Date/Time: Thursday 13th February 2020, 4:00-5:00pm

Venue: Old Library Building 2.20

Professor Veronica Schild is internationally known for her work on Latin American feminism. She has written about  the Chilean women's movement in  times of political transition, and on gendered citizenship formation in the neoliberal Latin American context.  

October 18^th marks the beginning of Chile’s social rebellion, and by Friday October 25^th, days after the president shifted from a belligerent to a conciliatory tone, an estimated 1.5 million Chileans spilled onto the streets in the country’s capital alone.  Though ordinary Chileans insisted that “se veia venir” or “we saw it coming”, technocrats, experts and social scientists were caught off guard.  Indeed, the banner carried by demonstrators, “Chile despertó” (Chile awoke) seems to have exposed the slumber of early pundits and their limited, inadequate or irrelevant explanatory models.  After three months of relentless mobilizations, authoritative voices here and there rushed in to analyze the social rebellion, their blind spot reemerging with full force.  It is as if gender -- however "intersectionalized" -- didn't matter in teasing out the malaise, the social demands, or the brutal effects of a neoliberalism in crisis which underlies the whole.  Yet, the massive feminist demonstration of March 2019, when nearly half a million women marched in Santiago alone, should have given pause.  It was billed at the time as the largest social demonstration in Chilean history, and the question I want to pose here is, what is the relevance of a new generation of feminist activism for making sense of the ongoing social rebellion? 

This talk is free and open to everyone to attend, no registration necessary.