Gendering the "Reconstruction of Self" in Pinochet's Chile: Youth, the Psyche, and Society, 1973–90

"Gendering the 'Reconstruction of the Self' in Pinochet's Chile: Youth, the Psyche, and Society, 1973-1990"

Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship altered Chile’s political culture and day-to-day existence through political violence, using gendered forms of torture to shatter political prisoners’ sense of themselves as political agents.  While scholars have argued that state terror and neoliberal reforms ushered in an era of complete rupture with populist ideas, this paper uses gender to question the idea that populism's legacies completely disappeared in the neoliberal period.  I investigate the efforts of mental health professionals associated with Chilean human rights NGOs in the 1970s and 1980s to help political prisoners and their families “reconstruct the traumatized self” by moving beyond mere survival and private, affective ties and engaging dynamically with society, usually through a political project. 

I contend that the framework for reconstructing the self passed through a heteronormative mold, reinforcing aspects of populist gender models.  I interrogate the degree to which professionals based the reconstructed self on heteronormative ideas and how their interactions with youth shaped their analyses. I ask how working with youth who were coping with the death or disappearance of a parent or were imprisoned and tortured for continuing the struggle of the previous militant generation factored into professionals’ ideas about gender, childhood, adolescence, and adulthood.  It explores the extent to which professionals based concepts about reconstructing selfhood on an ideal heterosexual subject who would ultimately find political agency as part of a nuclear family.

While I address gendered legacies of populism, I also argue that mental health professionals’ notions that individual recovery from violence was part of a collective process—and that collective resistance depended on individual recovery—invoked the populist concept of the individual participating within a collective. This gave the gendered reconstruction of the self an integral place in Chile’s restoration of democracy.