Women, Gender, and Memories on the Margins in Valparaíso, 1973–2012

Drawing on feminist oral history and cultural anthropologists’ recent studies on state violence and networks of care in Latin America and Southeast Asia, this paper analyzes oral interviews I conducted with four women who were political militants and imprisoned together in Valparaíso, Chile, in the 1970s. I show how recent understandings of middle-class women’s emancipation, as well as ideas from the feminist movement that gained ground in the mid-to-late 1980s in Chile shaped their narratives. Josefina, Alba, and Isadora framed their narratives around repression and violence’s effects on their careers, social activism, sexuality, and marriage dynamics. They also emphasized less traditional approaches to raising children, such as planned single motherhood. I argue that memories like theirs have been overshadowed by grand narratives about the dictatorship’s violence that have centered on a rupture in heteronormative, masculine, revolutionary politics.

To place these oral interviews within the larger context of memory struggles during the Pinochet dictatorship and transition to democracy, I read them against sources such as the oral archive at Santiago's Museum of Memory and Human Rights, women’s organizations’ bulletins, human rights publications, truth commission reports, and political prisoners’ testimonies that were published in newspapers and magazines. I propose that gendered ideas that have become ingrained over time in Chilean memory struggles, such as heroic masculinity and grieving widowhood, point to underlying gender inequalities that framed how Chileans engaged in struggles for democracy and human rights, as well as making claims to recognition of state violence and reparations for their suffering. I also explore how my role as an historian crosses with that of a cultural powerbroker for interviewees whose stories have been subjugated in predominant narratives of this period in Chilean history.