QUEERING THE

C H I L E A N WA Y
Cultures of Exceptionalism and
Sexual Dissidence, 1965–2015

CARL FISCHER

[NEW DIRECTIONS IN LATINO AMERICAN CULTURES]

New Directions in Latino American Cultures

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 Carl Fischer

Queering the Chilean

Way
Cultures of Exceptionalism and Sexual Dissidence,
1965–2015
Carl Fischer
Fordham University
Bronx, New York, USA

New Directions in Latino American Cultures

ISBN 978-1-137-56385-9 ISBN 978-1-137-56248-7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-56248-7

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Cover image © Acción de la estrella (Action of the Star), by Carlos Leppe, 1979.
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 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I’d like to begin by thanking my hardworking and insightful colleagues

during my time at Princeton. Their input and suggestions (not to men-
tion friendship, solidarity, and occasional hell-raising) from Princeton
and New York to Bogotá, Santiago, LA, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires,
Berkeley, Mexico City, New Orleans, Providence, San Juan, and San
Francisco were so important and beneficial for me, and our exchanges
and conversations informed my work at the thesis stage and beyond:
Jeff Lawrence, Ruth Halvey, the members of my original cohort at
Princeton (Felipe Cala, Duanel Díaz, Daylet Domínguez, Sara Muñoz,
and Matthew Tremé), Alejandra Josiowicz, Ana Sabau, Marco Martínez,
Camilo Hernández-Castellanos, Olga Sendra-Ferrer, Melissa Teixeira,
Luis Othoniel Rosa, Margarita Fajardo, Lisa Hirschmann, Carlos Fonseca,
and Cecilia Palmeiro.
And there are my colleagues beyond Princeton to thank: Arturo
Márquez-Gómez, Constanza Vergara, José Miguel Palacios, Claudia
Cabello, Judith Sierra-Rivera, Vivi MacManus, Licia Fiol-Matta, Juana
Suárez, Margo Persin, Michael Lazzara, María Laura Bocaz, Bernardita
Llanos, Diamela Eltit, Vania Barraza, Javier Uriarte, Felipe Martínez-
Pinzón, Laura Torres-Rodríguez, Matt Bush, and Lena Burgos-Lafuente.
Many of my colleagues at Fordham University became valuable inter-
locutors for me as my dissertation slowly grew into a book. I am par-
ticularly grateful to Cynthia Vich, Carey Kasten, Corey McEleney, Lise
Schreier, Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé, Francesca Parmeggiani, Andrew Clark,
Javier Jiménez-Belmonte, Rafael Lamas, Gioconda Marún, Shonni

v
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Enelow, Brian Reilly, and Audrey Evrard for their feedback and profes-
sionalism, as well as their fellowship.
My professors at Princeton made my experience there a great one,
and taught me so much: in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese
Languages and Cultures, I wish to thank Arcadio Díaz-Quiñones, Pedro
Meira Monteiro, Germán Labrador, Bruno Carvalho, Rachel Price, Marina
Brownlee, Ron Surtz, Angel Loureiro, Rubén Gallo, Javier Guerrero, and
especially my advisor, Gabriela Nouzeilles. Susana Draper was an amaz-
ing second reader on my project. Here I will also thank Rob Karl, Lynn
Chancer, and Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel. Special thanks also to Silvana
Bishop, Beth Heisler, Karen González, Rose Rivera, and Fernando Acosta
at Princeton for their unending support and hard work that allowed my
own research to go as smoothly as possible. Michael Predmore, Jorge
Ruffinelli, Lúcia Sá, Gordon Brotherston, and Richard Rosa were great to
me during my years at Stanford University, as were Robert Ellis, Salvador
Fernández, and especially Adelaida López at Occidental College.
I have been lucky enough to have received invaluable help and input
along the way from many colleagues (many of whom have become
friends) all over the world, as well. In Chile: Claudia Aravena, Eduardo
Sabrovsky, Betsy Whitehead, Rafael Albarrán, Doralisa Duarte Pinto at
the Museo de Bellas Artes, and Pedro Montes at the D21 Gallery. In
Germany: Thom Quinn and Regina Ammicht-Quinn, Christiane Quandt,
Teobaldo Lagos Preller, Dieter Ingenschay, Susanne Klengel, and Jens
Dobler. In Barcelona: Cristián Herrera, Janine Civitate, Eva Sánchez, and
Javier Mariscal.
Research leading to the completion of this project was conducted
thanks to a number of grants: two from the Program in Latin American
Studies at Princeton, one of which was from the Kingston Fund in par-
ticular, and two from the Office of Research at Fordham University. I am
thankful for this support.
Preliminary versions of material seen here can be found in Critical
Matrix (Fall 2009), American Quarterly (September 2014), and Hispanic
Review (Summer 2015).
I would like to conclude with heartfelt thanks to my friends and fam-
ily, especially my brothers, David and Paul, my sister-in-law Zhi-Ning, my
niece Lilah, and my parents, Mark and Bridget.
 CONTENTS

1 Introduction 1

2 The Monstrous Masculinities of Chile’s Agrarian Reform,

1965–1970 33

3 The Exceptional Art of Gendered Utopias, 1970–1973 73

4 Queering the State of Exception, 1973–1990 123

5 Politicizing the Loca Body After the Dictatorship,

1990–2005 181

6 Exceptionalism, the Female Body, and the Public

Sphere in the Bachelet Era, 2006–2015 233

Bibliography 273

Index 275

vii
 LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 2.1 El Chacal de Nahueltoro (Dir. Miguel Littin 1969) 57

Fig. 2.2 El Chacal de Nahueltoro (Dir. Miguel Littin 1969) 59
Fig. 3.1 A march of workers in La batalla de Chile (Dir. Patricio
Guzmán 1975–1979) 82
Fig. 3.2 Labor leaders in La batalla de Chile (Dir. Patricio
Guzmán 1975–1979) 84
Fig. 3.3 A member of the fascist organization Patria y Libertad in
La batalla de Chile (Dir. Patricio Guzmán 1975–1979) 86
Fig. 3.4 A “people’s trial” of a government functionary in
La batalla de Chile (Dir. Patricio Guzmán 1975–1979) 88
Fig. 3.5 A demonstration of “poder popular” in La batalla de Chile
(Dir. Patricio Guzmán 1975–1979) 91
Fig. 4.1 El happening de las gallinas (1974), by Carlos Leppe.
Image courtesy of the D21 Gallery, Santiago, Chile 138
Fig. 4.2 El perchero (1975), by Carlos Leppe. Image courtesy
of the D21 Gallery, Santiago, Chile 141
Fig. 4.3 Prueba de artista (1981), by Carlos Leppe. Image
courtesy of the D21 Gallery, Santiago, Chile 144
Fig. 4.4 Fenelón Guajardo López, in El Charles Bronson chileno
(Dir. Carlos Flores Delpino 1984) 147
Fig. 4.5 El Charles Bronson chileno (Dir. Carlos Flores Delpino 1984) 152
Fig. 5.1 Lorenza Böttner in Wall of Ashes (Dir. Frank Garvey 2009) 207
Fig. 5.2 Lorenza Böttner in Lorenza (Dir. Michael Stahlberg 1991) 209
Fig. 5.3 Lorenza Böttner in Lorenza (Dir. Michael Stahlberg 1991) 215

ix
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

“THE CHILEAN WAY”: EXCEPTIONALISM AS EXCLUSION

In 2010, after then-president of Chile Sebastián Piñera oversaw the
daring and ultimately successful rescue of 33 miners trapped under-
ground, he triumphantly used an English-language phrase to invoke
the rescue, both at home and abroad: it was proof of the “Chilean way”
of doing things. The “Chilean way” has become, in fact, a semi-official
slogan aimed at showing off Chile’s prosperity (which, as Piñera pointed
out, had made it possible for the country to harness the resources for
the rescue) to the world in general, and to potential foreign investors in
particular.1 The rescue of the miners, a news story that riveted a billion
people around the world, became the latest platform for Chile to set
itself apart from its supposedly unstable, chaotic Latin American neigh-
bors as uniquely affluent, humane, and prudent. The attention paid in
media spheres to Chile’s exceptional economic success was matched
by that received by the workers and functionaries involved in the res-
cue; indeed, inherent to the economic calculus of the “Chilean way”
were its protagonists’ performances of heterosexual masculinity. Mining
Minister Laurence Golborne was glowingly portrayed (initially, at least)
as a family man who had made the personal sacrifice to leave an extremely
lucrative job as manager of a retail holding company and work in public
service. The miners’ masculinity was also the subject of media attention:
Héctor Tobar, author of Deep Down Dark (2014)—an account of the
mining accident and subsequent rescue—stated in an interview that the

© The Author(s) 2016 1

C. Fischer, Queering the Chilean Way,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-56248-7_1
2 C. FISCHER

miners’ jobs “were dangerous, but also very fulfilling for them, because
in Chile, being a miner is sort of like being a man.”2 Gleeful accounts of
the heterosexual exploits of the miners—including Yonni Barros, whose
wife and girlfriend were portrayed in Patricia Riggen’s 2015 film The
33, based on Tobar’s book, as fighting over their man while waiting
for him to emerge on the surface—figured them as model workers and
healthy (if roguish) machos. Film heartthrob Antonio Banderas’ role as
the miners’ leader further displaced their precarious, dangerous labor
into the realm of spectacle. The queer subjects who helped make the
rescue possible—such as Pedro Rivero, a travesti leading the first rescue
team to arrive on the scene of the accident (Tobar 79)—were relegated
to obscurity.3 Piñera’s rhetoric, and those it encompassed and excluded,
is just one of many examples of how Chile’s exceptional economic suc-
cess has been tied, in the country’s public discourse, to masculine, het-
eronormative sexual praxis.
I use the term “exceptionalism” here as a productively contradictory
way to think about how certain states, persons, cultural objects, and com-
modities set themselves apart as one-of-a-kind and yet, at the same time,
are firmly situated within a particular group of peers. Crowded fields of
contenders—countries vying for foreign investment, applicants competing
for jobs, authors and filmmakers seeking audiences, and products looking
for consumers—often make use of the rhetoric of exceptionalism to high-
light their comparative advantage in relation to others. In this way, they
make themselves intelligible and attractive to whoever is looking for the
“best”—even if, as a paradoxical consequence of this, they once again find
themselves indistinguishable from others who are also proclaiming their
superiority. The rhetoric of the superlative, the unprecedented, and the
extraordinary remains a daily fact of life under regimes of capital that force
their subjects to compete amongst themselves for notoriety, visibility, and
prominence; however, there are political, as well as economic, motives to
set oneself apart as exceptional. Indeed, traces of exceptionalism can be
found in the nationalist discourses of most countries, including the USA,
as American Studies scholars such as Daniel Rodgers (2004), Jasbir Puar
(2007), and Donald Pease (2009) have suggested. Since the nineteenth
century, Americans imagined that their country was “a chosen land, inher-
ently and irrevocably, with a world-historical covenant and mission that
set it apart from the rest of the world,” depending “on an imagined ‘else-
where’” (Rodgers 23–24). Just as New England was, for John Winthrop,
a “city upon a hill” (Rodgers 24), Chileans, too, have conceived of their
 INTRODUCTION 3

exceptionalism in spatial terms. In a text seminal to Chilean nationalist dis-

course, Benjamín Subercaseaux (1941) elegized how the country’s “loca
geografía” set it apart from what lay beyond its dramatic borders, which
comprised the vast Pacific, the bone-dry Atacama Desert, the towering
Andes, and the hostile Antarctic. Yet this apartness was always in implicit
comparison with other places whose geography is presumably more “sane”
(and therefore less notable).
Particularly over the last 50 years—the scope of this study—Chile has
conceived of itself as apart from, and unique in, the world, in an economic
and political sense as well as a geographic one. Official discourse held up
the country’s 1966 agrarian reform as the one in Latin America that most
closely followed US Alliance for Progress directives; Salvador Allende’s
government (1970–1973) was the world’s only socialist democracy; and
Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship (1973–1990) stood out as much for its
orthodox adaptation of neoliberal structural reforms as for its murderous
efficiency. Later, postdictatorship political leaders took over the economy
and called it an even more shining example: they had balanced neolib-
eralism with increasing social protections and democracy, while reckon-
ing with the dictatorship’s violent past—albeit always “en la medida de
lo posible,” as former President Patricio Aylwin famously said.4 Michelle
Bachelet, elected in 2006 (and again in 2014), has been figured as a model
for new kinds of female participation in the world’s highest spheres of
power. The word modelo in Chile, on its own, continues to be used met-
onymically to describe the country’s entire political and economic system5;
in recent years, the country’s politicians have attacked their opponents by
accusing them of undermining Chile’s “exceptional” economic image.6
Despite drastic economic and political changes, then, Chile has continu-
ously projected itself in the world as an exceptional specimen of whatever
type of economy it has at the time.
The present study will critique Chilean economic exceptionalism as an
inherently violent phenomenon that works not only to make the material
exploitation upon which it often depends invisible, but also to exclude
those subjects deemed unworthy to partake in its apparent success. These
erasures are enacted through the “state of exception,” a phenomenon in
which a sovereign government temporarily suspends “constitutional pro-
cedures and individual guarantees,” deploying “repressive measures” in
order to sustain its power (Loveman 1993: 12). This idea, first coined by
the German philosopher Carl Schmitt (1922) to justify lawmaking outside
of democratic institutions in Weimar Germany, has been little explored a
4 C. FISCHER

propos of Chile, although it has been amply theorized. As Puar has shown,
US exceptionalism can only operate under some degree of a state of excep-
tion, so that when the country suspends the constitutional rights of its
citizens, by, for example, summarily executing them with drone strikes,7
it is a way to “restore, protect, and maintain … the normative ordering
that then allows the United States to hail its purported universality. […]
State of exception discourses rationalize egregious violence in the name of
the preservation of a way of life and those privileged to live it” (8–9). The
USA justified its neocolonial interventions abroad—including its well-
documented support for the military coup that overthrew Allende8—by
proclaiming its status as “the norm that others ought to envy” (Rodgers
25). In effect, its conviction that other countries should be like it justified
its interventions abroad to make it so that other countries were like it.
What Pease calls exceptionalist fantasy, then, provides its American adher-
ents “with the psychosocial structures that permitted them to ignore the
state’s exceptions” (12) and thus to justify and excuse many of the violent,
illegal acts it has committed.
In Chile, states of exception have been a way of life since the incep-
tion of the republic, and are thus key to understanding its rhetoric of
exceptionalism. The country’s 1833 constitution—drafted by the authori-
tarian “ministerial dictator” Diego Portales (Loveman 1993: 329) and
marking the “final consolidation” of the country’s long, chaotic process of
independence from Spain—concentrated power into very few hands. This
meant that the country’s leaders “perfectly and frequently implemented
the regimes of exception that became familiar to other Spanish Americans
in the nineteenth century” (Loveman 1993: 315), by taking unilateral
control of the different apparatuses of nominally democratic government
whenever it was convenient.9 Moreover, this dependence on the state
of exception became an inherent part of the country’s exceptionalism:
Chile “became the envy of other Spanish American nations” thanks to
its frequent suspensions of democracy. In fact, those suspensions allowed
Chile to avoid “the caudillismo, fragmentation, and disorder characteristic
of the region” (Loveman 1993: 314), which permitted the country to
conceive of itself as so particularly stable, politically speaking. But there
have been other instances of Chilean exceptionalism being propped up by
the state of exception throughout its republican history. Ericka Beckman
(2009) points out how the Chilean state’s sense of nationalist superiority
stemmed from the way in which it situated its role in the War of the Pacific
 INTRODUCTION 5

(1879–1883) as a righteous struggle against the supposedly “inferior”

races of Peru and Bolivia—an “assertion of Chilean racial superiority …
foundational to discourses of Chilean particularity as a ‘white’ and modern
country in Latin America” (Beckman 74). This gave the state grounds to
justify its annexation of the lands (and suspension of the rights) of the
Mapuche and Rapa Nui people, in a Chilean iteration of “manifest des-
tiny” (Beckman 74). Portales and Schmitt’s authoritarian ideals were of
great inspiration, meanwhile, to Augusto Pinochet and other ideologues
of the 1973 military coup like Jaime Guzmán,10 as Renato Cristi (2011)
shows. Guzmán’s creation of Chile’s 1980 constitution, which remains in
place to this day, was borne out of a state of exception that resulted from
the overthrow of the Allende government: a rupture of the established
order, putatively (and paradoxically) meant to save that order. This coup,
wrought (in part) to shore up Chile’s “exceptionally” capitalist credentials,
had the effect of annihilating almost 3000 people identified with the Left,
and torturing and exiling many others. In the twenty-first century, the
same discourse of Chileans as more “‘white’, ‘virile’ and ‘civilized’” than
their neighbors has been deployed against “Peruvians [who] emigrated
in large numbers to Chile as maids and service workers” (Beckman 84,
87).11 Chile’s contemporary discourse of national superiority and prosper-
ity is made possible by laws that simultaneously single out certain workers
for extra scrutiny and relax labor legislation when the need for foreign
labor arises—a contemporary iteration of the state of exception.12 These
authoritarian, exclusive ideals thus lie at the heart of how official Chilean
political and economic institutions conceive of themselves as exceptional.

QUEERNESS AND THE RE/PRODUCTION OF

EXCEPTIONALISM
Chile’s supposedly exceptional economic and political status—particu-
larly since 1965—rests not only upon the states of exception that silenced
dissent and enabled financial and labor exploitation; it is constructed,
often quite aggressively, in tandem with models of masculine, heterosex-
ual comportment. It hinges upon heterosexual families and even dynas-
ties—almost always headed by men with recognizably “illustrious” last
names like Angelini, Calderón, Yarur, Matte, Luksic, and Solari13—whose
“patrimony” is safely couched within what Judith Butler (1990) called
the “heterosexual matrix” (7).14 The repression inherent to Chile’s
6 C. FISCHER

exceptionalism has often been deployed specifically to protect the inter-

ests of these families. This is a phenomenon that has been going on since
the beginning of the republic, as Gabriel Salazar’s (2002) discussion of
the nineteenth century “patriarcado mercantil”—men whose fortunes
increased upon their marriage to women from equally prosperous families,
and whose identities as men were interrelated to their roles as providers for
their children and wives (18)—shows. In this way, those who control the
law ensure that the symbolic capital of ideology and the very tangible capi-
tal of inheritance are passed from generation to generation within the con-
text of heterosexual family life. We can see why queerness is figured as so
threatening to the institutions that uphold Chilean exceptionalism when
Lee Edelman (2004) shows how the queer—literally defined in his text as
a practitioner of exclusively non-reproductive sexual acts—is positioned in
art and literature as the antithesis not only of heterosexual reproduction,
but also of any societal attempt “to affirm a structure, to authenticate
social order, which it then intends to transmit to the future in the form of
its inner Child” (3, emphasis in original). Participation in the practice of
reproductive sexuality is almost always the principal factor through which
the heterosexual masculinity required to be the protagonist of Chilean
exceptionalism is represented and categorized in the country’s official dis-
course—a phenomenon very much in keeping with overall global trends.15
Such subjects are constructed as “sexually exceptional”—that is, particu-
larly able to embody official political and economic aims, thanks to their
embrace of heteronormative masculinity. Sexual exceptionalism is a term
coined by Puar, who, working from the supposition “that heterosexual-
ity is a necessary constitutive factor of national identity,” points out how
the exceptionalism driving current US interventions in the Middle East is
based not only on the state of exception, but also on “a praxis of sexual
othering … vis-à-vis Orientalist constructions of ‘Muslim sexuality’” (4).16
The queer refusal to embrace normative, reproductive heterosexuality
threatens those institutions—such as the mercantile patriarchy, the mili-
tary, the church, and political groups (on the Left and the Right alike,
it should be said)—that enact and enforce oppressive laws to protect a
nameless but constantly invoked Child17 who would perpetuate Chilean
exceptionalism into the future. This queerness, as represented in the coun-
try’s art and literature, comes in many permutations at different times—
less conventionally cisgender men, women who embrace certain tenets of
feminism, and LGBT subjects, among others—but what all these permu-
tations share is the potential to bring about economic and political harm
 INTRODUCTION 7

to Chile’s exceptionalism. Subjects that threaten the country’s official

discourse of exceptionalism are marginalized or even marked for death,
in extrajudicial mechanisms invented by the mercantile patriarchy and
the other aforementioned institutions. When members of such institu-
tions have needed to stay in power, they have deviated from—or even
suspended—the letter of the law to make it conform to their contingent
needs, in ways reminiscent of Giorgio Agamben’s (2005) interpretation
of the state of exception. Positing that the state of exception has to
do with the ever-shifting borderline between how the law is theorized
(that is, how constitutions intend it to be practiced) and how the law is
actually implemented and deployed (often in “exceptional” ways unfore-
seen by those constitutions), Agamben shows how unwritten (though
very real and practical) shifts in the interpretation and implementation
of the law often have the effect of repressing certain ideas and deeming
certain subjects worthy of ostracism or eradication. In Chile, hetero-
sexual women, too, are often circumscribed to domestic, or even (in the
words of Jaime Guzmán) “spiritual” roles, which restrict their ability to
actively participate in the management of labor and capital. The rhetoric
of exceptionalism is similar, in this sense, to the discourse of homopho-
bia: the desire to distinguish oneself from, and exert power over, queer
subjects at the heart of homophobia is often imbricated in the imposi-
tion of heterosexual conformity and normativity.
The shifting boundaries of the law that enable those invested in
Chile’s exceptionalism to erase and disavow queer subjects and eco-
nomic exploitation under the state of exception can also create enclaves
for sexual dissidence, however. Indeed, the gray area between the letter
of the law and its implementation allows for the same sorts of identity-
based dissidence and indecipherability that queerness does. Ever since
Foucault (1978), arguing against the so-called repressive hypothesis,
proposed that rather than containing or censuring sex—particularly in
its more “deviant” forms—societies tend to render it as something to be
“taken charge of, tracked down as it were, by a discourse that aimed to
allow it no obscurity, no respite” (20), queer theory and cultural pro-
duction have focused on subjects whose sexual identities defy society’s
“incitement to discourse” (Foucault 17) on sexuality by refusing to be
“captured” into discursive categories that might hold them to unjust
surveillance.18 Given that Chilean exceptionalism is a phenomenon rhe-
torically linked to economic notoriety (if not always labor exploitation,
at least during the Allende years) and sexual exceptionalism, sexually
8 C. FISCHER

dissident subjects can disrupt the heterosexual lineages that lend those
institutions the authority to enforce their economic and political power.
By effacing themselves and evading the rhetoric of spectacle and promi-
nence that surround those subjects deemed “sexually exceptional,” or—
alternatively—by inserting their sometimes-inscrutable, illogical bodies
into narratives invested in the easily explainable “logic” of capital, queer
subjects defy the reproductively oriented genealogies of exceptionalism
in Chile. They thus challenge its unwritten but de facto exclusions with
their own evasive, or interruptive, practices. Queering “the Chilean way”
thus involves disrupting the facile correspondence between the country’s
exceptionalistic economic rhetoric and the heterosexual, conventionally
masculine, reproductive subjects in which that rhetoric is often embod-
ied. Making use of the very same discursive and categorical ambiguities
the state of exception uses, queer subjects dodge the very intelligibility
upon which exceptionalism depends to make certain persons, countries,
and products “stand out” among others.
Indeed, an important cross-section of Chilean cultural production has
deployed queer subjects to question Chile’s insistence on itself as econom-
ically exceptional. A number of scholars and artists have pointed this out
in interesting, productive ways,19 although a systematic, historiographical
claim about a gender-based critique of Chilean exceptionalism over time
has not, until now, been made. Pedro Lemebel, for example—whose work
I will be reading throughout this volume not only as an object of theory,
but also as a theoretical polemic in itself—parodied the globalizing preten-
sions of Piñera’s discourse of prosperity: “Pura buena onda ofrece usted,
don Piñi, como si estuviera conquistando al populacho con maní. Nada
más, el resto pura plata, empachado de money, quiere pasar a la posteridad
solo por eso” (2012: 189, emphasis added). Critiquing here both Piñera’s
obsession with legacy and posterity, as well as his ready deployment of the
often-Anglicized parlance of transnational capital—both on high display
throughout the rescue of the 33 miners—Lemebel undermined the elit-
ist discourse of Chilean exceptionalism in just a few sentences, and did so
from an enunciative position of queerness that consistently evaded clear
political and economic categories.
Looking beyond Lemebel, the reader can find a 50-year-long archive of
cultural production that questions narratives of economic exceptionalism
and advocates for greater economic and sexual inclusiveness. The sort of
economic “modernity” to which Chile aspired in the late 1960s, for exam-
ple, is one such narrative that imagines a heterosexual head-of-household
 INTRODUCTION 9

as its ideal figure—perfectly positioned as the protagonist of the agrarian

reform that would more widely distribute prosperity and most effectively
contain any sort of Cuban-style revolution, as Heidi Tinsman (2002) has
written. This left little room for any who would defy such an ideal, and yet
José Donoso’s unforgettable character la Manuela, in his 1966 novel El
lugar sin límites, exposed the sexism and heterosexism within which Chile’s
adherence to the Alliance for Progress-driven agrarian reform was inscribed.
Meanwhile, to be an ideal (male) worker, student, or revolutionary in the
conventional narrative of the Unidad Popular (UP) government meant
acquiescing to a very reduced subset of heterosexual praxes, including that
of “seducing” women to sympathize with the UP cause. Yet the masculin-
ist assumptions underlying the utopian visions of equality and socialism in
nostalgic artistic works created after the fall of the UP can be easily identified
and critiqued—as Patricio Guzmán himself once admitted in an interview
about his important documentary La batalla de Chile.20 After the fall of
the UP, the dictatorship’s authoritarian, family-oriented narrative for Chile
clashed with its insistence on radical, neoliberal economic openness that
brought a number of new, queer ideas into the country—such as the ones
that inspired the visual artist Carlos Leppe, whose performances destabi-
lized the heteropatriarchal narratives underpinning both the economic
exceptionalism and the state of exception of the dictatorship.
Following the dictatorship, Chile’s “disciplined” transition to
democracy—balancing an adherence to neoliberalism with increased
social protection—tended to silence voices demanding more radical
gestures of remembrance and reparation, including those who wanted
to break with the neoliberal altogether, such as Tomás Moulián (2002).
But the indelibly queer legacies left by artists and writers in this period,
such as the performance artist Lorenza Böttner, can open up new forms
of remembrance, while also exposing the heteronormative assumptions
made even by those making the case for forms of leftism more radical
than those offered by the Concertación. Finally, Bachelet has had to
confront the masculinist nature of this system several times while in
office—such as when she proposed a gender-balanced cabinet in 2006—
but her insistence on greater gender equality has occasionally run into
tension with hopes in the populace for greater economic, social, sexual,
and ethnic equality, in a society so segmented and classist. In this sense,
queer writers such as Constanzx Álvarez (2014) shift our focus onto
the kinds of “sexual dissidence” that female bodies can perform when
taking exception to the country’s spheres of power. Attempts to queer
10 C. FISCHER

Chilean exceptionalism thus form an alternative artistic legacy—like

that theorized by José Muñoz (2009)—with identifiable traits that have
developed and passed on from generation to generation, even though
they take place outside of the logic of heteronormative reproduction.21
Accordingly, I submit that if Chile is to serve as a transnational model,
it need not necessarily be for economic policymaking, but rather for how
to deploy queerness to question non-inclusive notions of economic excep-
tionalism. I propose to trace a genealogy of Chilean artistic, cinematic,
and literary forms which systematically expose, over the span of 50 years,
the seemingly fixed discursive models of heterosexual masculinity at the
heart of Chilean exceptionalism as actually quite mutable and artificial.22
In this sense, I follow a disciplinary tradition, in queer studies, of critiqu-
ing the underlying presumptions of heterosexuality often at the base of
large, societal metanarratives.23 Beyond that, however, I will show how
the interrogation and evasion of masculine heteronormativity by queer
Chilean artists and writers are inseparable from interrogations of other nar-
ratives, long taken for granted, of Chile as an economic model. Although
such narratives may be held up as models to be copied by other countries
at different historical junctures, they are no more “prediscursive” than
the performances of heterosexual masculinity of those conceived as their
ideal protagonists. I will thus be using the term “queer”—whether as a
verb, noun, or adjective—to evoke any kind of sexual difference aimed
at disrupting the “reproduction” of larger narratives of exceptionalism. I
will show that in Chilean cultural production, queer subjects—apart from,
and yet implicitly compared against, those subjects whose aims are allied
with official economic and political discourse—are finding new ways to
think about what exceptionalism is, and in the process are reappropriating
discourses of sexual exceptionalism for their own purposes. Queerness, in
the end, is a phenomenon as evasive of the letter of the law as the state of
exception is, and accordingly, it can undermine Chilean exceptionalism in
much the same way that the latter must depend on the state of exception
for its force.

SITUATING AND HISTORICIZING QUEERNESS

AND THE CHILEAN WAY

Just as Rodgers proposes, in the US context, that the “alternative

to exceptionalist history begins with recognizing the … slippage …
between the categories of ‘here’ and ‘elsewhere’” (30), one way to undo
 INTRODUCTION 11

Chile’s sexual, political, and economic exceptionalism is to think about

the slippages that occur when we think about Chile transnationally. This
thinking has implications for how we situate Chilean exceptionalism
within global dynamics of nationalism and capital flow, how we situ-
ate queer Chilean cultural production within global currents of gen-
der studies, and how we historicize the exclusions inherent to Chilean
exceptionalism. A closer look at the ways in which this official discourse
is queered means paying attention to the historical, economic, political,
and gender ambiguities this process of queering ends up teasing out.
Speaking of economic exceptionalism: to what extent is Chile’s rhetoric
of itself as an economic model to others imbricated in its exceptional abil-
ity to assimilate foreign economic models? In a seemingly endless feedback
loop, Chile is simultaneously positioned as both a neoliberal paradigm
(under dictatorship) that Reaganite and Thatcherist economic policies in
the metropolitan North Atlantic later followed, and as a “good student”
that has rapidly assimilated those policies (first modeled by the North
Atlantic and elsewhere). Although author and activist Naomi Klein (2007)
derisively points out how the country is “still held up by free-market enthu-
siasts as proof that Friedmanism”—that is, a form of neoliberal economic
management conceived at the University of Chicago—“still works” (103),
in recent years the country has served as a signpost for what supposedly
more “developed” countries like the USA might become. Many of the
privatizations, public sector reductions, expansions of for-profit schools
and colleges, and de-industrialization currently being discussed and/or
implemented in the USA have already been undertaken by Chile.24 Since
nationalistic and sexual exceptionalism depend on an implied “other” to
sustain themselves, questioning the parameters of Chilean exceptional-
ism means questioning those countries, subjects, and economic systems
against which it is defined. I will thus maneuver within the “slippages”
mentioned by Rodgers, which exist not only between the local and the
global aspects of exceptionalism, but also between the global and local
aspects of queer critiques of that exceptionalism, as practiced in Chile.
This slippage is one example of how the ambiguities inherent to the state
of exception—whose repression Chilean exceptionalism depends upon, as
I have argued—can be used to the advantage of sexually dissident subjects.
As for the potential pitfalls of queering Chilean cultural production,
given the inaccuracies and presuppositions—as well as the revelations
and elucidations—that take place when poststructuralist theory (both
feminist and queer) is put into practice in (or, in worst-case scenarios,
12 C. FISCHER

simply “applied” to) the postcolonial context of Latin America, it is worth

taking a second look at the cultural particularities of lo queer in Chile.
The place of Chilean and Latin American cultural production in trans-
national “genealogies” of feminist and queer theory has been amply
debated,25 and it remains fertile territory for further discussion. Nelly
Richard (2008), for example, has discussed Latin American feminist cri-
tiques that the “experiences” of Latin American women defy the feminist
and queer theories of the global north, which constitute, for them, an
inherently imperialistic enterprise (32–33). This runs the risk, for Richard,
of projecting “un imaginario femenino del cuerpo-naturaleza que se hace
fácilmente cómplice de la concepción metafísica del ser latinoamericano
como pureza originaria que emana de un continente virgen” (Richard
2008: 36, emphasis in original): an othering of Latin American culture in
general, and of Latin American women in particular. She thus defends the
use of feminist theory in the Latin American context, so that “el sujeto-
mujer enfrente la tarea crítica de re-articularse discursivamente a través de
las instituciones de la cultura” (Richard 2008: 36, emphasis in original).
The visual artist and theorist Felipe Rivas (2011), meanwhile, who first
illustrated his suspicion of North Atlantic queer theory in the form of
performance art,26 argues that although the “traspaso disciplinario literal
Norte-Sur” of “queerness” should not be uncritically practiced or cel-
ebrated, a flat-out rejection of the promises of what he calls cuir theory
should not fall victim to “un excesivo localismo latinoamericano” (70),
either. He thus argues for the idea of sexual dissidence, the name of the
collective he is loosely affiliated with,27 which claims a number of influ-
ences from Chile and around the world, thus diluting the hegemony
of North Atlantic queer theory in critiquing politicized forms of sexual
difference. In what follows, I am going to use the more localized term
“sexual dissidence” and the more globally circulating term “queerness”
interchangeably.
Just as a careful inquiry into Chile’s definition of itself as economically
exceptional reveals it to be less so than it claims, and a closer examination
of the heterosexuality of that exceptionalism reveals its intertwinement
with queerness, an inquiry solely focused on Chile’s dictatorship and post-
dictatorship era—the period most studied by recent critics28—inevitably
reveals the need to historicize these claims beyond that period. This is not
only because the dictatorship and its aftermath can be better understood in
a broader historical context, but also because it is a way to more accurately
 INTRODUCTION 13

capture the changing, and often ambiguous, ways in which representa-

tions of economics and gender have coalesced and come undone in the
country’s cultural production over time. In this sense, I subscribe to Rubí
Carreño’s ideas (2009) about how historicizing gender and cultural stud-
ies in Chile beyond the period of the dictatorship and postdictatorship has
the added advantage of questioning narratives of Latin American cultural
production, particularly in the North American academy, that are overly
invested in stereotypical conceptions of state violence and other forms of
“barbarie” (15). Carreño and other critics working in Chile have made
an effort to show that the queer aspects of Chilean cultural production
run much further back than previously thought,29 and this is an effort in
which I hope to inscribe my own work. The corpus under examination
here—documentary subjects, novels, films, plays, and works of perfor-
mance art—has been assembled for its ability to expose, over a long period
of time, how dissident practices of sexuality can expose the inconsistencies
in the narratives of Chilean exceptionalism (on the Left and Right), from
long before the dictatorship to long afterwards.
While the works I will discuss all come from Chile, this volume is hardly
an apology for any sort of national “unity.” In fact, many of the works
analyzed here were produced outside of Chile—the product of a vibrant
diaspora of intellectuals, artists, and writers who found themselves think-
ing (about) Chile from far away for political, artistic, sexual, economic,
or family reasons, and whose geographic and critical distances from their
country allowed for particularly sharp observations. These “exiles” extend
throughout the period under discussion here: some left before the dicta-
torship (Donoso), some remained outside the country until Allende was
deposed (Alberto Fuguet and his family, for instance), and others were
part of the huge wave of exiles forced out of the country by the laws
of the dictatorship (Jorge Edwards, Patricio Guzmán). Some were rel-
egated to what Michael Lazzara calls “insilio” (2002: 12), producing art
within Chile but outside official circles (Carlos Flores, Leppe, Diamela
Eltit); others remained outside the country even after it was safe to return
(Bolaño); and others still are members of a younger, internationally cir-
culating cohort of Chilean intellectuals, subsidized by Chilean and inter-
national grants, who broaden the scope of that which is “Chilean” in new
ways (Guillermo Calderón). Others created art from positions that did
not fit comfortably into any of the aforementioned categories (Lorenza
Böttner). Far from being the single “imagined political community” that
14 C. FISCHER

Benedict Anderson theorizes in his definition of the nation (1983: 6),

Chile’s cultural production over the last 50 years shows the country to
be rather more like a patchwork of communities interspersed throughout
the globe and in the minds of different artists. Since Chilean exceptional-
ism has so often been used to bolster nationalistic claims, my critique of
that exceptionalism necessarily involves a critique of nationalism through a
conception of the country that lies far beyond its “loca geografía.” Chile’s
vibrant artistic corpus has undermined preconceptions of the country
as insular and challenged the idea of the nation as the central axis around
which artistic production can be organized. I will thus focus on its rhetoric
of economic exceptionalism, as opposed to other studies that link sexuality
and the national,30 because in this age of transnationally circulating capital,
Chile’s neoliberal economic “success” is often at the heart of its transna-
tional narrative of exceptionalism.
Although exceptionalism is often complicit with imperialist discourse,
it also enables the circulation of Chilean cultural production in the world.
In this sense, Jacqueline Loss’ discussion of cosmopolitanism (2005) is
key to understanding exceptionalism. Loss understands cosmopolitanism
as a discourse deployed by Latin American cultural actors to negotiate the
standing of cultural products (their own and others’) in local and global
contexts to claim (and dissent from) affiliations to multiple spheres of
exchange, canonicity, and authority (2–3, 10).31 Just as the term cosmo-
politismo has been invoked to describe internationally circulating Latin
American cultural products as alternately selling out to the imperial gaze
and resisting it (Loss 5), the rhetoric of exceptionalism indicates a logic
of competitiveness that has long been key to capital, even as it was also
deployed in service to the Chilean Left.32 Chilean exceptionalism is thus
a productive way to place Chilean cultural production into dialogue with
globally circulating currents of ideas: being exceptional in the world,
whether as a historical moment, as a work of art, as an economic system, or
simply as a person, often also means being intelligible to an international
audience. In this sense, when I propose an archive of works representing
queer figures that use the ambiguities of the state of exception to muddle
the projection of nationalist narratives of Chilean economic exception-
alism, I leave the possibility open for those figures to make themselves
uniquely intelligible, globally speaking.
 INTRODUCTION 15

AN ORGANIZATIONAL SCHEMATIC
Chapter 2, “The Monstrous Masculinities of Chile’s Agrarian Reform,
1965–1970,” opens in 1965 because around that time, a number of fac-
tors coalesced to make Chile’s economy and cultural production more
outward looking. First, implementation of the agrarian reform and mod-
ernization directives of the Alliance for Progress program came soon
after the election of Eduardo Frei Montalva to the presidency, and Chile
quickly became a model of good practices for the program’s execution
throughout the region. At the same time, José Donoso and Miguel Littin
both created cultural artifacts that would make waves in cosmopolitan
circles all over the world. Donoso’s two novels, El lugar sin límites (1966)
and El obsceno pájaro de la noche (1970), and Littin’s film, El chacal de
Nahueltoro (1969), are at the center of this second chapter for several
reasons. Theirs were the first pieces of Chilean cultural production to
widely circulate abroad that were not from the genre of poetry: although
Gabriela Mistral, Vicente Huidobro, and Pablo Neruda had made Chilean
literature renowned throughout the world, Donoso and Littin were cos-
mopolitan pioneers in new ways—the former as part of the “Boom,”
and the latter in sync with the latest cinematic trends from Europe and
Brazil, such as cinema novo, neorealism, and the nouvelle vague. This rec-
ognition abroad—which gave their work added cachet within Chile, of
course—provided the cultural counterpart to Chile’s newly prominent
place in world economic affairs. Their work also showed a new awareness
of more cosmopolitan gender norms as well, with characters that exem-
plified “monstrous” (in the sense conveyed by Judith (Jack) Halberstam
(1995) and Michel Foucault (2003)) performances of masculinity that
queered ideas about normative, biological reproductive practices. This
chapter, then, draws upon and critiques Marshall Berman’s ideas about
the contradictions of “modernity” to draw parallels between these literary
and cinematic models of queerness and the rise of the Chilean economy as
a new hemispheric paragon of good practice and modernization.
Chapter 3, “The Exceptional Art of Gendered Utopias, 1970–1973,”
is situated in the era of the UP government, when Salvador Allende took
office and sought to further socialize the means of production, nationalize
the country’s natural resources, and accelerate the agrarian reform pro-
cess. While all of the works discussed in this chapter are about this period
(and some were created during it), however, they were all made public
after it was over—in one case, fairly long after. The works associated with
16 C. FISCHER

this highly politicized—even utopian, as Fredric Jameson (2004) would

put it—era all directly confront the historical legacy of the UP, but with a
historical distance that allows for clearer analysis, as Beatriz Sarlo (2004)
points out. Meanwhile, reading works that had taken this temporal dis-
tance allows me to examine and critique idealized cultural perceptions of
the UP, which seem to become more frequent (and more nostalgic, in the
sense of the term conveyed by Svetlana Boym (2001)) as time goes on.
La batalla de Chile, the documentary by Patricio Guzmán (1975–1979),
Persona non grata, Jorge Edwards’ 1974 memoir, and “La noche de los
visones,” a chronicle from Pedro Lemebel’s 1996 collection Loco afán,
all look backward with nostalgia on an era long gone. Indeed, in the case
of Guzmán, they even shaped that era through editing and montage. Yet
they also look forward to a utopia (or dystopia) yet-to-be, examining the
UP as an exceptional economic “model” that could have been, along-
side different “models” of masculinities that came with those futures and
pasts. These models include the hierarchical dystopia of military discipline
portrayed by Edwards, the utopian preenings of the locas that pervade
Lemebel’s work, and the revolutionary rhetoric and action of the guerril-
leros and workers filmed by Guzmán.
In Chap. 4, “Queering the State of Exception, 1973–1989,” I argue
that the Pinochet dictatorship was able to portray itself as economically
exceptional and politically dominant, thanks to the “state of exception”:
its interruption of democracy was couched, paradoxically, in the per-
petuation of conservative societal conventions, particularly the preserva-
tion of the heterosexual family. Those heterosexual families—including
Pinochet’s specifically—were then positioned as the ideal protagonists of
the neoliberal reforms that ensued, such that paseos familiares in amply-
stocked supermarkets were discursively positioned as the highest expres-
sion of Chilean exitismo. However, for thinkers like Willy Thayer (2006),
the manipulation of teleologies inherent to the state of exception made
for a simplistically forward-looking vision of time, which allowed artists
to take advantage of other loopholes and instabilities in the dictatorship’s
discourse, particularly those related to reproduction, both artistic and
sexual. The performance art of Carlos Leppe (1974–1981), Carlos Flores’
1984 documentary El Charles Bronson chileno, and Alberto Fuguet’s
first novel (originally published in serial form) La azarosa y sobreexpuesta
vida de Enrique Alekán (1990) all use queer forms of masculinity to
contest the heterosexual, reproductive terms within which the state of
exception was imposed. Their work—produced within the country, not in
 INTRODUCTION 17

exile—comprised novel, nuanced ways of balancing non-normative gen-

der performance with authoritarianism.
Chapter 5, “Politicizing the Loca Body After the Dictatorship,
1990–2005,” intervenes in debates about the legacy of the dictatorship
in the 15 years after it ended, which often took the form of questioning
whether Chile’s neoliberal economy—which persisted even after the dicta-
torship that had imposed it was defeated—was, in fact, exceptional. Much
of Chilean cultural criticism on the Left worked under the sign of the
term postdictatorship in order to question this exceptionalism, focusing on
the traces of Chile’s defeated leftist past (Avelar). However, I ask whether
some postdictatorship criticism has performed its own form of exception-
alism by excluding certain queer experiences of the atrocities of the 1970s
and 1980s. It is for this reason that I turn in this chapter to the figure of
the loca, who can critique monolithic political and economic examinations
of literary and cultural production, both official and unofficial—those
that promote Chile’s exceptional neoliberal economic success, and those
that deconstruct that exceptionalism—through their enactment of an eva-
sion, albeit a selective one, of political categories. By examining an artistic
corpus of locas who are occasionally unpalatable, for different reasons, to
those on Chile’s Left and Right, I investigate the evasive relationship that
exists between those figures and the political ideologies that constantly
seek to place them under surveillance within restrictive canons. I begin by
briefly discussing the work of Pablo Simonetti, whose short story collec-
tion Vidas vulnerables (1999) represents very few locas, offering instead a
homonormative narrative of the gay experience in Chile that whitewashes
queer militancy and proposes a total complicity with the reigning neo-
liberal regime. I then return to the work of Lemebel, whose collection
of chronicles Loco afán (1996) evades and nuances the postdictatorship
critical agenda of the Left by discussing the diverging perspectives of the
locas that the Left has occasionally tried to claim for its ranks (or denied, as
necessary). Finally, I conclude by returning to the Chilean diaspora, with a
remarkable series of stories about the Chilean-German performance artist
Lorenza Böttner, reconstructed from Loco afán, Bolaño’s novel Estrella
distante (1996), and a number of visual archives. Serving as a reminder
(however inscrutable) of the potential havoc that politicizing the queer
body can wreak, Lorenza encapsulates the ability of the loca to evade those
discourses, and exemplifies the imperative to think about how debates
about Chilean exceptionalism can look beyond the lexicon of the “post”
and ahead to the future.
18 C. FISCHER

Chapter 6, “Exceptionalism, the Female Body, and the Public Sphere

in the Bachelet Era, 2006–2015,” focuses on the present in Chile, marked
by the two elections, in 2006 and 2014, of Michelle Bachelet. Bachelet,
an avowed feminist, ran on a socialist platform, and in doing so she raised
the possibility of reimagining the intractable imbrication of the coun-
try’s discourse of economic exceptionalism in male, heterosexual praxis;
however, the question of whether this gendered change would involve
greater economic equality remains open. I argue that Bachelet functions
metonymically in debates about the female body (politic) currently under-
way in Chile: does feminism today involve joining the spheres of power,
or dissenting entirely from them? Moreover, can women aspire to embody
the idealized subjects of Chile’s economic exceptionalism—long a mascu-
linized phenomenon—or should they take exception to it through prac-
tices of sexual dissidence? I read into a literary archive from this period
that focuses on the female body (Bachelet’s and others’) in order to ask
whether the liberal inclusion of women that Bachelet has proposed is
indeed desirable, or whether it is better to focus on the new spaces her
moderate discourse of inclusion has opened up in Chile for other excluded
groups, such as students, indigenous people, and LGBT citizens whose
protests have become increasingly vociferous and visible. Accordingly,
Eltit’s novel Impuesto a la carne (2010) meditates on the political and his-
torical narratives of Chile’s bicentennial, including its masculinist excep-
tionalism, all from the perspective of two women protagonists confined
to a hospital—hardly a coincidence considering Bachelet’s long career in
public health. Guillermo Calderón’s play Discurso (2012), meanwhile,
imagines Bachelet giving a hypothetical farewell speech that diverges from
the bland, disciplined “discourse” that has characterized her time in office
and offers a frank account of her term with none of the taboos surround-
ing the president—her body, her love life, her past, and her often opaque
politics—left unaddressed. In doing so, the play asks whether Bachelet can
remain an exceptional figure with whom so many Chileans identify, and
what implications that question will have for Chile’s idea of itself as excep-
tional. The novel/manifesto La cerda punk by Constanzx Álvarez (2014),
meanwhile, calls for a radical break with narratives of feminist inclusion in
circles of power.
As this book progresses, readers may get the idea that my compulsion
to “queer” the large-scale economic and gender narratives of Chilean
history since 1965 is more of a negation than a proposition. By seeking
lines of flight from nationalist thought, facile definitions of masculinity
 INTRODUCTION 19

and gender, and unreasonably exclusive economic structures, however,

I try not to focus solely on the deconstructive powers of non-reproduc-
tive sexual praxis. On the contrary, it is my hope to inscribe this volume,
chapter by chapter, in the praxis of “reparative hermeneutics” proposed
by Muñoz (12) when citing Eve Sedgwick (2003). This is a proposal
for an alternative cultural history of Chile that critiques exceptionalism
by taking into account, and indeed welcoming, practices of sexual dis-
sidence in all forms. The “Chilean Way”—which, as I argue, has been
synonymous for many years now with both heteronormative masculin-
ity and certain forms of economic management—can thus also describe
a model for how representations of gender in cultural production can
interrogate economic preconceptions throughout the world.

NOTES
1. See, for example, http://www.latercera.com/noticia/opinion/
ideas-y-debates/2010/10/895-301780-9-the-chilean-way.shtml.
As Ricardo Lagos writes in his memoir The Southern Tiger (2012),
a memoir whose title is reflective of the way Chile’s boosters have
promoted the country’s neoliberal economic policies “balanced”
with a modest social welfare net, “our small, far-flung country at
the end of the world, reminds me every day what great hope there
is for the progress of humanity” (199). Lagos’ extolment of “the
Chilean way—the guiding principles that we follow” (199) is thus
part of a long rhetorical tradition of positioning Chile as a mono-
lithic model of economic progress. See also the Briton Neil
Davidson’s book of Spanish-language chronicles about Chile, The
Chilean Way (2010).
2. Inside the New York Times Book Review podcast, November 21,
2014.
3. Rivero’s part in the saga of the miners was elided from the mass-
marketed film, and mentioned very little in mass-media accounts of
the rescue. Tobar’s text refers to him as a “transvestite,” but I have
chosen to use the Spanish word travesti to describe him in order to
preserve the cultural specificities of the Spanish term, which does
not easily translate into English “transvestite.” More information
about the peculiarities of the Chilean travesti, and the genealogy of
the word itself, can be found in the following chapters.
20 C. FISCHER

4. See, for example, http://www.emol.com/noticias/nacional/

2003/07/22/118175/patricio-aylwin-no-hay-justicia-real-sino-
en-la-medida-de-lo-posible.html.
5. The construct of Chile’s “model” economy is the central point of
debate for the work of a long list of social scientists—some praising
the model, and others critiquing it. See, to name only a few, Daniel
Wisecarver (1992), Iván Jaksic and Paul Drake (1999), Oscar Muñoz
(2007), Luis Larraín (2012), Alberto Mayol (2012), Gonzalo
Martner and Eugenio Rivera (2013), and Germán Urrea (2014).
6. See, for example, an August 2015 interview with dictatorship col-
laborator and prominent Right-wing politician Jovino Novoa, who
states that the main flaw of Bachelet’s administration, known as the
Nueva Mayoría, is that it critiques the neoliberal project that has
made Chile supposedly such a global “model”: “La Nueva Mayoría
sostiene con mucha fuerza que Chile es un proyecto fracasado, que
todo lo que pensábamos que era muy bueno, lo hecho en 30 años,
esto que el mundo nos miraba con bastante admiración, que todo
eso es un fracaso y una mentira porque hay desigualdad. Básicamente
tienen centrado ahí su foco. Y como este modelo fracasó, hay que
crear uno nuevo. Chile no es obra de una persona o de un grupo,
Chile es un proyecto y un esfuerzo colectivo, Y eso significa algo
respecto de lo cual nos sentíamos orgullosos muchas personas,
desde Ricardo Lagos a la UDI. Y la Nueva Mayoría llegó a decir
‘que todo eso era un espejismo, que lo que importaba es que aquí
había desigualdad, entonces como hay desigualdad, no importa
que haya menos pobres’. Y creo que eso hoy día no representa
el sentimiento mayoritario de Chile.” For further context, see
http://www.theclinic.cl/2015/08/13/jovino-novoa-y-la-nueva-
mayoria-el-temor-es-que-esto-sea-una-especie-de-peronismo/.
7. The USA justified its 2011 execution by drone of US citizen Anwar
al-Awlaki, for example, as governed by the Authorization to Use
Military Force (AUMF) Act, passed by the Congress in 2001 to
remove constitutional protections on US citizens when they are
deemed by “high-level government officials” to be fighting for a
“dangerous enemy force.” See http://www.theguardian.com/
world/2014/jun/23/us-justification-drone-killing-american-
citizen-awlaki.
8. For more information about the USA’s role in Chile’s military
coup, see Peter Kornbluh’s volume The Pinochet File (2004).
 INTRODUCTION 21

9. As Loveman details, Article 36 of the constitution “allowed

Congress ‘to authorize the president of the republic to use extraor-
dinary powers, always with the requirements that the powers con-
ceded be expressly detailed and limited to a stipulated time period.’
This provision was made use of liberally until its revision in 1874,
when an amendment more tightly circumscribed the proper objec-
tives of congressional ‘exceptional laws’ […]. On his own authority
the president could declare a state of siege in the event of external
attack, and if the Congress were not in session and with the
approval of the council of state, he could do so in the case of inter-
nal commotion. Since Congress was in ordinary session from June
1 until September 1 each year (Article 52), the president had state
of siege authority during nine months of the year” (Loveman
1993: 333).
10. In the opinion of Cristi, “exponer el pensamiento de Schmitt
resulta indispensable para entender cabalmente el devenir constitu-
cional chileno a partir de 1973” (100–101).
11. I would add that this has been employed against newer immi-
grants to Chile, from Colombia, the Dominican Republic, and
Haiti, as well.
12. This contradictory rhetoric is evidenced in the Chilean govern-
ment’s application for temporary work visas, which singles out
Colombians, Dominicans, and Peruvians for extra scrutiny: “Los
nacionales de Colombia deben presentar además un Certificado de
Antecedentes Judiciales vigente y totalmente tramitado y los nacio-
nales de Perú deben presentar un Certificado Consular de
Antecedentes Penales vigente solicitado en su consulado y los
nacionales de Rep. Dominicana deberán presentar el certificado de
NO Antecedentes Penales vigente, obtenido en el consulado de
Rep. Dominicana en Chile.” For more information see http://
w w w. e x t r a n j e r i a . g o b . c l / m e d i a / 2 0 1 5 / 0 4 / T E 1 6 _ I S O _
TEMPORARIA_POR_MOTIVOS_LABORALES1.pdf. This
unequal treatment under the law of certain nationalities is ostensi-
bly intended as a way of “protecting” Chileans from potential
criminals: a suspension of the order in order to preserve order.
13. See Hugo Fazio’s volume Mapa de la extrema riqueza al año 2005
for more information about the distribution of wealth in Chile
among a few families.
22 C. FISCHER

14. In a footnote, Butler defines this term as the “grid of cultural

intelligibility through which bodies, genders, and desires are
naturalized. I am drawing from Monique Wittig’s notion of the
‘heterosexual contract’ and, to a lesser extent, on Adrienne
Rich’s notion of ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ to characterize
a hegemonic discursive/epistemic model of gender intelligibility
that assumes that for bodies to cohere and make sense there must
be a stable sex expressed through a stable gender … that is opposi-
tionally and hierarchically defined through the compulsory prac-
tice of heterosexuality” (208).
15. As sociologist R.W. Connell points out in the study Masculinities
(2005), “the world in which neoliberalism is ascendant is still a
gendered world, and neoliberalism has an implicit gender politics.
Deregulation of the economy places strategic power in the hands
of particular groups of men […]” (xxiii). Moreover, Connell con-
tinues, states, markets, the law, and other institutions are ordered
around reproductive sexuality: “state organizational practices are
structured in relation to the reproductive arena. The overwhelm-
ing majority of top office-holders are men because there is a gender
configuring of recruitment and promotion, a gender configuring
of the internal division of labor and systems of control, a gender
configuring of policymaking, practical routines, and ways of mobi-
lizing pleasure and consent” (73).
16. Puar coins the term “sexual exceptionalism” to describe how the
USA not only positions itself as politically and morally superior,
but also imagines its citizen-subjects as practicing “national-
normative sexualities” (99)—heteronormativity and certain, more
normative strains of homosexuality—which justify “the United
States … as a place free of sexual constraints” in contrast to its
Muslim enemies (92), “constructed as pathologically sexually devi-
ant and as potentially homosexual, and thus read as … particular-
ized object[s] for torture” (87). The rhetoric of Iranian leader
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who famously proclaimed in a speech at
Columbia University in 2007 that there were no homosexuals in
Iran—thus asserting the moral superiority of a Muslim country
over the permissive mores of the USA—only served to confirm
Puar’s analysis, given that the repression of homosexuality implicit
in Ahmadinejad’s statement would make Iranians, for the USA, all
 INTRODUCTION 23

the more sexually deviant and thus more apt for punitive
measures.
17. Edelman here invokes the idea of the figurative Child (with an
upper-case C, to distinguish it from any particular child) as the idea
toward which political factions often gesture to emphasize their
points. One example of how this works is Chile’s current (as of
mid-2016) law on abortion, in which the rights of unborn (even
as-yet-unconceived) children are given priority over those of the
mothers (such as the right to decide what one does with one’s own
body) that some of those children will eventually become. This
example is inspired by one given by Edelman: a 1996 letter by the
Catholic cardinal of Boston, Bernard Law, denouncing “proposed
legislation giving healthcare benefits to same-sex partners of munici-
pal employees,” since “such access to healthcare would profoundly
diminish the marital bond” and undermine, in Law’s words, “‘the
principal, and the best, framework for the nurture, education, and
socialization of children’” (28–29). Edelman concludes, brilliantly,
that this is a “fatal embrace of a futurism so blindly committed to the
figure of the Child that it will justify refusing healthcare benefits to
the adults that some children become” (29).
18. Though the repressive hypothesis accounts less for physical repres-
sion than for repression of the discursive sort, a great deal of theo-
retical writing produced since Foucault has posited queerness as an
umbrella term for the sexual identities and praxes seeking those
spaces of obscurity and respite, and remaining outside of the con-
fines of the social discourse that produces, disciplines, and catego-
rizes sexuality. Paradoxically, then, when faced with repressive
regimes, discourse about queerness tends to multiply even as out-
ward manifestations of it are physically and politically repressed.
19. Texts that have made this point include Nelly Richard’s text
Masculine/Feminine: Practices of Difference(s) (2004), Rubí
Carreño’s readings of José Donoso (2007), Licia Fiol-Matta’s
reading of Gabriela Mistral (2002), Fernando Blanco’s reading of
Pedro Lemebel (2004), and Juan Pablo Sutherland’s (2001) and
Fernando Blanco’s (2001) parallel but complementary recoveries
of a canon of “queer” Chilean writers. Both of these anthologies
express a desire to intervene in “history” (Sutherland 2001: 10)
or “historiography” (Blanco 2001: 112): either by opening up
24 C. FISCHER

“new spaces and readings” of gay discourse (in the case of the
former) or by rethinking categories of identity (in the case of the
latter). I discuss them further in Chap. 5.
20. Guzmán admits to Julianne Burton that “the daily lives of the
Chilean masses, for example, the changing relations between men
and women … all this was also in the original outline. We were
unable to film but a small part of this however. […] It would
have been very important to show this, particularly in light of the
heavily macho tradition in the rest of Latin America” (Burton
1977: 67–68). Curiously, this interview was published before the
third part of the film was even released; Guzmán was aware of this
omission even as he was concluding the film.
21. Muñoz, in a response to Edelman, makes the case for a “queer
future” in art and literature. Couching his arguments in utopian
terms, he states that queerness is not yet fully realized; I will discuss
this debate in greater depth in Chap. 5.
22. In Gender Trouble, Butler made the case that literature can expose
gender performance as a copy of a non-existent, idealized model,
rather than as “prediscursive” (1990: 10) or “natural” (1990: 7).
In Bodies that Matter (1993), Butler makes it clear that in addition
to defining gender as societally constructed, it is important to
examine the material factors that determine how that construction
operates, whether racial, classed, or otherwise. Debates have long
taken place in gender studies between Butler’s position, on one
hand, and the need to maintain some traces of identity for the pur-
pose of building identity-based alliances, on the other. In this
sense, see, for example, the treatment of identity in Simone de
Beauvoir’s (1953) famous assertion that one is not born, but rather
becomes, a woman; Patricia Hill Collins’ (2000) important work
on black feminist theory, which complicates the “standpoint” of
feminism with issues of race and class; Julieta Kirkwood’s (1986)
theories of feminism as a resistance to Chilean dictatorship and
authoritarianism; and Chandra Mohanty’s (2003) work on “post-
colonial” feminisms that work in solidarity with more “first world”
feminist forms. I argue that the debate is, and should remain, unre-
solved. As Nelly Richard (2008) points out, “La fuerza renovadora
del feminismo como uno de los instrumentos más poderosos de la
crítica contemporánea surge de esta tensión—nunca resuelta—
entre, por un lado, la necesidad política de configurar identidades
 INTRODUCTION 25

prácticas (relacionales y situacionales) para combatir las formas de

subordinación y marginalización sociales que agencia la desigual-
dad de género, y por otro, el juego plural de las diferencias que se
vale de lo ambiguo para fisurar internamente las oposiciones binar-
ias (por ejemplo, la oposición masculino/femenino) y descentrar
las pertinencias de identidad fijas y lineales” (8).
23. Since Foucault first opened up theoretical space for thinking about
queer subjectivities that attempt to evade the ways in which dis-
course surveils sexuality, many other queer theorists have posited
ways of evading this discourse of “tracking” sexuality down. The
examination of this interplay, in the contemporary world, between
non-normative sexual identities and practices (on one hand) and
the discourses that try to “track them down” (on the other) has
been taken up by Gayle Rubin (2011), Eve Sedgwick (1990), and
Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner (1998), among others.
24. For example, former US President George W. Bush (in 2005) and
former US presidential candidate Herman Cain (in 2011) both
cited Chile’s privatized individual retirement program as a model
they wanted to implement. In a September 2011 article on the
Mother Jones website, Tim Murphy analyzed Cain’s statements in
favor of privatizing social security, and cited a 2005 article (by
Barbara Dreyfuss) in the magazine that went into much greater
depth on the matter when Bush invoked Chile’s plan as a model
for what he wanted to do in the USA. The two articles can be found
at http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2011/09/herman-cain-
chilean-model-explained and http://www.motherjones.com/pol-
itics/2005/03/siren-santiago, respectively.
25. See, for example, the work of Néstor Perlongher (1997), Gloria
Anzaldúa (1999), Silviano Santiago (2002), Brad Epps (2008),
and Juan Pablo Sutherland (2009), among others.
26. In “Diga ‘queer’ con la lengua afuera” (2010)—another interven-
tion in a long tradition of queer, corporeal performance art in
Chile that includes Leppe, the Colectivo de Acciones de Arte
(CADA) and Lemebel and Francisco Casas’ collective Las Yeguas
del Apocalipsis—Rivas illustratively performs the estrangement of
the word “queer” to Hispanophone ears. By pronouncing the
word “queer” with his tongue out, his pronunciation performs the
“indeterminación y confusión analítica” inherent to the translation
of ideas about lo queer to the Latin American context and the
26 C. FISCHER

Spanish-speaking “tongue” (Rivas 61). See https://vimeo.com/

13821481 for the performance, and http://www.feliperivas.com/
for more information about Rivas’ work.
27. CUDS, the Colectivo Universitario de Disidencia Sexual, has orga-
nized a number of events and interventions in contemporary Chile.
Rivas lists their influences as including “las discusiones propias del
activismo político más contestatario, la crítica cultural chilena y
argentina de los 90, la recepción y discusión de ciertos títulos
enmarcados en la “teoría queer” (en su mayoría sólo los que han
sido traducidos), los debates feministas y postfeministas latino-
americanos, europeos y anglosajones, los estudios subalternos y
poscoloniales, los textos españoles (Beatriz [Paul] Preciado,
Ricardo Llamas, Paco Vidarte, Oscar Guasch, Javier Sáez), la teoría
de medios y nuevas tecnologías (también las prácticas de guerrilla
de las comunicaciones, ciberactivismo y el net.art), el ciberfemi-
nismo, la influencia de los textos literarios (la narrativa de los 80 y
90, junto con la escena poética joven) y las prácticas artísticas
locales, las distintas corrientes del postmarxismo más reciente y
diversos autores postestructuralistas” (74–75, emphasis in origi-
nal). See also http://disidenciasexual.tumblr.com/ for more
information; I will discuss CUDS in further depth in Chap. 6.
28. In Chaps. 4 and 5 of this volume, which focus on the dictatorship
and postdictatorship, respectively, I will discuss the work of these
critics—such as Nelly Richard, Alberto Moreiras, Idelber Avelar,
Francine Masiello, Michael Lazzara, and Macarena Gómez-
Barris—in greater depth. Critical concentrations on this period are
common not only because of a spike in the number of excellent
Chilean writers, artists, and critics in the 1980s and 1990s—
Lemebel, Raúl Zurita, Diamela Eltit, and Roberto Bolaño come to
mind—but also because the work of many artists and critics of this
period fell neatly into currents of thought and debates that
were dominant in North Atlantic academic circles at that time,
such as postmodernism, cultural studies, and trans- and interdisci-
plinary work.
29. Cristián Opazo (2009), for example, has uncovered a tradition of
non-normative sexuality among male Chilean writers that runs
back as early as Augusto D’Halmar’s novel Pasión y muerte del cura
Deusto in 1924 (89), and although Opazo’s work has not explicitly
connected these expressions with economic thought, he does show
 INTRODUCTION 27

how early cultural production in Chile modeled discourses of queer

masculinity to later works. Carreño herself (2007) has focused on
both feminist and queer discourse in Chile, all the way back to such
writers as María Luisa Bombal and Marta Brunet, although her
analysis was more focused on the Chilean literary tradition than on
the broader narratives—both economic and political—that have
lent global implications to that discourse.
30. Here, I am thinking of Robert McKee Irwin’s study of Mexican
masculinities (2003) and Gail Bederman’s study of masculinities in
US nation formation (1995); this has also been, in the Chilean
context, an ongoing preoccupation for Blanco (2001 and 2004:
50) and Sutherland (2001).
31. Mariano Siskind’s work on literary cosmopolitanism (2014) also
characterizes the phenomenon as one of resistance, “denouncing
both the hegemonic structures of Eurocentric forms of exclusion
and nationalistic patterns of self-marginalization” (6).
32. This took place in the context of international campaigns by
Allende’s Unidad Popular government to gain international atten-
tion from like-minded countries in the early 1970s. See, for exam-
ple, Allende’s letter to “los artistas del mundo,” in which he thanks
the artists—such as Frank Stella, Alexander Calder, and Joan
Miró—who donated works for a future “Museum of Solidarity.”
He writes: “Se trata … de un acontecimiento excepcional, que
inaugura un tipo de relación inédita entre los creadores de la obra
artística y el público. En efecto, el Museo de la Solidaridad con
Chile … será el primero que, en un país del Tercer Mundo, por
voluntad de los propios artistas, acerque las manifestaciones más
altas de la plástica contemporánea, a las grandes masas populares”
(Aguirre y Chamorro 2008: 98, emphasis added). Many of those
works are now part of the collection of the Salvador Allende
Museum.

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 INTRODUCTION 31

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 CHAPTER 2

The Monstrous Masculinities of Chile’s

Agrarian Reform, 1965–1970

INTRODUCTION: MODELS OF MASCULINE

EXCEPTIONALISM?
For a series of articles that José Donoso wrote as a correspondent
for the Chilean magazine Ercilla in the early 1960s, he visited many
remote, rural parts of the country, describing the dismal living and
working conditions there and exhorting the central government to
intervene and improve the situation. In a 1963 article, for example, he
covered a summit between Mapuche chiefs and government and church
authorities near the southern Chilean town of Osorno, issuing a specific
condemnation of the central government’s lack of involvement in the
countryside. “El gobierno hasta ahora, no había ofrecido ayuda téc-
nica a los mapuches para trabajar sus tierras. La necesidad los hizo talar
sus bosques, empobreciendo así sus posibilidades. […] Hay miseria,
hambre y desesperanza” (Donoso 2004: 297), he wrote, emphasizing
the unsustainable way of life into which the government was forcing
the Mapuches. Donoso, despite having been born into Chile’s most
elite class, was acutely aware of the pockets of economic “backward-
ness”—as perceived by those elites—in the nation’s countryside in the
late 1960s. The scene he established, in which “el Ministro de Tierras
Julio Philippi, acompañado por el Obispo de Araucanía y otros dig-
natarios,” men marked by name and rank as members of Chile’s elite,
cross an open field to negotiate over land rights with “el viejo cacique

© The Author(s) 2016 33

C. Fischer, Queering the Chilean Way,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-56248-7_2
34 C. FISCHER

Aucamán” (Donoso 2004: 295), is one in which ethnic, gender, class,

and national(ist) dynamics all intersect. This meeting of patriarchs from
a number of sectors of rural Chilean society to debate about the devel-
opment of the land was characteristic of the masculinist nature of dis-
course in the area at the time.
Consensus had amassed around the fact that Chile’s countryside
had to “modernize,” and that the avatars of this modernization process
would be male, with a firm, proven stake in heterosexual masculinity and
reproductive praxis. On one hand, the patrón de fundo defended an old,
semi-feudal order1 (his long family legacy purportedly allowing him to
cement his social position), while on the other, the small campesino head-
of-household was fighting to implement change (his patriarchal leadership
of his own home serving as proof of his fitness to challenge the dominance
of the patrón). Cultural producers, think tanks, and politicians both in
the country and beyond decided that increasing the central government’s
involvement in the countryside was the best way of ameliorating the wide-
spread exploitation—including gender-based violence2—perceived to be
taking place there. And Donoso, as both the aforementioned article and
several of his novels indicate, was attuned to how masculinity mediated
governmental interventions to “correct” this backwardness—interven-
tions whose aesthetics and economics this chapter takes on as its central
concern.
Eduardo Frei Montalva was elected to the presidency of Chile in late
1964, and immediately embarked on a series of measures3 that would
increase government intervention in national life, particularly in the coun-
tryside. Frei had campaigned for a “Revolución en Libertad,” a slogan
whose paradoxical nature reflected the intention—equally paradoxical, for
some—of Frei and his party, the Christian Democrats, to dismantle lati-
fundia in Chile while essentially preserving class divisions there (Tinsman
84).4 Under pressure to avoid a popular uprising at home and mindful of
the revolution that had taken place not long before in Cuba, his govern-
ment’s agrarian reform was intended to co-opt leftist revolutionary ferment
through moderate reforms—reforms which also happened to be at the
center of the US government’s “Alliance for Progress” program. Though
some superficial gestures toward agrarian reform had already been made in
Chile,5 it was during Frei Montalva’s presidency that it gathered momen-
tum.6 The Agrarian Reform Law (no. 16,640) of 1967 declared that all
plots of land with over 80 hectares of “basically irrigable” land could be
expropriated, and then Law no. 16,625, passed the same year, allowed
 THE MONSTROUS MASCULINITIES OF CHILE’S AGRARIAN REFORM, 1965–1970 35

for campesinos to unionize (Pinto 111). The historian Heidi Tinsman’s

analysis (2002) of this unionization campaign, focused primarily on mar-
ried inquilinos,7 is key to understanding the relationship between Chile’s
economic development and notions of reproductive masculinity. Married
inquilinos were, for Christian Democratic labor organizers, ideal candi-
dates to join campesino unions because their “sexual access to female bodies
defined their masculine integrity” (Tinsman 118).8 Unmarried inquilinos,
on the other hand, were often viewed with suspicion by both labor unions
and potential employers, in part because of their lack of sustained “sexual
access” to female bodies. Tinsman states that men who refused to union-
ize—married or not—were derided as “maricones (faggots)” (97), and she
does not even discuss the roles of actual homosexuals in the agrarian reform
efforts. In short, the married inquilino was thought of as the most able to
ensure the economically exceptional place of his country within the pan-
theon of Alliance for Progress experiments. Chile soon became “a showcase
for [the US’s] new Latin American development and security program, the
Alliance for Progress,” in the words of Tinsman (88, emphasis added). The
agrarian reform would show off how remarkably forward-looking Chile
was, in relation to its Latin American neighbors. Chile, then, was able to
position itself as economically exceptional using exceptional figures.
At the same time, Latin American artistic circles were holding similar
debates about aesthetic modernity, while also taking the heteronormative
masculinity at the heart of those aesthetics for granted. As Diana Sorensen
(2007) has argued, there was “a shrinking of distances between Latin
Americans and the metropolitan cultures,”9 thanks to the qualitative leap
forward that Latin American literature had taken at the hands of the Boom
writers (including Donoso). This allowed for Latin American literature
and the literature of the “metropolitan world” to suddenly be “seen as
existing in a ‘shared cultural present’” (Sorensen 146). On the other hand,
however, these same writers felt the need to square this literary “advance”
with a nagging feeling of having lost their sense of belonging to Latin
America itself, now that they had entered the pantheon of “world litera-
ture” (Avelar 1999: 35, Sorensen 146). They debated between eschewing
their literary affiliations to the smaller, more provincial intellectual circles
in their respective countries, and to the novelas de la tierra that had pre-
ceded them,10 in favor of more cosmopolitan affiliations to each other
and to non-Latin American writers—and contemplating the “patricide”
that would ensue (Sorensen 147). As Sorensen and others such as Manuel
36 C. FISCHER

Puig11 have shown, 1960s Latin American literary modernity was as much
a matter of masculinity as it was an aesthetic issue.
Similar debates were taking place in Latin American film circles dur-
ing the mid- to late-1960s. A transnational stream of ideas about “Third
Worldist Film” had taken root at this time, not just in Latin America but
throughout the so-called global south: “an alternative, independent, anti-
imperialist cinema,” seeking independence from the influence of mass-
market Hollywood studio films and “calling for a tricontinental revolution
in politics and an aesthetic and narrative revolution in film form” (Shohat
and Stam 1994: 248). Miguel Littin, one of the first filmmakers in Chile
to take up this idea of revolution,12 debated between his expressed desire
to make films that were “Latin American” and “Chilean” on one hand—a
desire to stay away from an “estética … impuesta por moldes europeos”
(Littin and Santa María 1970: 24)—and the global influences on (and
circulation of) his work, on the other. His debate between breaking with,
and embracing, the local elements of his work had implications for gen-
der as well: “El cineasta del ’67 reclamaba para sí y ocupaba un papel en
el combate por la liberación de América Latina. El paternalismo era cosa
del pasado” (Littin 1988: 33). Pointing out the link between antiquated,
paternalistic masculinity and the redistribution of latifundia underway in
Chile, Littin committed to the project of the agrarian reform—albeit only
to align himself with the masculinist rhetoric of armed combat. As such,
he showed how cinematographic modernity in Latin America was also a
matter of masculine identity and performance.
This chapter opens in 1965, the year of a party at the house of Carlos
Fuentes in Mexico City that José Donoso sets as the beginning of the
Boom (Donoso 1972: 123); it was also a time when many of these contra-
dictions over economics, aesthetics, and gender came to a head in Chile.
Debates in that period about the country’s aesthetic and economic mod-
ernization crystallized around a heterosexual head-of-household as an
idealized figure—even as a sexual revolution13 brewing throughout the
Americas and the world worked to destabilize such figures. The following
year, Donoso published El lugar sin límites in Mexico, which would be the
first literary and cultural document in the Latin American 1960s to draw
attention to, and question, the underlying heteronormativity of aesthetic
and economic preconceptions about the Chilean (and, by extension, Latin
American) agrarian modernization process. José Amícola (2006) refers to
El lugar sin límites as ahead of its time vis-à-vis global social and gender
liberation movements of the 1960s: “tan temprano en su expresión de las
 THE MONSTROUS MASCULINITIES OF CHILE’S AGRARIAN REFORM, 1965–1970 37

cuestiones de gender” (26).14 Clearly intended to emphasize its impor-

tance as a counter-weight to historical, cultural, and literary conceptions
of this period in Latin America as exclusively heteronormative, El lugar sin
límites would thus serve as a powerful, novel intervention in the aesthetic,
economic, and sexual debates taking place in Latin America at the time.
Accordingly, this chapter will focus on El lugar sin límites as well as what
I consider to be the other two principal cultural artifacts of this period in
which the discursively patriarchal nature of Chile’s exceptionalistic agrarian
modernization is most patently manifested and most zealously disputed:
Donoso’s later novel El obsceno pájaro de la noche (1970), and Littin’s film
El chacal de Nahueltoro (1969). These texts dialogue with the economic
and sexual disputes taking place not only in Chile, but also beyond it:
they were very much in contact with ideas from abroad,15 and as they
circulated transnationally, they challenged Chile’s transnational rhetoric of
exceptional economic modernization on equal terms. Further extending
Ericka Beckman’s (2013) insightful analysis of the linkage between literary
and economic modernity from the nineteenth century to the twentieth
century, I will argue that the economic instabilities that ensue from Chile’s
integration with global economic currents through agrarian moderniza-
tion lead to instabilities in literary and cinematic representation that can
prove productive. All three texts contain characters that attenuate the eco-
nomically and sexually normative notions around which Chile’s economy
was discursively embodied. They denounce how modernization is so often
gendered and sexed as male, to exclude queer, non-reproductive bodies
from political and economic visibility. Moreover, they propose broader,
more aesthetically oriented forms of modernity, providing insight into the
long tradition of inflecting Latin American rhetorics of modernization
with sexuality.16 They also show how the aspiration to superiority (the
desire to distinguish oneself from others) that lies at the heart of the rhetoric
of exceptionalism can relate to, and be imbricated in, gender conformity
(the desire for oneself to be like the others). This would have implications
for the place of Donoso’s and Littin’s destabilizations of the masculinist
natures of Boom literature and engagé cinema, respectively.

QUEERNESS, EXCEPTION, AND MONSTROSITY

Chile’s economic modernization efforts in the 1960s, as well as the aes-
thetic modernization of its literature, were very much invested in what
Marshall Berman (1982) defines as the “maelstrom” of processes ori-
38 C. FISCHER

ented toward an ideal of temporal progression, material progress, and

transformation (16). Yet it is also worth asking whether modernity is
inherently a sexist and heterosexist enterprise, in light of how related
it is to patrimony—an idea also concerned with the teleological impli-
cations of legacy, lineage, and accumulation. The question of whether
modernity is sexist is central to Rita Felski’s (1995) feminist critique of
Berman’s work. Whereas Berman quotes Marx and Nietzsche’s idea of
“modern man,” as in “‘the man of tomorrow and the day after tomor-
row’—who, ‘standing in opposition to his today,’ will have the courage
and imagination to ‘create new values’ that modern men and women
need to steer their way through the perilous infinities in which they live”
(23), Felski argues that

… the exemplary heroes of [Berman’s] text—[Goethe’s] Faust, Marx,

Baudelaire—are of course symbols not just of modernity, but also of mas-
culinity, historical markers of the emergence of new forms of bourgeois and
working-class male subjectivity. Both in Berman’s account of Faust and
in his later evocation of Baudelaire’s flâneur … the modern individual is
assumed to be an autonomous male free of familial and communal ties. (2,
emphasis added)

Critiquing the extent to which historical narratives of modernity such as

Berman’s are personified, exemplified, and sexed as male, and then show-
ing how modernity can and should also be identified with femininity, Felski
provides the groundwork for showing how modernity can be heterosex-
ist as well as sexist. In light of the literature and art under examination
here, existing historical narratives of Chile’s modernization in the 1960s,
populated by and imagined around not just men but heterosexual men,
must be revised. Given the gendered assumptions that modernity—at least
as conceived by Berman—makes, a non-heteronormative conception of
modernity can undermine the rhetoric of exceptionalism in Chile that has
proven so exclusive of queer sexual expression.
Despite the fact that the work of Donoso and Littin was affiliated with
currents of economic and aesthetic “modernity” that were very invested
in notions of normative masculinity, their work also dialogues with more
cosmopolitan,17 less patriarchal, and (importantly) queerer forms of gen-
der identity and performance. The fact that Felski invokes the exemplarity
in her critique, above, of the “heroes” invoked by Berman, highlights how
exceptionalism both places “heroes” as typical subjects of a narrative of
apparently widespread superiority and also sets them apart from typical
 THE MONSTROUS MASCULINITIES OF CHILE’S AGRARIAN REFORM, 1965–1970 39

ones. The logic of exceptionalism is thus quite compatible with the teleol-
ogies of modernity, which also incorporate new subjects into modernity’s
forward-looking gaze even as they “melt away” the presence of “outlier”
subjects (often women, in Felski’s analysis) who threaten modernity’s
momentum. This double-edged rhetoric of inclusion and exclusion is also
a key element of normative gender-based ideologies like the one underly-
ing Chile’s agrarian reform, by which men who fit a certain, reproductive
ideal were made “protagonists” of the reform, while others who did not
were relegated to history’s shadows. Donoso’s and Littin’s aesthetic repre-
sentations of the refusal to reproduce, or of queer reproductive practices,
bring certain subjects out of these shadows. In doing so, they question the
assumption that heterosexual Chilean men should be the protagonists of
modernity, by representing how the process in which such men pass their
patrimony and other forms of influence down to their offspring in con-
ventionally heteronormative ways can be frozen or interrupted outright.
The subjects depicted in Donoso’s and Littin’s work in this period are
implicated in the heteronormative, masculinist modernization projects of
the Chilean state, and yet they also queer reproductive heterosexuality in
a way that undermines the foundations of Chile’s rhetoric of exceptional
modernization.
I submit that the trope of monstrosity is the best way to read how
Donoso and Littin interrogate the supposed heterosexual and masculine
modernity underlying the Chilean government’s “exceptional” agrarian
reform policies. Monstrosity has been a common literary device since the
time of the Anglophone Gothic novel18; it is defined in the same terms of
reproduction that idealized masculinity is; and it serves as a path toward
a non-heteronormative way to think about modernity. Michel Foucault’s
writings on monstrosity that appear within his discussion of “abnormality”
are particularly helpful in examining how those who espouse “monstrous”
masculinity can subvert the political and economic pretensions of those
who practice reproductive masculinities. In Abnormal (2003), Foucault
outlined the genealogy of the title term through the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries as a way of socially classifying people designated as devi-
ant from praxes of reproduction accepted as normal (55–59). Foucault’s
model of abnormality par excellence is the monster: the product of “the
blending, the mixture of two species […]. It is the mixture of two sexes
… the transgression of natural limits, the transgression of classifications, of
the table, and of the law as table: this is actually what is involved in mon-
strosity” (63, emphases added). The monster is what is produced when
40 C. FISCHER

two disparate elements combine in a deviant way—a concept rooted in

reproduction. Indeed, the figures invoked in Donoso and Littin’s work
who end up questioning the exceptionality of Chile’s agrarian moderniza-
tion most strongly are all participants in sexual practices that “breach”
(Foucault 64) the law in various ways.
Foucault’s conception of monstrosity uses the word “transgression,”
a key concept in the philosophy of exception and exceptionalism. The
fact that the monster can both embody deviance and serve as a nexus of
signification around which deviance becomes socially normalized gives it
the power to contradict accepted notions of modernity (and the gendered
assumptions upon which it is based). It also produces meaning that recap-
tures deviancy back into the aegis of modernity. Foucault calls this idea
“tautological intelligibility”:

… the monster is, so to speak, the spontaneous, brutal, but consequently

natural form of the unnatural. It is the magnifying model, the form of every
possible little irregularity exhibited by the games of nature. In this sense …
the monster is the major model of every little deviation. It is the principle of
intelligibility of all the forms that circulate as the small change of abnormal-
ity. […] Paradoxically, the monster is a principle of intelligibility in spite of
its limit position as both the impossible and the forbidden. And yet this prin-
ciple of intelligibility is strictly tautological, since the characteristic feature of
the monster is to express itself as, precisely, monstrous, to be the explanation
of every possible deviation that may derive from it, but to be unintelligible
itself. (Foucault 56–57, emphasis mine)

In the eighteenth century, abnormality and monstrosity were terms used

to describe and diagnose mental and physical disabilities, producing dis-
course around them and incorporating such “abnormalities” into doctors’
manuals, church doctrine, and legal treatises. The process of designating
individuals as abnormal and then attempting to “normalize” abnormality
(with, of course, varying degrees of success) is, for Foucault, the mark of
that society’s achievement of what he calls “synthesis” (15), “transfor-
mation” (75), and “transition” (110), if not modernity. Exceptions to
modernity have thus, paradoxically, laid the discursive groundwork for it.
In the following sections, I will discuss how the (masculine, reproduc-
tive) gender ideal around which Chile’s supposedly exceptional modern-
ization is structured becomes challenged by three texts that appropriate
“monstrosity” (queerness, atypical reproduction, or non-reproductivity)
in order to question and possibly extend what it means to be an “ideal
 THE MONSTROUS MASCULINITIES OF CHILE’S AGRARIAN REFORM, 1965–1970 41

subject” of modernity. Just as Felski challenges the masculinist assump-

tions of Berman’s work, monstrous ideas about reproduction, especially
queerness, are able to discursively expand Chile’s aesthetic modernity to
more cosmopolitan influences.19 This cosmopolitanism, both on the part
of cultural agents like Donoso and Littin and in characters who defy the
parochialism of their surroundings by defining themselves in more global
terms, circumvents the ideal subjects of the economic modernity so desired
by the architects of the country’s agrarian reform. Yet the “monsters” in
these texts use sexuality to dispute the state projects of modernity even as
they remain invested in those projects. Just as Frei Montalva’s government
insisted that its “revolution” take place within the logic of “liberty”—a
Chilean exception to the “rules” of either socialist revolution or semi-
feudalism in other latitudes—the “monsters” in these texts dispute the
sexual exceptionalism of state projects of modernity even as they remain
invested in exceptionalism itself. The fact that these texts broadened
the inclusivity of both agrarian modernization and Boom/Third World
Cinema aesthetics sets an important precedent for later, more radical ways
in which queer cultural texts from Chile have challenged the heteronor-
mative assumptions of economic exceptionalism and global aesthetics.

EL LUGAR SIN LÍMITES: ERECTING AND TRANSGRESSING

THE BOUNDARIES OF REPRODUCTION

El lugar sin límites takes place over the course of a day in the life of the
transgender la Manuela (born Manuel González), the part owner of a
brothel in the rural town of El Olivo. From the very beginning of the
novel, Pancho Vega—to whom Severo Sarduy, in an early article about
this novel, refers as “el macho oficial del caserío” (1968: 72)—has been
threatening a violent return. A year earlier he and some friends had drunk-
enly wrought havoc on the brothel, and when don Alejo Cruz, the local
landowner and senator for the region, told them to “portarse en forma
comedida,” they left, though not before roughing up la Manuela and rip-
ping her red dress: “mientras uno le retorcía el brazo, los otros le sacaron
la ropa y poniéndole su famoso vestido de española a la fuerza se lo rajaron
entero.” Pancho has vowed retribution for don Alejo’s rebuke, not on
Don Alejo, but on la Manuela and her daughter, la Japonesita, because la
Manuela called him a peon (Donoso 1966: 12–13). Sure enough, Pancho
shows up at the brothel later on during the day when most of the nov-
42 C. FISCHER

el’s action takes place, threatening to rape la Japonesita.20 The complex

economic and sexual implications of the relationships among these three
main characters of the novel—la Manuela, Pancho, and don Alejo—can
be read through the lens of production and reproduction: each one has
participated in the praxis of heterosexual reproduction, but in each case
there have been different results for the practitioner within the economy
of the novel, and different implications for the modernization of their
surroundings.
There are two erections that occur during the novel that transgress
heterosexual reproduction, Chile’s pretensions to economic modernity,
and the aesthetic aims of the Boom. The economic and masculine sta-
tus quo that these erections—one la Manuela’s, the other Pancho’s—
challenge is represented by don Alejo, El Olivo’s sole landowner. As
the region’s senator—representing “el partido histórico, tradicional, de
orden, el partido de la gente decente que paga las deudas y no se mete en
líos” (Donoso 1966: 66)—don Alejo is the only governmental author-
ity with whom most people in the area have any contact at all. Yet his
influence is waning: the state is marching toward modernization, if not
toward agrarian reform specifically, and El Olivo is destined to disappear
(Donoso 1966: 53–54) now that the highway through the area has not
been built anywhere near it (Donoso 1966: 44) and don Alejo has refused
to bring electricity to it. In fact, don Alejo is associated with decay and
loss as much as he is with reproduction and economic control: not only
has he just found out that he is dying (Donoso 1966: 97), but also he
has no legitimate descendants. Don Alejo is thus in line with overarching
historical trends in the 1960s related to the shrinking economic influence
of large, rural landowners due to agrarian reforms: a power vacuum has
opened up for new actors to embody the state’s new ideal of (reproduc-
tive and economic) modernity.
Pancho’s economic aspirations have always been intimately tied to
reproductive heterosexuality: his livelihood has been made possible
through an alliance he gained by marriage (his brother-in-law Octavio,
who owns a gas station along the highway at a distance from El Olivo,
has lent him the money to pay back a longstanding debt to don Alejo,
and represents a more urban prosperity, less burdened by generational
rural ties) and a life far removed from the fundo with his own family
rather than the Cruz family. This is why Pancho’s erection, caused as it
is by la Manuela—biologically a man—is constructed as so exceedingly
threatening to his economic aspirations. Toward the end of the novel,
 THE MONSTROUS MASCULINITIES OF CHILE’S AGRARIAN REFORM, 1965–1970 43

Pancho arrives at the brothel to inflict his revenge on la Manuela by

raping her daughter, la Japonesita. In order to distract Pancho from
doing this, la Manuela screws up her courage and begins to dance for
him. Soon enough, Pancho finds himself aroused by la Manuela, as evi-
denced by this stream-of-consciousness narration from Pancho’s point
of view:

el viejo maricón que baila para él y él se deja bailar y que ya no da risa porque
es como si él, también, estuviera anhelando. Que Octavio no sepa. No se
dé cuenta. Que nadie se dé cuenta. Que no lo vean dejándose tocar y sobar
por las contorsiones y las manos histéricas de la Manuela que no lo tocan
… nadie ve lo que le sucede debajo de la mesa, pero que no puede ser …
y toma una mano dormida de la Lucy y la pone ahí, donde arde. (Donoso
1966: 121)

Pancho manages to displace la Manuela as the cause of his erection in

that moment by putting the hand of another prostitute on it. Hidden as
it is under the table, Pancho manages to laugh it off. But the phonograph
soon breaks, and so—since there is no electricity to plug in an electric
one, due to don Alejo’s unwillingness to modernize El Olivo—Pancho,
Octavio, and la Manuela decide to take the party to a bigger brothel
in Talca. What starts out as drunken joy quickly sours, however, when
la Manuela tries to kiss Pancho: “Iban uno a cada lado de la Manuela,
agarrando su cintura. La Manuela se inclinó hacia Pancho y trató de
besarlo en la boca mientras reía. Octavio lo vio y soltó a la Manuela.
‘Ya pues compadre, no sea maricón usted también’” (Donoso 1966:
124). Making explicit the attraction between la Manuela and Pancho
cuts Pancho’s fragile attempts at normative masculinity to the quick.
Pancho must disavow his attraction to la Manuela by blaming the kiss
entirely on her, and he and Octavio end up badly beating her—a beating
that Ben Sifuentes-Jáuregui (2002) has read as their attempt to disrupt
any intimation of sexual ambiguity on their parts, “affirming their sense
of ‘integrity’” so that “a single story [can] be told about them” (118),
even when the beating is described in the text as monstrous and mul-
tiple, with “los tres una sola masa viscosa retorciéndose como un animal
fantástico de tres cabezas y múltiples extremidades heridas e hirientes”
(Donoso 1966: 126). This erection thus ends with la Manuela’s death,
and the assurance of Pancho’s place as an avatar of heterosexual “integ-
rity” (a term Tinsman also uses) and economic modernity. And yet, just
44 C. FISCHER

as doubts about Pancho’s heterosexuality have been sown in Octavio’s

mind, Donoso also sows doubts about Chile’s modernization not only
as possibly queer, but also as monstrous.
Pancho’s is the second of the two erections that queer Chile’s “model”
economic modernity in Donoso’s novel, but la Manuela’s is the first. The
novel flashes back to when the ownership of the land upon which the
brothel sits was wrested by la Manuela and the brothel’s original madam, la
Japonesa Grande, from don Alejo. It happens one night when la Japonesa
Grande holds a celebration for don Alejo, who has successfully run for sen-
ate. She has invited a band, led by la Manuela, from the provincial capital
of Talca to sing and dance for the occasion. Don Alejo, feeling magnani-
mous, makes a bet with la Japonesa Grande: if she can get la Manuela to
have sex with her while don Alejo watches, he will give la Japonesa the
deed to the brothel, which she is currently renting from him (Donoso
1966: 80). La Japonesa proposes this idea to la Manuela, and, for her
trouble, offers her a share in the brothel. The ensuing sexual act between
them has a number of narrative implications: it is how la Japonesita is con-
ceived; it results in a key loss of influence and control in El Olivo by don
Alejo; and it is the fulcrum upon which la Manuela’s complicated aspira-
tions to modernity rest. Her erection brings her some degree of power,
in the form of paternity and land ownership, but it is also a reminder
of how monstrous her ambiguous gender praxis can appear to be, par-
ticularly to her daughter: “cuando la Japonesita le decía papá, su vestido
de española tendido encima del lavatorio se ponía más viejo, la percala
gastada, el rojo desteñido, los zurcidos a la vista, horrible, ineficaz” (49).
It is Rubí Carreño (2007) who has pointed out the central ambiguity of la
Manuela’s action to protect la Japonesita from Pancho’s attempt to rape
her: in attempting to distract Pancho by seducing him, la Manuela both
performs normative paternity and also disavows the gendered and sexed
aspects of that paternity. As Carreño observes, “¿Cuántos padres estarían
dispuestos a ocupar el lugar de la hija en caso de violencia sexual? ¿Cuánto
heroísmo y valentía se requiere para asumirse como homosexual?” (135).
La Manuela’s resolutely unclassifiable performance of gender—in which
she forces those around her to reckon discursively with a “monstrous”
combination of masculinity and femininity that simultaneously denies and
broadens what it means to be a father—indicates the power of queerness
to affect Chile’s economic narratives of modernity.
That their respective erections, key to the progress of the narrative,
both transgress and broaden the discourse of Chile’s modernization is not
 THE MONSTROUS MASCULINITIES OF CHILE’S AGRARIAN REFORM, 1965–1970 45

the only thing la Manuela and Pancho have in common. The former’s kiss
of the latter reminds all involved that the modernity they desire cannot
be both sexually cosmopolitan and economically exceptional; in short, it
cannot be too modern. The modernizing “revolution in liberty” espoused
by la Manuela—in which land can be redistributed and affiliations to the
local patrón can be disputed, but not entirely undone—thus offers a queer
retelling, though not a subversion, of modernity. Pancho’s path to moder-
nity, meanwhile—an escape from the fundo to a house in the suburbs, yes,
but also indebtedness to and exploitation by Octavio instead of by don
Alejo (Carreño 138)—also serves as a queering of modernity, since the
modernity Pancho espouses will always be under threat by an inopportune
erection, and his response to such an erection will undoubtedly be mon-
strous. Both Pancho and la Manuela have complex relationships to the
paternalistic teleologies inherent to modernity, but neither one of them
ever fully embodies the heterosexual ideal for Chile’s modernization that
existed at the time. Don Alejo, meanwhile, maintains his control over the
vast majority of El Olivo for the moment, but the fact that the novel shows
the potential for non-heterosexuality at the heart of this modernization
shows the extent to which Chilean art—if not its economy—was growing
increasingly cosmopolitan.
Following Jacqueline Loss’ (2005) insistence on cosmopolitanism as
resistance to place, we can view la Manuela’s insistence on mobility and
escape from El Olivo to find a place cosmopolitan enough to accept her as a
reaction not only against prevailing semi-feudal economic norms, but also
as a reaction by Donoso against a Latin American cosmopolitan literature
made up of purely heterosexual themes. In a soliloquy at the beginning
of the novel, la Manuela imagines herself as a cosmopolitan performer:
“Si viviera en una ciudad grande, de ésas donde dicen que hay carnaval y
todas las locas salen a la calle a bailar vestidas con sus lujos y lo pasan regio
y nadie dice nada, ella saldría vestida de manola. Pero aquí los hombres
son tontos, como Pancho y sus amigos” (25). Here, both la Manuela and
Donoso counter the gendered subjecthood at the heart of Chile’s agrar-
ian and aesthetic modernization rhetoric. El lugar sin límites may have
stopped short of openly utopian longings for absolute sexual freedom, the
interruption of oppressive teleologies, and economic equality, but it does
fiercely critique the situation preceding Chile’s agrarian reform. As such,
it offers insight into Donoso’s queering (and broadening) of the supposed
cosmopolitanism (and conventional masculinity) of the Boom, and also
into the promise and limitations of the period’s agrarian modernization.
46 C. FISCHER

EL OBSCENO PÁJARO DE LA NOCHE: THE EFFACEMENT

OF SEXUAL EXCEPTIONALISM

In El obsceno pájaro de la noche, Donoso again meditates upon the link-

age between economic development and patriarchal lineage amidst Chile’s
modernizing, 1960s social milieu.21 Once again, the principal characters in
the novel, all male, are aware that their places of power within the coun-
try’s economy will be irrevocably linked to their participation in conven-
tional reproductive praxis. In the latter novel, however, this power hinges
less upon the characters’ ability to embody the image of Chile’s masculin-
ist 1960s modernity and more upon their ability to be seen as having done
so. Within the logic of the novel, men have more or less power depending
on their abilities to appear to accumulate capital and pass it on, thereby
perpetuating their lineage through time. However, if no one sees them
doing this—if their achievements are not considered to be as exceptional
as they feel they deserve—their legacies fade away. Other characters in the
novel, meanwhile, embrace invisibility to dispute the predominantly mas-
culinist, heterosexual image of Chilean economic modernization.22 The
struggle among these characters to appropriate, through sexual practice,
the space of the ideal subject of their shifting economic milieu is at the
heart of the novel.
The site in the novel where exceptional economic modernity is primar-
ily questioned through queerness and monstrosity is, paradoxically, the
decidedly unmodern imbunche—a popular myth in rural Chilean folklore
in which witches steal children of privilege, sew up all their bodily orifices,
and deny them identity and life. To lack a “face”—which is what hap-
pens when one is turned into an imbunche—is to be incapable of material
accumulation, and to not perpetuate one’s lineage. This is related to what
Sharon Magnarelli (1993) states about the use of masks in the novel: “if
one accumulates a suitable stockpile of material goods, one will be able to
fashion a face, a mask, an identity … a possession that indicates that the
family has material goods as well as a social position to be inherited and
later bequeathed to one’s son” (103). The imbunche can be read as the
donning, and yet also the disintegration, of just such a mask.
The imbunche, which first appears in the novel as an oral tradition
told and retold among women, is positioned as the folkloric opposite of
reproductive masculinity and economic modernity: all destruction and
no creation; feminine rather than masculine; all past and no future; to be
accumulated rather than to accumulate. In a lengthy and fascinating study
 THE MONSTROUS MASCULINITIES OF CHILE’S AGRARIAN REFORM, 1965–1970 47

of the novel’s use of the imbunche—a word that refers to both the witch
and the sewn-up person—Adriana Valdés (1975) states that its power lies
in the fact that it renders people voiceless, nameless, and sexless: “una
existencia sin un verdadero ‘tú’” (137). The fact that all of the male char-
acters find themselves vulnerable to the threat of becoming an imbunche
at different points in the novel is a reminder of just how related the ideal
of exceptional, visible masculinity is to its backward, monstrous, effaced
opposite. It is also an indicator of the difficulty for Chile’s narrative of eco-
nomic modernization to separate itself from its premodern folk origins: its
new agrarian reforms seem to be in danger of reverting at any moment to
the most abject of feudalisms. The imbunche, being infertile, cannot bear
children herself, so she can only steal those of others; denying their iden-
tity and visibility, she interrupts the economic teleologies that their repro-
ductive heterosexual praxis would perpetuate. The imbunche thus operates
in the novel according to the same paradoxical logic that monstrosity
does. Characters transgress modernity when turned into imbunches, yet
the monstrous figure of the imbunche often inaugurates new, unexpected
forms of aesthetic and economic modernity.
The novel begins when Jerónimo, the wealthy young scion of the
Azcoitía family, returns to Chile after a number of years in Europe and
stakes his claim to a piece of the country’s bounty. He has reluctantly
decided to stay because his social prominence in Chile—he is wealthy,
famous, and handsome—means he can stand out among his peers more
than he could in Europe. His uncle Clemente, a priest with close ties to
Chile’s ruling class, reminds him of his exceptionally powerful position in
the country: “Tu lugar está aquí, hombre. ¿Para qué quieres seguir vivi-
endo en Europa … si aquí eres alguien?” (Donoso 1970: 169; emphasis
added). Not only is Jerónimo “someone”—a status to which members of
the less powerful classes aspire—his own history is intertwined with that
of Chile itself. Jerónimo’s exceptional physical perfection sets him apart
from the very beginning of the novel: through his visibility and seemingly
inborn leadership and power, he seems uniquely positioned to espouse the
ideal, heterosexual subject of elite Chile in the 1960s. If Jerónimo, the
last male of the Azcoitías, can project the legacy of his family forward, he
can ensure that the subjects of Chile’s economic rhetoric are like him—
oligarchic and tied to semi-feudal landholdings, and yet exceptional for
their sexual prowess and economic power. Soon enough, he begins to
participate in the socially accepted dynamic of reproductive heterosexual-
ity: he marries Inés Santillana, a woman from another well-to-do family;
48 C. FISCHER

he is elected to congress, for the party of “los cabecillas conservadores”

(Donoso 1970: 194); and after years of trying, he and Inés finally have
a son whom Jerónimo hopes will fulfill his pretensions of continuing his
lineage.
Jerónimo may be trying to appropriate the language of modernity, par-
ticularly in its most patriarchal iterations, but the premodern, indigenous
customs and folklore of the Chilean countryside lie just under the sur-
face. In line with historical accounts of the Chilean oligarchy since the
so-called conquest, the origins of the Azcoitía family are couched in terms
of an all-powerful man, a cacique forefather who forged the agrarian-based
economic power that the family continues to enjoy in Jerónimo’s time.
Meanwhile, transgressions of Jerónimo’s pretensions to sexual and eco-
nomic power come in the form of the imbunche, first personified in the
novel by Inés’ servant, Peta Ponce. Possessor of the folk knowledge of the
countryside, her threat to modernity (at least in its most teleological sense,
as conceived of by Berman) consists, in part, of “el poder de plegar y con-
fundir el tiempo” (Donoso 1970: 222): her mysterious powers threaten
the progression forward of the values Jerónimo holds so dear. Jerónimo
realizes that he has a powerful enemy in Peta (Donoso 1970: 183), and
this danger is compounded by the fact that she is related by blood to
the Azcoitía family. Peta intervenes in the conception of Jerónimo’s
son, named Boy, in such a way that he is born with extreme deformities,
described in the novel using graphic details reminiscent of its grotesque
descriptions of imbunches. For instance, early on Donoso describes the
actions of the witches:

las brujas [querían] robarse a la hija del cacique … robársela para coserle los
nueve orificios del cuerpo y transformarla en imbunche, porque para eso …
se roban las brujas a los pobres inocentes y los guardan en sus salamancas
debajo de la tierra, con los ojos cosidos, el sexo cosido, el culo cosido, la
boca, las narices, los oídos, todo cosido, dejándoles crecer el pelo y las uñas
de las manos y de los pies, idiotizándolos, peor que animales los pobres,
sucios, piojosos, capaces sólo de dar saltitos cuando el chivato y las brujas
borrachas les ordenen que bailen. (Donoso 1970: 42)

Later, when Jerónimo’s son is born, the baby Boy is described as a “repug-
nante cuerpo sarmentoso retorciéndose sobre su joroba, ese rostro abierto
en un surco brutal donde labios, paladar y nariz desnudaban la obsceni-
dad de huesos y tejidos en una incoherencia de rasgos rojizos … era la
confusión, el desorden, una forma distinta pero peor que la muerte”
 THE MONSTROUS MASCULINITIES OF CHILE’S AGRARIAN REFORM, 1965–1970 49

(Donoso 1970: 161). Jerónimo’s pretensions to economic modernity and

patrilineal succession are thus refigured in the novel not only as premodern
and semi-feudal, but also monstrous: Boy transgresses the prominence,
notoriety, and fame desired by Jerónimo. Jerónimo immediately relegates
Boy to La Rinconada, a closed fundo far outside the city.
The threat of imbunchificación from Peta to Jerónimo and Boy is
matched by a similar threat to Jerónimo from his private secretary,
Humberto Peñaloza. Humberto also aspires to use sexuality to embody
the narrative of masculinist visibility and economic power inherent in
conventional narratives of Chilean modernity; his aspirations are, how-
ever, also related to aesthetics. Having grown up in the relative obscurity
of a poor family, Humberto wants to become a writer because he has
promised his father that he will “become someone,” couching his aspira-
tions in the same language that the Azcoitías use: “Sí, papá … le juro que
voy a ser alguien, que en vez de este rostro sin facciones de los Peñaloza
voy a adquirir una máscara magnífica, un rostro grande, luminoso, son-
riente, definido, que nadie deje de admirar” (Donoso 1970: 99; empha-
ses added). Jerónimo initially appoints Humberto to be in charge of La
Rinconada—where Boy is housed among other people who are deformed
like him so that he can never find out about his own “imperfection.” The
idea is for Humberto to write the novel with which he aspires to “become
someone” in relative economic comfort.
Initially, Humberto couches his aspirations in terms of facial features—
he aspires to transition from being an imbunche of sorts (a face without
features) to being visible and exceptional in the way Jerónimo initially sees
himself to be. One way Humberto seeks to accomplish this is by joining
Peta in the process of conceiving Boy; while Peta takes Inés’ place in the
process, Humberto takes Jerónimo’s, and together, the two of them con-
ceive “el hijo que la pareja luminosa era incapaz de concebir” (Donoso
1970: 224).23 In this way, Humberto (like Peta) seeks to use sexual
praxis to wrest from the Azcoitías their exclusive embodiment of Chilean
exceptionalism and its legacy. Moreover, Jerónimo is so preoccupied with
appearances that he becomes impotent when his sexual performance is not
subject to the gaze of others—he needs his secretary to watch him while
he has sex24—and Humberto knows this. He realizes that the best way to
wrest Jerónimo’s aspirations to modernity away from him is to equate the
latter’s dependence upon his gaze with the simplistic idea of submission,
in gay sex, of the passive partner—a maricón, in the words of the novel
(Donoso 1970: 227)—to the penetrating partner, who (in Humberto’s
50 C. FISCHER

mind) retains his heterosexuality when he “possesses” the former. For

Humberto, then, class mobility is thus figuratively tied to putatively het-
erosexual practice, just as it was for the Alliance for Progress planners and
members of the Frei Montalva administration.
Yet Humberto soon realizes that he can best undermine Jerónimo’s
appearance of power not by leaving behind his imbunche status, but rather
by embracing it. If Jerónimo is not seen when he is having sex, he becomes
an imbunche possessed by Humberto. Humberto soon realizes that his
power over Jerónimo increases the more indifferently he acts toward
Jerónimo’s sexual practices. In order to maintain this indifference, and
enforce Jerónimo’s invisibility, Humberto himself becomes an imbunche:
he ends up working at La Casa de Ejercicios Espirituales de la Encarnación
de la Chimba, a former convent on the periphery of Santiago that houses a
number of retired former domestics and orphan girls. There, he becomes
known as Mudito, a silent man, grotesque and feeble, who cleans and
sweeps in a house full of women and in fact eventually becomes one of
them. The content of his novel remains unknown, and Humberto, as an
author, never reaches any kind of renown. Humberto’s transformation
into the imbunche Mudito is complete by the end of the novel:

[E]nvuélvanme, viejas, arrópenme bien … para no poder mover los brazos

ni las manos … cósanme entero, no sólo la boca ardiente, también y sobre
todo mis ojos para sepultar la potencia en la profundidad de mis párpados,
para que no vean, para que él no los vea nunca más, que mis ojos consuman
su propio poder en las tinieblas, en la nada, sí, cósanmelos, viejas, así dejaré
a don Jerónimo impotente para siempre. (Donoso 1970: 87)

When Humberto decides to deny Jerónimo the satisfaction of being seen

by him, his embrace of a monstrous imbunchificación—which brings with
it a renunciation of his masculinity, and an embrace of queerness25—would
seem to be a renunciation of the modernity to which he had aspired. Yet
with Jerónimo’s impotence and deformed offspring comes the decline of
semi-feudal agrarian power in Chile; new spaces open up for the coun-
try’s modernity to be embodied by subjects who embrace a more progres-
sive economic outlook. Antonio Cornejo Polar (1975) reads the birth of
Boy as the decline of Chile’s landed bourgeoisie in the novel (110), and
this is certainly possible, but perhaps not for the reasons Cornejo Polar
imagined. Boy signals the end of the line for the Azcoitías not because of
his deformity, but rather because, having lived his life sheltered from the
 THE MONSTROUS MASCULINITIES OF CHILE’S AGRARIAN REFORM, 1965–1970 51

hierarchies of the outside world, he is not taken in by his father’s powerful

façade or masculine “perfection” when they meet again as adults. Because
of this lack of recognition in La Rinconada, Jerónimo realizes the pre-
cariousness and ultimate emptiness of the identity that he has assumed,
and tries to renounce it, “tratando de arrancar con mis uñas esa más-
cara … tengo que sacármela a pesar del dolor y aunque quede sin cara”
(Donoso 1970: 510). The final impulse of Jerónimo’s life is to become an
imbunche, and he ends up drowning in one of the fountains of the fundo.
Jerónimo’s supposedly exemplary identity—upon which his masculinity
depends—fades off into distant memory without much fanfare.
Boy is key to the logic of monstrosity that pervades the novel, as the
depository of the contradictory sexual, economic, and aesthetic aspira-
tions to modernity of his two “fathers,” Jerónimo and Humberto.26
Raised to believe that his deformities are the norm rather than any sort of
transgression, a five-day sojourn beyond the walls of La Rinconada shakes
Boy out of his artificial world. He suddenly realizes that far from being
run-of-the-mill, he is exceptionally monstrous, physically speaking. He
thus decides to withdraw into La Rinconada forever, embracing a life of
aesthetic representation as well as queerness, in order to foil his father’s
plan to “casarlo con una prima fea, que tuvieran hijos y nietos, que viviera
en la ciudad, que se dedicara a la política, a los negocios, que fuera socio
del Club de la Unión” (Donoso 1970: 497)—in short, for Boy to live a
“normal,” heterosexual life. Boy makes a deal with the deformed people
of La Rinconada that he will let them live on the inside forever, free from
the judgment and gawking of the outside world, as long as they help him
rebel against Jerónimo’s plan to return him to the “real world.” However,
in the end, Boy remains the master of a semi-feudal domain; in a sense,
Jerónimo’s legacy does live on, albeit in a monstrous form, which at least
allows for the appearance of feudalism to more closely match its underly-
ing ontology.
This ambiguous interplay of Boy’s monstrosity between rule and excep-
tion, between semi-feudal land ownership and economic modernity, and
between representation and the real, is reminiscent of the ambiguous place
of the novel vis-à-vis Chile’s literary modernity. On one hand, Boy seeks
to discursively place his monstrosity within the aegis of the “modern,” by
embracing aesthetics and rejecting the legacy of his father. On the other,
however, he becomes a patrón himself, perpetuating the premodern agrar-
ian economics in his own private fundo of La Rinconada and deploying his
monstrosity to contradict Chile’s aspirations to economic modernization
52 C. FISCHER

in the 1960s. The fact that Boy remains an anonymous imbunche when
doing so complicates this ambiguity all the more: whatever his claim to
modernity may be, it remains a claim unseen in the public sphere. In any
case, he contradicts the sexual and economic notions of modernity imag-
ined by the Frei Montalva administration and the Alliance for Progress. As
with El lugar sin límites, El obsceno pájaro de la noche ties the unstable local
and transnational implications of Chile’s economic modernization process
to aesthetic modernity. Whereas Boy’s embrace of aesthetics had to be
a confined phenomenon, El obsceno pájaro circulated around the world
as part of the Boom; through the addition of queer themes, it was able
to question the dominant narratives abroad of Chile’s economic success,
which were so often rooted in compulsory heterosexuality. Reaching the
conclusion that the most exceptional aspect of Chile was not its economic
modernity so much as its capacity for representation, El obsceno pájaro
made a powerful statement about the gender biases and overall monstros-
ity of the agrarian reform.

EL CHACAL DE NAHUELTORO: MAKING AN EXAMPLE

OUT OF A TRANSGRESSOR OF PATRIARCHY
El chacal de Nahueltoro narrates the true story—culled from media cov-
erage, interviews, and court records (Hart 2004: 63–64)—of José del
Carmen Valenzuela Torres, who murdered the woman with whom he was
living, along with her five young children, in the early 1960s, near the
southern Chilean city of Chillán. The film’s narrative follows the hapless
José—unambiguously positioned in the film as an ignorant victim, since
birth, of his unfortunate circumstances—from the poverty of his child-
hood, to the crime itself, to his imprisonment and rehabilitation, and
finally to his execution. Far from condemning its protagonist, however,
the film is clearly intended to be a denunciation of the structural injustices
in the Chilean countryside27 that led him to commit the murder. In fact,
it served as a pedagogical tool that figured José’s as an exemplary case
of how the rural poor were marginalized at the time, and was “exhibited
during Salvador Allende’s successful election campaign by trade unions,
at schools, and in open air meetings and was later released to theatres
in 35mm, eventually being seen by an estimated 500,000 people” (Rist
1996: 222). Conceived as a way to advocate for a greater role for the state
to take not only in improving the conditions of the Chilean countryside
but also in intervening more closely in the lives of Chileans in general,28 the
 THE MONSTROUS MASCULINITIES OF CHILE’S AGRARIAN REFORM, 1965–1970 53

film resounded with Chileans at home as well as audiences abroad: until the
boom in Chilean cinema of the last 15 years, El chacal was the most widely
seen Chilean film in history (Rist 221). When El chacal first premiered at
the 1969 Viña del Mar film festival (Hart 64)—before an audience that
included filmmakers as diverse as Nino Criscenti and Roberto Savio from
Italy, Saul Landau from the USA, Glauber Rocha from Brazil, and Joris
Ivens from The Netherlands (Francia 1990: 156–161), whose presence
made for a key moment in the definition of the political aims of Latin
American film at the time—it made a mark for Chilean film on the world
stage. Indeed, José’s story was positioned as exemplary at a global level.
Littin’s well-intentioned call for state intervention takes a different cast
when viewed through a gendered lens, however. Like La Manuela, Boy,
and Mudito, José serves as an exception to the patriarchal ideals so preva-
lent in the Chilean countryside in the 1960s: his murder of an entire fam-
ily unit constitutes a dismissal of a position of patriarchal respectability
and reproductive masculinity. This would seem to fit with Littin’s critique:
José has been driven to desperation and murder because of the country-
side’s brutality, portrayed in the film as primarily the result of antiquated,
male-dominated norms that have excluded him. The modernity neces-
sary to stop men like José from turning to murder, it would seem, would
thus have to come from the institutions being less patriarchal. But during
its portrayal of José’s imprisonment and rehabilitation, the film positively
portrays its protagonist’s incorporation into the very institutions from
which he had been excluded; they are as male-dominated as ever, with
the only difference being that the state has now intervened. José plays
soccer, becomes a practicing Catholic, and promises that his attraction to
women is no longer laced with violence. Whereas José is initially figured as
exceptional for being a social outlier, he is later positioned as exemplary of
the state’s ability to bring its prisoners into line with its male-dominated
norms. At the end, however, the film’s rhetoric of exceptionalism takes yet
another turn: an example is made of him—he is publicly executed, serving
as a deterrent to future prisoners—and positioned as a victim of the bru-
tality of the very justice system that had previously rehabilitated him. The
film’s multiple (and occasionally contradictory) portrayals of José as an
exceptional, exemplary figure, then, extend beyond a socioeconomic cri-
tique, to one in which someone who has renounced the heteronormative
masculinity inherent to being a head of household is held up alternatively
as the antithesis of the patriarchal ideals of the 1960s Chilean masculinity,
and as a model of them.
54 C. FISCHER

Although Littin never put his interest in José’s story in explicitly gen-
dered terms, he was at least obliquely aware of some of the gendered
implications of his economic critique of Chile’s agrarian situation. The
answer Littin gave, when asked in a 1970 interview why he wanted to
make El chacal, offers insight into his awareness of the link between the
social and gendered implications of José’s story:

Al leer ciertos diarios atrasados, me encontré con un titular que decía:

“‘¿Cómo vai a morir, Canaquita?’ ‘Sin chistar, porque sería feo.’” Había algo
ahí que me interesó. Algo que no tenía nada que ver con mi mundo. Seguí
leyendo y encontré que el juez preguntaba al asesino: “¿Por qué mataste a
los niños?” Y él respondía, “Pa’ que no sufrieran los pobrecitos.” Luego me
interesó mucho más. (Littin and Santa María 11)

José, whose many nicknames included “El Canaca” (thus the use of the
diminutive “Canaquita”), sparked Littin’s imagination, in part, because of
his bravery—a conventionally patriarchal, masculine trait—in the face of his
impending execution. To “flinch” or “complain” (chistar) at the moment
of his execution would be “ugly” (i.e., improper) because it would show
weakness and compromise conventional ideals of manliness. The second
part of Littin’s 1970 statement has to do with heterosexual masculinity as
well, and it also offers a glimpse of the extent of José’s deviance from the
economic and gender norms of Chile at the time. By reasoning that the
children’s lives would have been full of suffering if he had spared them,
José’s murder of them means that he has completely abstracted himself
from the paternal (and patriarchal) legacy that continuing to be a father
would have brought to him. He thus eliminates any possibilities he could
have had of being the ideal masculine subject imagined by the govern-
ments of the period.29 Littin’s interest in José’s story, then, springs from
the fact that his protagonist is both exceptionally manly, and exceptionally
unmanly. Littin is as interested in José’s ability to redraw the map of what
it meant to be “manly” and “modern” according to the country’s quickly
changing mores as he is in exposing the brutality of semi-feudal Chile.
The film positions José as deviant from idealized masculinist and het-
erosexual comportment from the very beginning of his life. Its first section
offers scene after scene of young José’s exclusion from the institutions of
“respectable” Chilean society, figured as dominated by heterosexual men.
In a voiceover narration, José states that his father was an inquilino on a
fundo, and abandons the home when his son was very young; José, who
 THE MONSTROUS MASCULINITIES OF CHILE’S AGRARIAN REFORM, 1965–1970 55

leaves when he is eight, is also unable (or unwilling) to be part of a stable,

conventional family structure. Afuerinos, like José and his father before
him, particularly those who did not participate in conventional, hetero-
sexual family life, were completely marginalized from the modernizing
efforts of the agrarian reform. As Edgar Doll (2009) puts it, quoting an
article by Fernando Franulic Depix:

los peones-gañanes no formaban familia, su impulso cotidiano era andar

la tierra […]. Todos sabían que … por hallársele en el camino y sin ocu-
pación—es decir, sin una papeleta que atestiguase que tenía ‘amo’—se le
consideraba un ‘vagabundo mal entretenido,’ y … se le acosaba y se le per-
seguía. Era un sospechoso por nacimiento. (Doll 113)

Young José is unambiguously portrayed as an outcast vis-à-vis this system,

as evidenced by a close-up of his dirt-caked but innocent face when appre-
hended by the Carabineros police for vagrancy. Later, a policeman, wash-
ing José in the (almost certainly freezing) river, tells him to “¡Aguántese
como hombre!”—drawing attention to an evident lack of knowledge on
the boy’s part of how to do such a thing, presumably due to having not
had a father to show him. Later, the policeman foists him off on a paro-
chial school, where the priest inculcates in students the Catholic teachings
through rote repetition; José is unable to understand what is going on and
the priest is hardly willing to take the time to explain. He runs away again,
and has a picaresque-like adolescence, moving from patrón to patrón,
working whenever and wherever he can. Rather than marrying and work-
ing in one place, José ends up drunk on cheap wine and getting kicked out
by the madam of a brothel. Within the first 15 minutes of the film, then,
José is systematically refused entry into all of the principal institutions as
they stood in the 1960s in the Chilean countryside (and also, from the
reproductive arena, due to how patriarchal these institutions were): the
church, the law, and the prostíbulo.30
In the second section of the film, in which José forms part of a family
unit for a time, the sexism and the economic callousness of rural landown-
ers—figured as equally harmful—are laid bare in one compact but sophis-
ticated sequence. Using flashbacks and flash-forwards, we see how José
meets Rosa Rivas, a recently widowed woman living with her five young
children in a primitive adobe house on a fundo. José has been taken by the
police to the place where he murdered her and her children, in order to
do a reconstruction of events, which introduces this particular scene: the
56 C. FISCHER

first flashback is a long sequence shot, in which José walks up to the house
where Rosa is chopping wood, and asks for water; Rosa goes to get a glass
for him, and returns to find him chopping the wood for her, after which
he ends up staying the night. This largely wordless sequence demonstrates
how closely interwoven economic usefulness, patriarchal protection, and
sexuality are in José and Rosa’s short relationship. Later, when Rosa gives
José a plate of food to eat and tells him how her husband was murdered,
the narration begins to switch times more quickly. There is a brief flash-
forward to the following day, when Rosa and her children are evicted from
their house by the patrón, juxtaposed with a flashback to Rosa’s husband’s
funeral, in which the patrón arrives and offers her his condolences, and
then back to a conversation, post eviction, between José and Rosa. Here,
Rosa tells José that the patrón justified his eviction by saying that now that
she has another man by her side, he no longer has any obligation to her,
and wants her off the land. This is accompanied by another flashback, in
which the patrón tells her: “Y de hombre ¿qué te quejai? ¿No tenís al ator-
rante que llegó ayer [sic]?” This eviction of a single woman and five young
children is the high point in the film’s denunciatory arc: Rosa and her
children are the victims not only of the landowner’s selfishness, but also of
his sexism. This, despite the fact that the film clearly showed from the time
she appeared on screen that she was perfectly capable of at least chopping
wood and obtaining food for her children on her own (hardly small tasks).
The scene in which José murders Rosa and her children—which Jorge
Ruffinelli (2010) has called “una de las secuencias más logradas del cine
latinoamericano” (95)—cements the discursive place of José in the first
half of the film as a monster incapable of understanding what it means to
be a member of a normal family. While bloodless, the feminicide scene
conveys the drunken disorientation and brutality of a desperate man
left homeless and powerless in the countryside. Rosa and José’s final
moments together are shown as a sequence shot, just like the scene
in which they first met: this time, though, the camera moves back and
forth at a much more frenzied pace between the cowering Rosa and the
enraged José (Fig. 2.1), who bludgeons her to death with a stick.31 José
manages to escape the scene of the crime, but he is eventually arrested
and put in jail. As Foucault pointed out, José’s monstrosity defies the
discourse of ideas and institutions: he has committed a “sin,” defying
the church that rejected him; he emits language that is barely under-
standable, which stands in contrast to the refined, bureaucratic language
of the judges and other state functionaries dealing with his case; and his
 THE MONSTROUS MASCULINITIES OF CHILE’S AGRARIAN REFORM, 1965–1970 57

Fig. 2.1 El Chacal de Nahueltoro (Dir. Miguel Littin 1969)

inability to “aguantarse como hombre” shows a lack of understanding

of dominant social mores for his gender. A murderous monster, José
embodies many of the dangers feared by the powers-that-be at the time.
The process of José’s remarkable “taming,”32 the subject of the next sec-
tion of the film, is evidence of how monstrosity can be re-signified to pro-
duce discourse in a society, all in the name of “reform.” During his time in
prison, the very institutions that previously turned their back on José—the
church, the law, the reproductive arena, and the economy itself—work to
turn him into a model of comportment within them, only to execute him
in the end. Ruffinelli points out the “existential irony” of the state’s contra-
dictory response to José—“cuando se comienza a vivir, es hora de morir”
(94)—but the more central irony is that even though the influences of the
state extend themselves to incorporate José, they become no less patriar-
chal than they were previously. The first outward sign of this rehabilitation
occurs when José kicks a soccer ball to some other prisoners playing out-
side; afterward, the camera focuses a tight shot on José’s face, smiling for
the first time in the film, which becomes a freeze frame. Soccer, a tradition-
ally male-dominated institution key to patriarchal Latin American sociabil-
58 C. FISCHER

ity,33 is seen as only the first of many steps in José’s increasing integration
into society: later, a sympathetic priest takes an interest in him, converts
him to Catholicism, and prays with him up until his very last moments; the
director of the prison system travels all the way from Santiago to promise
José that Chile’s Patronato de Reos will take care of his mother after his
death; José is taught to make and sell guitars, and he proves quite the
craftsman; and he fantasizes about women whose images he looks at in
pornographic magazines, telling one of his jailers that one of them in par-
ticular “sí que sería una buena despedida.” This process takes place largely
though the inculcation of highly traditional masculine, heterosexual values:
sports, a respect for the Catholic church, a work ethic, a more conventional
response to female sexuality that does not result in feminicide,34 and an
“unflinching” respect for authority—even toward the military firing squad
that eventually executes him. Meanwhile, the tendencies of these insti-
tutions that excluded José in the first place—many of which were earlier
portrayed as brutal in their patriarchal intolerance—are not subject to any
critique whatsoever. For example, the night before José’s execution, the
director of the prison remarks that the priest “ha hecho una buena labor,
no se puede negar. El hombre está tranquilo, no va a presentar problemas
mañana”: a self-congratulatory statement by Chile’s male authorities on
their ability to turn José into an exemplary prisoner. José has been turned
into a “real man” who, under different circumstances, would be ideal for
reincorporation into Chile’s newly exceptional, agrarian modernity. Rist’s
analysis of how “Littin, a Marxist, was making an inspired critique of how
the combined forces of Chilean authority—church, military, school, and
state—continue to keep the peasantry marginalized in poverty of mind and
spirit as well as substance” (223) is accurate enough, but Littin’s critique
ignores how the marginalization that these institutions of authority enact
hinges on normative heterosexual masculinity. In their response to José’s
monstrosity they have to redraw their own boundaries to some extent, but
not mitigate their paternalistic tendencies; once the state is involved, the
film no longer critiques the masculinist nature of José’s rehabilitation.
The persistence of El chacal de Nahueltoro as an important artifact in
the canon of Chilean film finds its analogue in the persistent (albeit uncon-
ventional) legacy José is to leave behind upon his execution. The nature
of the death penalty as an exemplary punishment enhances José’s status as
exceptional: in one scene, José poses for a newspaper photo session, smil-
ing and blindfolded while he acts out his own execution, and saying “así
me van a matar” (Fig. 2.2). Just as the real José was undoubtedly aware
 THE MONSTROUS MASCULINITIES OF CHILE’S AGRARIAN REFORM, 1965–1970 59

of the historical legacy he was going to leave behind, the character in the
film is, too, which allows for the film to bridge documentary and fiction,
as several critics have pointed out.35 Despite the fact that José’s original
crime constituted an extrication of himself from the reproductive arena—
an interruption of a family’s lineage, and a denial of his own potential to
become a patriarch—he is still held up as a model of manliness, economic
success, and Christianity at the end of the film. Indeed, José’s interactions
with the members of the media who enthusiastically interview him serve
to perpetuate his legacy, in the absence of more conventional methods of
doing so, like having children. This is in line with the film’s contradictory
treatment of the sexual implications of José’s crime: he is presented as an
“exception” to the rule of patriarchal lineage when he kills Rosa, and later
presented as having “exceptionally normal” sexuality once he is in prison.
The film’s critique of the exclusivity of Chile’s patriarchal institutions, fol-
lowed in quick succession by the positive portrayal of those very institutions
for their power to include, expand, and reform those whose heterosexuality is
“salvageable”—an operation as contradictory as the “modernization” imple-

Fig. 2.2 El Chacal de Nahueltoro (Dir. Miguel Littin 1969)

60 C. FISCHER

mented during the time in which the film was made—is an indicator of the
fact that the film’s stated intention to perform a Marxist critique of Chilean
society only goes so far. Instead, it ends up showing how putting an alterna-
tive, less patriarchal “model” of masculinity into transnational artistic circula-
tion reinforced the patriarchal rhetoric of economic exceptionalism spouted
by Chilean boosters, rather than subverting it. Even though it sought to
position José’s case as an exemplary, reparative reaction to economic injus-
tice, the fact that it maintained certain gendered assumptions both about the
crime and its punishment meant that its globalized critique was less cosmo-
politan—and therefore less effective—than it could have been.

CONCLUSION: THE AESTHETICS AND ECONOMICS

OF MODERN MASCULINITY

These three works show how closely the mores of male sexuality and
the transnational circulation of aesthetics were intertwined with the eco-
nomic modernizing impulses that were prevalent in late 1960s Chile.
Although modernity was conceived by the think tanks that promoted Frei
Montalva’s agrarian reform policies as a normative, patriarchal phenom-
enon, Donoso’s two novels and Littin’s film show how modernity can also
be a turn away from the countryside and what it represented—toward the
cosmopolitan, globalizing influences that arrived in Chile in the form of
the Boom and Third-Worldist film. These more cosmopolitan modernities
also make room for expressions of masculinity that deviate from the con-
ventional, normative framework for it to be imagined by the era’s econo-
mists (and theorists like Berman, for that matter). Queer, non-normative,
feminine (as theorized by Felski), and even “monstrous” masculinities
embodied the anxieties held by those in whose best interests it was to
perpetuate conventional, reproductive masculinities as the norm; they also
forced a rethinking of the economic underpinnings of those masculinities.
The aesthetic and economic implications of this modernity, duly inter-
rogated by characters like Boy, Mudito, La Manuela, and José, cannot be
overstated: although their rebellions against the reproductive arena gen-
erally stop short of overturning it completely, they led the way forward
for more radical critiques of it that would manifest themselves when the
Unidad Popular took power in 1970, and operate alongside a more radi-
calized agrarian reform and an increasingly experimental visual and literary
aesthetic. Perhaps if a writer, artist, or filmmaker had been included in the
negotiations over land rights in southern Chile that Donoso described
 THE MONSTROUS MASCULINITIES OF CHILE’S AGRARIAN REFORM, 1965–1970 61

in the article quoted at the beginning, the modernization process that

ensued would probably have led to less effective economic development,
but it would have been a bit more inclusive of some whose expressions of
gender deviated from the norm.

NOTES
1. Emir Rodríguez Monegal (1967), for example, referred to the set-
tings of Donoso’s novels Coronación, Este domingo, and El lugar
sin límites as “semi-feudal” (77). In fact, up until the 1960s, as
historian Gabriel Salazar (2002) has pointed out, the power of oli-
garchs over their spheres of influence, particularly in rural areas,
went largely unchallenged, distant as they were from the economic
and political tentacles of the state emanating from the capital. The
masculinism at the basis of Chile’s rural inequality was a long-
entrenched situation. Salazar writes about how the early uprisings
of criollos against the Spaniards in Chile were engineered primarily
by “jefes de familia (‘mayorazgos,’ en el siglo XIX) que controla-
ban a su vez poderosos intereses mercantiles” (17). Salazar’s inves-
tigation into what he calls el patriarcado mercantil is relevant here
because it follows the development of economically hegemonic
masculinity from before Chilean independence until modern times.
Their “hegemonic masculinity,” in Salazar’s words (borrowed
from Bourdieu), was based upon the intention to “proteger o
ensanchar el patrimonio mercantil de sus respectivas familias y el
modo de vida que ese patrimonio les permitía a aquéllas” (Salazar
18). The early assertion of masculine dominance in the Chilean
economy was focused on the reproductive arena instead of on any
particular state or market apparatus: oligarchs were concerned with
serving and broadening the wealth of their families more than that
of any state. When the economic power of these patriarchs was put
in check under the regime of the agrarian reform, then, so was
their place within the hierarchy created by participation in repro-
ductive praxis. Examples of elites in Chilean literature whose eco-
nomic status is tied to their stake in reproductive sexuality include
the urbane Santiaguino Dámaso Encina in Alberto Blest Gana’s
Martín Rivas (1862), and his more rural counterpart, the title
character in Eduardo Barrios’ Gran señor y rajadiablos (1948).
One more recent representation of such a patrón de fundo in
62 C. FISCHER

Chilean popular culture was the character of José Luis Echeñique,

unforgettably played by Julio Milostich in the TVN teleseries El
señor de La Querencia (2008).
2. Since its independence from Spain, Chile had become a territory in
which a large amount of land was held by very few: according to
the national agricultural census of 1965, 80 % of the country’s
irrigable land was concentrated in 7.5 % of the number of rural
property titles in existence (Pinto 2002: 110). In a country where
agriculture and mining were (and continue to be) the two main
industries, these numbers amounted to major social inequality.
María Antonieta Huerta (1989) has stated that the agrarian reform
“era considerada como requisito para poder concertar un desar-
rollo económico equilibrado” (186) between Chile’s cities and its
countryside. Heidi Tinsman, meanwhile, summarizes a 1965 study
conducted by sociologist Laura Collantes that “described relation-
ships between rural men and women as a ‘pre-human world of
frustration and ignorance’”: a view that “reflected mid-twentieth-
century attitudes held by most sectors of Chile’s upper and middle
classes” (55).
3. Frei presided over the groundbreaking for construction on the
underground Santiago Metro system, the construction of the new
Santiago airport in the district of Pudahuel, the extension of the
country’s train line southward to the city of Puerto Montt, and
many other important projects for Chile’s development. See Luis
Moulián, Eduardo Frei M. (1911–1982): Biografía de un estadista
utópico (2000).
4. The USA, concerned about the socialist Salvador Allende, Frei’s
closest competitor in the 1964 election, saw Frei as a moderate
option and poured money into his campaign. According to
Ricardo Yocelevsky (1987), the CIA was, directly or indirectly,
the source of more than half of the funding for the campaign
(139), which disseminated literature and assorted pamphlets that
invoked the threat of communism if Frei were to lose the
election.
5. The Chilean government had made some modest strides to enact
an agrarian reform before Frei’s election: Jorge Alessandri, the
president of Chile from 1958 to 1964, had already signed on to the
Punta del Este Charter (Montaldo Bustos 2004: 185), committing
Chile to agrarian reform, and a modest reform began in 1962.
THE MONSTROUS MASCULINITIES OF CHILE’S AGRARIAN REFORM, 1965–1970 63

Chile’s first Agrarian Reform Law (no. 15,020) was passed “bajo el
persuasivo y combinado influjo de la Revolución cubana, de la radi-
calización social que de ella se derivó, y de la política estadoun-
idense de la Alianza para el Progreso” rather than out of a true
impetus for reform within the government. It was so modest that it
came to be popularly known the “flowerpot reform” (Pinto 110).
6. As Pinto points out: “El ritmo expropiatorio y modernizador se
agilizó significativamente bajo el gobierno demócrata cristiano de
Eduardo Frei Montalva, uno de cuyos principales compromisos
programáticos era justamente profundizar y consolidar las transfor-
maciones del sector [agro]” (111).
7. Tinsman explains the inquilinaje system as a “labor arrangement
that tied campesinos in semipeonage to estates in return for rights
to land” (21) which dated back to colonial times and “shaped all
labor arrangements on the estate” (24). Married inquilinos—and
99 % of all inquilinos were male in 1964 (Tinsman 26)—were the
principal target of state unionization efforts because they predomi-
nated on the large estates, given the employers’ logic that “workers
with families were more loyal and manageable” (Tinsman 35).
8. According to this logic, “union activism required the essentially
masculine traits of toughness, courage, and risk taking,” and “[u]
nion machismo differentiated acceptable from unacceptable manly
behavior within a bipolar sexual economy of dominance and sub-
mission in which adequate masculinity was positively associated
with exerting power over someone else” (Tinsman 97).
9. Of course, although Sorensen (and Carlos Fuentes, whose 1969
work La nueva novela hispanoamericana she quotes when discuss-
ing this newfound affinity) does not make this distinction, she can-
not possibly mean all Latin Americans, so much as urban elites
within Latin America.
10. See Carlos Alonso’s useful discussion of the complicated “moder-
nity” of some of the novelas de la tierra (including Aves sin nido,
Doña Bárbara, and La vorágine) in his volume The Spanish
American Regional Novel: Modernity and Autochthony (1990).
11. Manuel Puig parodied the masculinist nature of the Boom genera-
tion in a letter, quoted in 1991 by Guillermo Cabrera Infante,
which suggested that the Boom writers’ anxieties about which lit-
erary traditions they belonged to were also related to anxieties of
gender. He playfully compared the major figures of the Boom with
64 C. FISCHER

the 1940s’ movie divas: “Borges was Norma Shearer (‘Oh, so dig-
nified’), Carpentier was Joan Crawford (‘Oh, so finery!’), Asturias
was Greta Garbo (‘Only because of the Nobel flavor’). Rulfo was
Greer Garson; Cortázar, Hedy Lamarr, Lezama Lima was Lana
Turner, Carlos Fuentes was Ava Gardner (explanation: ‘Glamour
surrounds her, but can she act?’) […]” (Cabrera Infante 184, as
cited in Amícola 33).
12. In 1970, Littin created a Manifesto of Unidad Popular cineastes,
which decried “una cultura anémica y neocolonizada, pasto de
consumo de una élite pequeña burguesa decadente y estéril,”
expressed “nuestra voluntad de construir junto e inmerso en el
pueblo,” and called for “una cultura auténticamente NACIONAL
y por consiguiente, REVOLUCIONARIA” (Littin 1974).
13. Of the Latin American 1960s, Sorensen writes that “liberation was
one of the key words of the day: its field of meanings was political
but broadly cultural as well: it reached styles of dress, sexual mores,
intergenerational relationships, religious belief, and educational
forms. In politics, the old rigidities of Marxism no longer held
sway: in the wake of Stalinism, the New Left sought renewed
articulations of the critique of capitalism…” (2, emphasis in
original).
14. Amícola’s article is primarily about the 1978 film version of the
novel, directed by Arturo Ripstein in Mexico but written by
Manuel Puig, “un caso único de internacionalismo latinoameri-
cano” (25)—a collaborative effort between a Chilean novelist, an
Argentine screenwriter, and a Mexican director. Puig’s name does
not appear in the credits of Ripstein’s film, apparently because of a
dispute with Ripstein over the adaptation (Amícola 28), but, as
Amícola writes, “[l]os manuscritos de ese guión … nos otorgan la
certeza de que la adaptación pertenece efectivamente al escritor
argentino […]. También tenemos el testimonio de Puig sobre su
adaptación” (24).
15. Donoso had studied in the USA, and Littin had traveled to Europe
and was strongly influenced by Italian neorealist directors like
Francesco Rosi (Mouesca 91, Ruffinelli 2010: 94) as well as by
Brecht (Littin and Santa María 19). Héctor Ríos, El chacal’s direc-
tor of photography, had studied film in Rome (Doll 102).
16. José Martí’s text “Nuestra América” (1891) is a foundational
example of how Latin America’s rhetorical (if not material) aspira-
tion to modernity is structured around heterosexuality—Martí’s
THE MONSTROUS MASCULINITIES OF CHILE’S AGRARIAN REFORM, 1965–1970 65

ideal for a Latin American leader opposes the “brazo canijo” of

someone educated in Madrid or Paris (16), seen as overly femi-
nine, to one imagined to be in touch with nature (and by
implication, unequivocally masculine). Martí’s references through-
out that text to the metaphors of reproductive praxis—mentioning
men who “fertilize” [“fecundan”] the land, for example (17)—are
yet another indicator of this. See also Beckman’s Chap. 5.
17. I am using the idea of the “cosmopolitan” here in the way
Jacqueline Loss (2005) has invoked “discrepant” cosmopolitan
aesthetic discourse as a way for writers and artists to defy the
boundaries of their national origins even as they tie their global
stature to their local contexts. Below, I will contend that these
“discrepancies” can be sexual as much as national and regional.
18. In Skin Shows (1995), Judith (Jack) Halberstam points out how
monsters in Gothic novels (although this analysis can be extended
beyond the body of work analyzed, since, as Halberstam points
out, “the novel is always Gothic” (11)) condense “various racial
and sexual threats to nation, capitalism, and the bourgeoisie in one
body” (Halberstam 3, emphasis mine).
19. As Loss points out, “being grounded does not necessarily mean
being parochial, nor does being cosmopolitan signify being root-
less” (11). She goes on to discuss two Latin American writers—
Diamela Eltit and Reinaldo Arenas—whose work is grounded in
specific geographies and literary traditions while also inscribing
itself in transnational, exilic, and global currents. This forces “a
critique of insularisms, provincialisms, and globalizations” (11),
for Loss; it also allows writers to dialogue on equal (though differ-
ent) terms with “US and Latin American realizations of cultural
theory and critique” (10). I am making the case that this “discrep-
ant cosmopolitanism” follows a logic similar to that of exceptional-
ism because it renders cultural producers and products
simultaneously of, and separate from, others to whom they are
compared. Eltit and Arenas (like Donoso and Littin) maintain
their specificities within national canons, but they are particularly
valued within those canons because their work also dialogues with
canons that circulate transnationally; cosmopolitanism, for Loss,
consists of the rhetoric and the gestures involved in navigating
these seemingly conflicting ideas. Queerness, in the context of cos-
mopolitanism, is also able to be both of and separate from its “des-
tiny of place.”
66 C. FISCHER

20. Tinsman has written about how rape was a common way for men
to exercise their domination of women in Chilean rural settings
(47).
21. As Sharon Magnarelli (1993) and Carreño have both pointed out,
the origins of El lugar sin límites lie within Donoso’s 1970 novel
El obsceno pájaro de la noche. Donoso carved out a story within El
obsceno pájaro that eventually became the 1966 novella: “Jerónimo
and his four black dogs became Alejo and his four black dogs”
(Magnarelli 67).
22. Multiple critics have pointed out the dualistic structure of the
novel, which is constructed around a number of binaries in conflict
with one another. See, for example, Hugo Achugar (1979: 242)
and Carreño (122–127).
23. In the spirit of the insistence on ambiguity in the novel by critics
such as Pamela Bacarisse (1979), however, it is worth mentioning
that the roles of Peta and Humberto in Boy’s conception remain
undefined. Humberto, in fact, doubts his paternity of Boy alto-
gether in one scene: “¿Cómo saber con certeza que fue la Peta
Ponce la que dispuso los acontecimientos de esa noche, y cómo, y
qué dispuso? […] Quizá ni un trozo de mi carne haya tocado la
carne de Inés … en esas tinieblas yo puedo no haberle dado mi
amor a Inés sino a otra, a la Peta, a la Peta Ponce que sustituyó a
Inés por ser ella la pareja que me corresponde…” (Donoso 1970:
233).
24. This harks back to don Alejo watching the sexual act between la
Manuela and la Japonesa in El lugar sin límites; voyeurism, a sexual
act outside of the realm of reproduction, is a key element of the
way in which both novels contest reproductive masculinity.
25. Enclosed inside La Casa, Mudito describes the process of becom-
ing an imbunche explicitly as a “nullification” of his pretensions to
reproductive sexuality: “Cuando llegan a mi sexo lo amarran como
a un animal dañino … y me fajan el sexo amarrándomelo a un
muslo para anularlo. Luego me meten en un especie de saco, con
los brazos fajados a las costillas, y me amarran en una humita que
sólo deja mi cabeza afuera” (338). Moreover, he refers to himself
as “la séptima vieja”: indistinguishable from any of the other
women.
26. For Diamela Eltit (2008), Boy is “una fecundación que no puede
sino ser monstruosa por la ruptura de la frontera social” that
THE MONSTROUS MASCULINITIES OF CHILE’S AGRARIAN REFORM, 1965–1970 67

separates Jerónimo and Humberto, as well as the one that sepa-

rates Inés and Peta (20).
27. This is one of the main things that critics have pointed out when
analyzing the film. Ruffinelli (2010), for example, highlights the
fact that José is portrayed just as much a victim as those he mur-
ders: “la historia no habla de cinco víctimas sino de seis: el victima-
rio es tan víctima como los que él ha asesinado. De manera alusiva,
y así y todo muy clara, la miseria de los campesinos se postula como
un crimen de la sociedad y del Estado” (95). Mouesca talks about
“la a veces pavorosa marginalidad del campesino, la mentira e hipo-
cresía de una justicia de clase” (90), and Ana Lopez mentions the
film’s critique of “a society that unfairly plays the games of civiliza-
tion—and enforces its sanctions—against those without the
resources to understand or comply with its rules” (417).
28. It should be pointed out that one of the notable achievements of
the Frei Montalva administration was to revive public policies
promoting the production of feature films—El chacal de
Nahueltoro likely would not have been made otherwise. First, the
Frei administration reopened the offices of Chile Films, a govern-
ment organ headquartered within the University of Chile, which
had first been established in 1942 as a reflection of both the
increasing industrialization of the country as a whole, and a rise
in cultural activity under the Frente Popular presidency of Pedro
Aguirre Cerda in the late 1930s (Mouesca 13); Chile Films had
fallen out of favor in the 1950s and early 1960s. Second—and
more importantly—the Frei administration passed a law creating
the Consejo de Fomento de la Industria Cinematográfica and stip-
ulating that 20 % of proceeds from movie ticket sales had to be
reinvested in the production of new movies (Mouesca 34).
Together, these policies made it much more financially feasible to
produce films; they also explain why Chilean films from the late
1960s and early 1970s tended to reflect the political agendas of
the governments in power at the time. For example, the first head
of Chile Films after its 1960s reactivation, Patricio Kaulen, cre-
ated “Chile en marcha,” a news program that was basically a pub-
licity machine for the Frei administration (Mouesca 34). Littin
himself, meanwhile, was appointed head of Chile Films in 1970;
he continued the practice of using Chile Films as a platform to
promote Allende’s policies. The ideological bent of other films
68 C. FISCHER

made in the late 1960s, including those of Aldo Francia, Raúl

Ruiz, and Helvio Soto, was also largely in accordance with the
political directives of the Frei administration.
29. Late in the film, the judge in José’s case, marking a sharp contrast
to José through his erudite pronunciation, his well-appointed sur-
roundings, and his tailored, white-collar appearance, refers to him
as “un individuo rústico … un gañán, digamos, de tercera cat-
egoría”: men like him were viewed with suspicion by members of
the upper classes, and certainly any potential patrón, because they
“appeared to gain the least from paternalistic arrangements and, in
turn, seemed to owe the least deference to social superiors. As sin-
gle men … afuerinos presumably proved less vulnerable to the pos-
sibility of being fired than inquilinos” (Tinsman 52), and were thus
more of a threat because of the lack of leverage their superiors had
over them. They were also seen as suspect by labor organizers, as
discussed above.
30. Littin summarizes all these exclusions under the banner of eco-
nomics when talking dismissively about the elements of bourgeois
Chile that turned their backs on José: “‘Dios, Patria, Bandera,
Ley’: los pilares en que se sustenta el sistema capitalista,” he stated
in a 1970 interview (Littin and Santa María 54).
31. Héctor Ríos stated that this sequence was “una de las escenas en
que Miguel [Littin] me había pedido asediar al actor. La cámara
pretendía dejar de ser testigo para convertirse en consciencia en el
semidespertar de la borrachera. […] No la cámara meramente
objetiva, sino subjetiva; entrando en el sentimiento del personaje”
(Littin and Santa María 83).
32. The section of the film about José’s rehabilitation is titled amansam-
iento, the same word that would be used for taming an animal: evi-
dence of how José is seen both as a human being and as an animal,
that is, as a monster, as well as of the rural discourse throughout
the film.
33. Multiple scholars of Latin American culture have theorized about
the links between soccer and the social sphere in Latin America,
such as Tony Mason (1995).
34. By focusing on a protagonist whose crimes are portrayed as not
being sexual in nature (i.e., because José “only” killed, but did not
rape, Rosa), Littin sought to maintain that Chile’s modernization
would be heterosexual and “healthy.” The film does mention the
possibility of rape when a voice of a radio announcer is heard while
 THE MONSTROUS MASCULINITIES OF CHILE’S AGRARIAN REFORM, 1965–1970 69

José is on the lam, talking about rumors “de que este sujeto deje a
su paso una estela de sangre y muerte. Se sabe que, en otro poblado,
fue hallado el cadáver de una pequeña de cortos años, violada,” but
this possibility is quickly dismissed, if never actually refuted. If José
were a rapist as well as a murderer, it would be more difficult for
Littin to make his case that Chilean modernization was entirely
free of queerness; José’s criminal monstrosity—already difficult to
“justify”—would be too overwhelming to identify with.
35. This is the third main aspect of the film that critics (Hart 63,
Ruffinelli 94, Rist 222, Mouesca 91, Navarro Mayorga 94, Lopez
417, and Jacobsen Camus 35) have focused on in their readings of
El chacal (Jacbosen Camus 2009; Navarro Mayorga 2009).

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Caracas: Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos Rómulo Gallegos.
Alonso, Carlos. 1990. The Spanish American Regional Novel: Modernity and
Autochthony. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
Amícola, José. 2006. Hell Has No Limits: De José Donoso a Manuel Puig. In
Desde aceras opuestas: Literatura/cultura gay y lesbiana en Latinoamérica, ed.
Dieter Ingenschay. Madrid: Iberoamericana/Vervuert.
Avelar, Idelber. 1999. The Untimely Present: Postdictatorial Latin American
Fiction and the Task of Mourning. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Bacarisse, Pamela. 1979. El obsceno pájaro de la noche: A Willed Process of Evasion.
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Beckman, Ericka. 2013. Capital Fictions: The Literature of Latin America’s Export
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Berman, Marshall. 1982. All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of
Modernity. Minneapolis: New York: Penguin Books.
Bustos, Montaldo, and Patricio. 2004. Antecedentes históricos y anecdóticos de la
agricultura chilena. Valdivia: Universidad Austral de Chile.
Carreño, Rubí. 2007. Leche amarga: Violencia y erotismo en la narrativa chilena
del siglo XX (Bombal, Brunet, Donoso, Eltit). Santiago de Chile: Cuarto Propio.
Cornejo Polar, Antonio. 1975. El obsceno pájaro de la noche: La reversibilidad de la
metáfora. In José Donoso: La destrucción de un mundo, eds. José Promis Ojeda,
et al. Buenos Aires: F. García Cambeiro.
Doll, Edgar. 2009. El chacal de Nahueltoro: La cuestión del realismo, materiales
fílmicos e historia. In El chacal de Nahueltoro: Emergencia de un nuevo cine
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Donoso, José. 2004. El escribidor intruso: Artículos, crónicas y entrevistas. comp.

Cecilia García-Huidobro. Santiago de Chile: Ediciones Universidad Diego
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———. (1966) 2006. El lugar sin límites. Santiago de Chile: Alfaguara.
———. (1970) 2007. El obsceno pájaro de la noche. Santiago de Chile: Alfaguara.
———. (1972) 2007. Historia personal del “boom.” Santiago de Chile: Alfaguara.
El chacal de Nahueltoro. 1969. Dir. Miguel Littin. Perf. Nelson Villagra, Shenda
Román. Cine Experimental Universidad de Chile and Cinematográfica Tercer
Mundo. Film.
Eltit, Diamela. 2008. Signos vitales: Escritos sobre literatura, arte y política. Santiago
de Chile: Ediciones Universidad Diego Portales.
Felski, Rita. 1995. The Gender of Modernity. Cambridge and London: Harvard
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Foucault, Michel. 2003. Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974–5. Eds.
Valerio Marchetti, and Antonella Salomoni. Trans. Graham Burchell. New York:
Picador.
Fuentes, Carlos. 1969. La nueva novela hispanoamericana. México, DF: Joaquín
Mortiz.
Francia, Aldo. 1990. Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano en Viña del Mar. Santiago de
Chile: CESOC Ediciones Chile América.
Halberstam, Judith. 1995. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters.
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Hart, Stephen M. 2004. Companion to Latin American Film. Woodbridge and
Rochester: Tamesis.
Huerta, María Antonieta. 1989. Otro agro para Chile: La historia de la reforma
agraria en el proceso social y político. Santiago de Chile: Ediciones Chile América
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Jacobsen Camus, Udo. 2009. Realismo y lenguaje en El chacal de Nahueltoro. In
El chacal de Nahueltoro: Emergencia de un nuevo cine chileno, ed. Sergio
Navarro. Santiago de Chile: Uqbar Editores.
Littin, Miguel, and Cristián Santa María. 1970. Vivisección de El chacal a la mesa.
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Zag and Ediciones Nueva Universidad.
Littin, Miguel. 1974. Cine Chileno: La tierra prometida. Caracas: Rocinante.
———. 1988. El cine latinoamericano y su público. In El nuevo cine latinoameri-
cano en el mundo de hoy, ed. Unknown. México, DF: Universidad Nacional
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Magnarelli, Sharon. 1993. Understanding José Donoso. Columbia: University of

South Carolina Press.
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de Cuba.
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77–85.
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años de cine chileno (1960–1985). Madrid: Ediciones del Litoral.
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Nahueltoro: Emergencia de un nuevo cine chileno, ed. Sergio Navarro. Santiago
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Filmography, ed. Timothy Barnard, and Peter Rist. New York and London:
Garland Publishing.
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Editores.
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feminidad (Construcción cultural de actores emergentes). Santiago: LOM
Ediciones.
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American Sixties. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
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Labor in the Chilean Agrarian Reform, 1950–1973. Durham and London:
Duke University Press.
Valdés, Adriana. 1975. El ‘imbunche.’ Estudio de un motivo en El obsceno pájaro
de la noche. In José Donoso: La destrucción de un mundo, eds. José Promis Ojeda,
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Frei (1964–1970). México, DF: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Unidad
Xochimilco.
 CHAPTER 3

The Exceptional Art of Gendered Utopias,

1970–1973

INTRODUCTION: THE TEMPORALITIES OF UTOPIA

AND EXCEPTIONALISM

As the first-ever democratically elected socialist leader in the Americas,

Salvador Allende’s ascension to the presidency of Chile was by definition
an exceptional occurrence. Allende said as much in a speech entitled “Para
qué hemos vencido,” delivered at his inauguration on November 5, 1970,
in which he outlined what his election meant, and what his government,
known as the Unidad Popular (UP), intended to do:

Sin precedentes en el mundo, Chile acaba de dar una prueba extraordinaria

de desarrollo político, haciendo posible que un movimiento anticapitalista
asuma el poder por el libre ejercicio de los derechos ciudadanos. Los asume
para orientar el país hacia una nueva sociedad, más humana, en que las metas
últimas son la racionalidad de la actividad económica, la progresiva social-
ización de los medios productivos y la superación de la división en clases.
(Allende 79, emphasis added)

Allende’s stated intention to move away from capitalism within the con-
text of democracy espoused the contradictory rhetoric of exceptional-
ism of his term from the outset. He sought to distance himself from the
world’s more market-oriented economies and from his more politically
staid predecessor, while simultaneously praising Chile’s democratic system

© The Author(s) 2016 73

C. Fischer, Queering the Chilean Way,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-56248-7_3
74 C. FISCHER

and building upon Frei Montalva’s earlier efforts developing the coun-
try—particularly the agrarian reform. He called for Chile to break with
its past while also celebrating it. Meanwhile, he paradoxically continued
Frei’s language of Chilean political exceptionalism by discussing his own
election as an unprecedented and “extraordinary” shift away from the
politics of Frei.
Allende’s rhetoric positioned Chile as a one-of-a-kind utopia of demo-
cratic socialism. His lofty goals for the country were reminiscent of the
Platonic virtues invoked in Utopia (1516) by Thomas More, who advo-
cated for “legislation which gave to all an equal share in all goods” (105),
as well as the abolition of all private property (101–103) and all class divi-
sions (131). Allende quickly undertook (or tacitly allowed for) a num-
ber of measures that immediately riled both foreign investors and the
Chilean oligarchy, including expropriations, popular occupations (known
as tomas), and nationalizations—of some foreign- and domestically-owned
farmlands, factories, and other natural resources, including the copper
mines. The state sought to bring as much of the economy under its con-
trol as possible to the point of implementing a computer system known as
Cybersyn to control the day-to-day operations of the country’s factories
from a central location in La Moneda Palace.1 Despite the huge impact
of the “people’s empowerment” (poder popular) imagined for Chile by
the UP, however, its promising project eventually faltered due to a com-
plex series of economic factors.2 The gap between Allende’s vision of the
country and its economic realities, then, conjures up the very etymology
of the word utopia. Coming from the Greek words ou, meaning “not,”
and topos, meaning “place,” a utopia, by definition, does not actually exist.
Despite, or perhaps because of this, however, Allende continues to be
the figure of utopia par excellence in the Chilean political and cultural
imaginary. In the memory of his political platform—simultaneously dif-
ferent from, and a model for, other societies—the rhetorics of utopia and
exceptionalism are intertwined.
By examining Allende’s exceptionally utopian aims temporally and spa-
tially—that is, not only in terms of a place that could have been achieved,
but also as a time to look forward to and a past to nostalgically look back
upon—the multiple implications of utopia can be fully explored. Fredric
Jameson (2004) points out how utopias lose their power as soon as they
are implemented: when they are limited to theory (and the artistic imagi-
nation), that is, “in the mind … all kinds of institutional variations and
re-combinations are possible” (Jameson 44).3 Allende’s utopian rhetoric
 THE EXCEPTIONAL ART OF GENDERED UTOPIAS, 1970–1973 75

may have lost its power once it began to be translated into concrete public
policy initiatives, but the multiple representations of the Allende period in
art and literature—both those that expressed its aspirations and those that
retrospectively looked back to it, afterward—are symptomatic of the shift-
ing temporalities and significations of utopia. Though Jameson concludes
that the imagining of utopia before its “moment” of implementation and
actuality is the most utopian exercise of all (44), retrospective medita-
tions upon it and artistic representations of it are also a key part of the
utopian endeavor, as Beatriz Sarlo (2004) points out (45). Sarlo conceives
of utopia—in a mode inspired by the ideas of Walter Benjamin—as both
the historical moment in which certain movements took place, and the
posterior representation of those movements (in art, history, literature,
or other modes of expression). Utopia, for Sarlo, continues even after its
practical failure. In this sense, Svetlana Boym’s work (2001) on the phe-
nomenon of nostalgia, which she defines as “longing for a home that no
longer exists or has never existed” (xiii), is particularly germane to the art
and literature about Allende and the UP, because the utopias they depict
are rife with “unrealized dreams of the past and visions of the future that
became obsolete” (Boym xvi).4 These multiple temporal approaches to
utopia are complicated further by the fact that many historians, such as
Steve Stern (2006) and Oscar Guardiola-Rivera (2013), have viewed the
UP not as utopian but rather as the chronicle of a failure foretold, argu-
ing that Allende and others seemed to be at least somewhat aware, from
the beginning, that the UP’s project was doomed. Utopia, then, seems to
take exception to its own present: utopian ideas are perpetually beyond
the possibility of realization, and yet there are constant artistic and literary
attempts to realize or retroactively idealize them.
In contrast to the agenda of the UP and its sympathizers, foreign cor-
porations and Chilean oligarchs (as well as some Chilean and US mili-
tary personnel) also imagined a utopia of sorts for the country, and also
couched their opposition in the terms of exceptionalism. The US govern-
ment, worried about UP-like ideology spreading to other countries in
Latin America, soon began working to undermine Allende.5 The possible
implications of the developments in Chile for surrounding countries were
certainly not lost on Henry Kissinger, who wrote a memorandum about
the “‘insidious’ ‘model effect’ of Allende’s democratic election” (Kornbluh
80, emphasis added). Just as Chile had moved to the Left, US government
authorities felt that now Allende could influence other countries to do so
in new and dangerous ways. Reacting against the egalitarian pretensions of
76 C. FISCHER

the UP, actors on the Right moved to articulate what they considered to
be a more suitable version of the future for Chile: “law as a key instrument
of the common good, private property as a fundamental right, national
unity as a supreme goal, and nationalism as expression of ‘fundamental
values of the national soul’” (Stern 2006: 69). The utopia imagined by the
Chilean Right for the country relied less on the traditional terms of excep-
tionalism, but used a great deal of its rhetoric of exclusivity nonetheless.
The idea of armed struggle—which, of course, had been successful in
Cuba just 11 years earlier, in 1959—was another utopia imagined for Chile’s
future by sectors to the left of the UP. The main proponent of this path was
the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria, or MIR, which “rejected elec-
toral politics” (Loveman 246). Led by Miguel Enríquez, a now-legendary
figure6 who advocated for a break with the bourgeois state apparatus that
the UP was occupying at the time, the MIR’s insistence upon armed strug-
gle was based on the idea that Allende’s “‘socialist’ government, the whole
‘democratic’ bourgeoisie has made full use of the occasion to try to derail
workers from their own class interests. It has been trying to sell the idea that
the only struggle workers should support is the defence of the democratic
state against dictatorship and evil tyrants” (http://en.internationalism.
org/ir/115_allende.htm). Indeed, John Beverley (2009) suggests that
Latin America’s armed movements offered answers that were difficult to
find elsewhere, and generally “revealed [it] in its most generous, creative,
courageous, and diverse aspects” (58).7 Still, even Beverley’s admission that
the case of Chile weakens his argument in favor of armed struggle—since
the UP was able to mostly co-opt the far Left into favoring democracy—
tacitly ties together utopia and exceptionalism by pointing out the unique-
ness of the UP’s project: “with the exception of the Chilean Popular Unity,
the Latin American revolutionary Left … did not give enough thought or
credence to the question of mass democracy and political hegemony” (55,
emphasis added). Accordingly, revolutionary armed movements in Chile
during the Allende years also showed how utopia and exceptionalism are
tied together: the MIR rejected popular democracy when advocating for
future armed struggles, but Chilean armed movements themselves are seen
in retrospect as unique in their respect for that democracy.
In Chile, then, utopian projects often contradicted one another, jos-
tling for supremacy in the same way that those who defended them strug-
gled amongst themselves. Allende can thus be represented, alternatively, as
a hero who chose to give his life for the cause of democracy, as an inflexible
ideologue who refused to change an almost completely ineffectual set of
 THE EXCEPTIONAL ART OF GENDERED UTOPIAS, 1970–1973 77

economic policies, and as a weak figurehead who clung to democracy even

when it was obvious that armed struggle against the Right was the only
way to achieve true socialism. In any case, the position of the policies of
Allende and the UP as eternally beyond the grasp of implementation, con-
stantly either yet-to-be or already-past, and the position of Allende himself
as a metonym for a time of unprecedented dreams (for some) and night-
mares (for others), indicate how exceptionalism infused the utopian aims
of the UP. Many artistic and literary representations of this period—which
remain in the realm of pure imagination, separate from the spheres of eco-
nomics and public policy, as Jameson prescribes—are appropriate ways to
examine it because they, too, both look ahead to the utopian aspirations
of the UP and also look back at them with nostalgia and sadness. They
also embody the rhetoric of exceptionalism, staying beyond the moment
of the UP and yet inexorably invested in making the unique ideas the UP
promised a reality.

UTOPIA, EXCEPTIONALISM, AND GENDER

The different utopias of the UP period focus on unrealized dreams and
nightmares for Chile, but they are exemplified most concretely in the artis-
tic and literary characters and figures who embody them. In these embodi-
ments, gender and sexuality can often be correlated with political and
economic aspirations and critiques. Despite the fact that women had new
opportunities to participate in the public sphere—which also opened the
doors for other previously marginalized political actors to participate—the
UP was still a heterosexual man’s world.8 Just as Christian Democratic
labor organizers had tied the campesino’s role as a strong paterfamilias
to his ability to take a firmer stance against his (possibly abusive) patrón,
the UP’s rhetoric invoked heterosexual masculinity by calling upon men
to entice women to participate in the UP as they would entice a poten-
tial lover.9 Non-reproductive sexualities of UP supporters, such as homo-
sexuality and feminisms that rejected motherhood, were marginalized
because they constituted a lack of political “discipline” and the threat of
“libertinage”: Heidi Tinsman (2002) points out that “Allende was par-
ticularly sensitive to allegations that the UP was immoral” (222), which
is likely why his inaugural speech also calls for young people to sublimate
their “desires” (of what nature, he does not mention) into “more work.”
When, in April of 1973, a group of about 25 gay men held a protest in the
Plaza de Armas of Santiago to demand a number of civil rights, including
78 C. FISCHER

the right to marry (Robles 2008: 15), they were met with extremely
disparaging reactions.10 Female sexuality that rejected motherhood was
similarly marginalized: Virginia Vidal’s 1972 pamphlet La emancipación
de la mujer, which offered a critique of “machismo y la exaltación de la
maternidad” (Vidal 76), was considered “too critical of men and never
distributed” (Tinsman 226). Those whose utopian aspirations consisted
of taking exception to the heterosexist discourse of the UP found it dif-
ficult to express themselves freely then, but retrospective views of this time
in literature, such as that of Pedro Lemebel, examine both the utopian
impossibility of, and growing demand for, gay rights during that period
of history. In this sense, the UP’s political aims were often expressed in
the same terms of economics and sexual morality used by More’s Utopia,
where sex outside of marriage is strictly prohibited: “If before marriage a
man or woman is convicted of secret intercourse, he or she is severely pun-
ished, and they are forbidden to marry altogether unless the governor’s
pardon remits their guilt” (187).
The aspirations of constituencies outside of the UP—on both the Left
and the Right—were also expressed in gendered terms, as remembered
retrospectively. Margaret Power (1997) quotes an article in La Tribuna
newspaper from December 1971 that describes how when some Right-
wing women took to the streets to protest against food shortages under
the UP by banging empty pots, those who opposed them were called
“miricones.” This word was a play on the word “maricón,” since, accord-
ing to the newspaper clipping, “obvio es recalcar el nombre que reciben
quienes atacan a las mujeres. Ellos se acercan mucho a la verdadera cali-
ficación [‘maricón’]” (Power 265). According to Power, Right-wing ele-
ments in Chile equated the desire for equality in the country with an
amalgam of weakness and homosexuality,11 and sought to reestablish a
previous economic order, in which heterosexual male prowess ensured a
clear-cut order of servility and seigniorial providence. For these actors, the
UP did not just constitute a threat to their personal patrimony but also
threw their preconceived notions of heterosexual masculinity completely
out of balance. On the Left, meanwhile, the ultra-masculine, heterosex-
ual image of the armed struggle—led by Cuba-inspired barbudos such as
Enríquez—was one that many who felt that the UP was not carrying out
its reforms fast enough found extremely appealing.12 It is impossible to
think about the transnational circulation of leftist utopian thought in this
period, both in Chile and in Cuba, without viewing it in the context of
heteronormative ideals of masculinity.13 In his 1965 article El socialismo y
 THE EXCEPTIONAL ART OF GENDERED UTOPIAS, 1970–1973 79

el hombre en Cuba, published in the Uruguayan magazine Marcha, Che

Guevara exhorted “new men” to come together to combat bourgeois,
individualistic ideas, and his work served as a reference point for Chilean
activists, writers, and artists at the time. However, for many within the
UP, it was an undesirable future that threatened the advances of Allende’s
coalition (Guevara 1977).14
Art and literature that retrospectively invoke the UP period from dif-
ferent standpoints offer the clearest insight into the relationship between
different conceptions of gender and utopian thought during the Allende
years. Located in this “impossible” utopian time—between imagination
and actuality, between an argument and its counterargument, between
documentation and representation, between past and present—they are
elegies to utopias as much as they are invocations of them, offering a rec-
ognition of their failures that sometimes bleeds into critique. This chapter
will examine the multiple tensions related to utopia as they were “embod-
ied” in characters who appeared in the cultural production about the
period: tensions between ex post facto UP narratives and of-the-moment
UP narratives; tensions among different ideals of the Chilean economy,
whether utopian or not; tensions between the imagination and implemen-
tation of those utopias; and tensions among the different conceptions of
gender comportment encoded by these economic and political ideals.15 By
moving away from utopias of gender, politics, and economics that surged
in situ from the rich and vibrant cultural scene of the UP, to similar ide-
alizations of the UP as utopia created not in the moment but rather after
the UP was overthrown, it may not be possible to “capture” a utopian
moment in time, but it is possible to challenge essentialist and singular
preconceptions about gender dynamics in the UP.
Accordingly, this chapter will focus on three works that stand apart
from others created during and—particularly—after the UP that show
how Chile’s economic and political utopias, and challenges to them, were
primarily exemplified in terms of gender. Viewed over time, these utopias
expose the tensions that occur when these heterosexual and queer mas-
culinities look forward to ideal futures while simultaneously being por-
trayed retroactively in nostalgic ways. Patricio Guzmán’s documentary La
batalla de Chile (1975–1979) starts with the military coup before looking
backward to document all the events that led up to the rupture of the
country’s democracy; it then ends with images of the popular movements
that spread during the time of the UP and longingly eulogizes the period
as a paradise lost. The film also depicts, in sometimes stark imagery, the
80 C. FISCHER

masculinist nature of the UP’s forward-looking, utopian policies: some

men advocate taking up arms to defend the UP as the only way of “being
a man,” while others turn to various (predominantly male-led) institutions
in Chile at the time (the Church, the Armed Forces, the Congress, and the
“bourgeois” state itself) for guidance to preserve the ideal Chile that they
envisioned. Jorge Edwards’ 1974 memoir Persona non grata, a pessimistic
account of the author’s time in Cuba, is filled with foreboding about the
future of UP-era Chile; however, for all its veiled criticism of the Latin
American Left, it was published after the coup, and reserves its fiercest cri-
tique for Chile’s oligarchy and the foreign interests that helped precipitate
the downfall of Allende. Meanwhile, the book culminates in a showdown
between Edwards and Fidel Castro, each man representing a different eco-
nomic vision for both Chile and Cuba, in a scene that sums up the extent
to which leftist intellectualism in the Latin American 1970s was a male-
dominated phenomenon that left little room for women. Pedro Lemebel,
in the chronicle “La noche de los visones” (part of the 1996 collection
Loco afán), sought to rewrite the history of the UP as a time in which gay
men enjoyed fleeting freedoms of expression, participating openly in the
economic and political apparatus established by the UP; however, few, if
any, gays in Chile experienced the liberation that Lemebel imagines for
them, as Robles has pointed out (12). Still, a nostalgic reconstruction of
a more liberated past for gays in the UP serves as a utopia which—at least
in the way Sarlo conceives of it—has the potential to question the history
of narrowly constructed, heterosexual utopias that dominated the time.
These three exceptional works document the continuing debates over
how to embody the extraordinary utopian aspirations of the UP.

LA BATALLA DE CHILE: THE FRAGILE CORPOREAL

“PRESENCE” OF UTOPIA
Early exhibitions held all over the world of Patricio Guzmán’s three-part
documentary La batalla de Chile: La lucha de un pueblo sin armas were
watershed events. Smuggled out of Chile under dictatorship,16 the film
generated interest in the unique aspirations of the by-then defunct UP and
in Chile’s struggle to recover its democracy. The film embodies many of the
ideological, economic, and political conflicts surrounding the contentious
final period of the UP in the form of primarily male subjects, all convention-
ally heterosexual. These subjects include the overwhelmed, beleaguered
functionaries of the bureaucratic and “bourgeois” government, who were
 THE EXCEPTIONAL ART OF GENDERED UTOPIAS, 1970–1973 81

menaced by the hierarchical, disciplined ordering of military bodies (who

later carried out the coup), and by impassioned speeches from leftist lead-
ers, campesinos, and workers advocating for a Cuba-style overthrow of the
state. Each subject is exceptional, both standing out in contrast to oth-
ers like him, and yet also positioned as metonymic for larger political and
economic positions. Although these two ideas would seem to be mutu-
ally exclusive, the performances of masculinity offered by these subjects are
what reconcile the paradoxical logic of exceptionalism in the film.
La batalla de Chile follows the final six months of the UP govern-
ment, covering the political conflicts (at both the elite and popular levels)
that led up to the coup; however, the curious order of its montage has
attracted the attention of many critics. It begins with a powerful image so
well-known and widely disseminated that it has since been raised almost to
the level of fetish, as Federico Galende (2005) has pointed out (51)—La
Moneda, Chile’s presidential palace, in flames after being bombed by the
military during the September 11 coup.17 Meanwhile, it ends with exhor-
tations for an alternate ending to the UP narrative, a popular uprising
against the Right-wing bourgeoisie, and the government itself, that never
effectively took place. One worker, when asked if he feels that the time has
come for a “firm hand,” answers that he would like control to be taken
by force: “es ahora o nunca, compañero.” The fact that this film begins
its first part, La insurrección de la burguesía (which premiered in 1975) at
the very moment of the UP’s downfall, and ends its third part, El poder
popular (which premiered much later, in 1979 (Ruffinelli 96–110)), with
an outcome for the UP that never was,18 is just one of many indicators of
how problematic the temporality of utopia can be. At the end of the film,
Guzmán’s narrative voiceover states that “ante la imposibilidad de que el
presidente Allende pueda seguir avanzando, mucha gente intuye un final
trágico.”19 All of the temporalities represented in Guzmán’s documentary
constitute political and economic utopias (and dystopias), whose fragility
is reflected onscreen by different masculine subjects who embody those
utopias. In this sense, the apparent exceptionalism of these performances
of masculinity—their exemplarity, their distinction—is complicated by the
fact that the images were edited with the knowledge that the leftist politi-
cal aspirations many are positioned to represent were doomed.
This focus on the masculinities represented in the documentary does
not take place at the expense of any women; the exclusion of female sub-
jectivity has already taken place in the editing process. Women do appear
throughout the film, but the opinions they espouse echo opinions first
82 C. FISCHER

expressed in the film by men, particularly when they are identified with the
Left. The only exception to this is when women are asked about how UP
policies have affected their domestic economy: for example, they are often
asked how they manage to keep food on the table at a time when food
rationing is so commonplace. When mentioning the major events that
took place during the UP, women are largely relegated to the background,
and Guzmán admits as much.20 The film shows the primary ideological
struggles of the period to be primarily masculine ones: for example, at
one point, amidst images of men (and only men) marching (Fig. 3.1),
Guzmán’s narration analyzes the differences within the UP:

Para un sector de la Unidad Popular, encabezado por los Comunistas,

la expropiación arbitraria de fábricas constituye un error, pues debilita la
imagen legal del gobierno. En cambio, para el otro sector, liderado por
los Socialistas, la ocupación de las industrias representa una forma útil de
movilización, que ayuda a preparar la lucha que se avecina. Este sector de la
Unidad Popular afirma que el choque armado con la derecha es completa-
mente inevitable, y que la única forma de enterrar un golpe es con la orga-
nización de las masas y el poder popular …

Fig. 3.1 A march of workers in La batalla de Chile (Dir. Patricio Guzmán

1975–1979)
 THE EXCEPTIONAL ART OF GENDERED UTOPIAS, 1970–1973 83

The implication of this scene is that the debate over this key difference
dividing the UP—whether to rise up and fight the Right, or to stay within
Chile’s legal and constitutional framework—is one that has taken place
primarily among men, a fact that has been much critiqued.
The faces depicted on camera—along with their class, labor, political,
military, or religious affiliations, their clothes, and their general com-
portment—offer “types,” particularly of men but also of women. They
represent models of political affiliation, but also models of gender com-
portment. As viewers, we are to surmise the subjects’ aspirations, reason-
ing, and beliefs from the little information that we receive about them. A
reading of these “types” can serve as a way of discerning how masculinities
manifest themselves throughout the film and correspond to the multiple
utopian temporalities that co-existed in the time of the UP. It is likely for
this reason that many critics, including Lopez, Ruffinelli (98–99), and
Trumper (125), have focused on the film’s sequence shots, particularly
in the first part, that serve to contextualize the subjects within their sur-
roundings, while supplementing their words with images of their pos-
sessions and other objects, often to signify class and political affiliations.
Lopez states that these shots “provide a wealth of detail and evidence of
the directiveness of filming that belies the careful orchestration of the ‘raw’
materials of the real” (278). Despite this focus on Guzmán’s sequence
shots as a way of decoding political affiliations, however, these critics have
not made note of how Guzmán’s subjects’ onscreen performances of gen-
der relate to different political ideologies.21
This use of sequence shots to signify not only class affiliation but also
gender comportment appears throughout the film. It is here where we can
begin to see how, as Judith Butler (1993) put it, one particular temporal-
ity can be “materialized” in the realm of aesthetic representation (10–11).
One scene in Part 1 depicts a union leader denouncing the owners of a
factory expropriated by the government. The owners have, according to
him, stolen the machines out of the facility, thereby rendering the factory
useless: as he speaks, the camera pans upward to a portrait of Che Guevara,
with the words “¡Viva Cuba!” on the wall behind him (Fig. 3.2). The fiery
rhetoric spouted by a table where only men, and no women, are sitting is
an evocation of the rhetoric of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, which was,
in itself, a performance of a certain type of masculinity: a man who takes
up arms to defend himself and his pueblo, if necessary. By linking the sub-
jects of this shot with the political situation in Cuba, their performances of
masculinity are duly classified while also intimating their aspirations for the
84 C. FISCHER

Fig. 3.2 Labor leaders in La batalla de Chile (Dir. Patricio Guzmán 1975–1979)

Chilean economy: they are more than willing to overthrow the political
apparatus of the UP to achieve the justice that they feel that the owners of
the expropriated factory have violated.
One telling scene in Part 2, a televised debate from the final months
of the UP, between two male Congressional representatives (diputados),
is indicative of the extent not only to which performances of masculinity
and political and class affiliation can be intertwined, but also of how these
gendered and classed bodies struggle with one another within the coun-
try’s elected leadership. In an increasingly heated exchange, Alejandro
Rojas, from the Communist Party, and Víctor García Garzena, from the
National Party, together embody this conflation of gender performance,
temporalities, and political outlooks. Rojas begins by challenging García
to deny his sympathies with the organizers of the late June Tancazo.
García responds that he himself is not in favor of any such coup, but that
he can “understand” those who are, particularly when they find them-
selves in dire economic straits, like “el pobre camionero pisoteado, que
toma una piedra.” García’s invocation of such a masculine-identified ges-
ture, and figure, to signify a political stance against the Left is just the
first way in which masculinity and economic aspiration are related here.
García goes on to address the viewers of the television program directly,
 THE EXCEPTIONAL ART OF GENDERED UTOPIAS, 1970–1973 85

asserting his own credibility and denigrating that of Rojas by alluding to

their respective physical appearances: “Pero mírenlo a él, y mírenme a mí.
Miren esa vida, y miren la mía. No sé cómo no se han caído las cámaras
de vergüenza.” Alluding to Rojas as a “student” and as a “revolutionary,”
García’s implication—that Rojas’ informal dress means that he is a dishev-
eled libertine—is a way of making a case for his own respectability over his
interlocutor’s; it is also a way of avoiding actually addressing the charges
that Rojas has leveled against him, namely, that he likely did in fact sup-
port the Tancazo. And, indeed, García is dressed much more formally in
a conservative suit and tie, while (considerably younger) Rojas is shown
with an open-necked shirt, smiling, relaxed, and smoking a cigarette. Like
his opponent, Rojas’ response also alludes to physical appearance: he states
that García “se ha retratado de cuerpo entero. Ha mostrado el rostro sedi-
cioso, el rostro golpista, del Partido Nacional.” García, after repeated
provocations by Rojas, tells him that “usted parece que fuera boliviano,”
which he clearly intends as a racial and ethnic insult. As Rojas would have
it, the ideal toward which García looks is not only the one in which men
dress formally to indicate their commitment to order and hierarchy, but
also one in which the Right takes back power by force. Rojas, meanwhile,
is portrayed by García as the very embodiment of dissolution and disor-
der that Allende feared the UP would be associated with—an image that
García racializes, as well. The fact that each one makes use of references to
the other’s physical attributions in order to discredit them is an indication
of to the extent to which one’s performance of masculinity—one’s dress,
race, and physical appearance, in this case—was attached to one’s political
and economic beliefs.
Much less is known about most of the subjects of La batalla de Chile,
however; instead of focusing exclusively on well-known characters, the
film often makes use of quick shots of anonymous subjects in order to
show the relationship between political and economic outlooks, gender
performance, and physical appearance. One scene, for example, is a wide
shot of a march of male members of the fascist “patrulla de choque” Patria
y Libertad. In a thinly veiled comparison to Nazism, the camera zooms
in at one point on a blond and muscular young man, who crosses his
forearms above his head in a gesture of defiance and provocation (Fig.
3.3). This man remains anonymous, but the viewer’s concept of this man’s
political and economic convictions is heightened by his physical appear-
ance: he is clearly willing and able to commit physical violence against
others for the cause he believes in, and his physical features contrast starkly
86 C. FISCHER

Fig. 3.3 A member of the fascist organization Patria y Libertad in La batalla de

Chile (Dir. Patricio Guzmán 1975–1979)

with those of the more indigenous-looking campesinos occupying agricul-

tural lands owned by Chile’s wealthier citizens. Later, a group of women
is seen screaming “maricón!” outside the home of Army Commander in
Chief Carlos Prats during a protest against his leadership of the military:
their critique of Prats’ loyalty to the UP is also an intimation that he is
not heterosexual. Part 3 includes two other “types” of men key to the
UP: the intellectual and the worker. Toward the end of the film, we see
a series of speeches by men in front of a blackboard, grappling with the
contradictions of the UP’s agenda: a “bourgeois state” at “seditious war”
with the “people’s government;” a popularly elected labor union that
should undemocratically overthrow the state; “a revolutionary process
that isn’t a revolution;” and “empresas del área social dentro de la estruc-
tura de un estado burgués capitalista, donde los mecanismos de opresión
y dominación siguen estando en manos de los burgueses.” A well-dressed,
professorial type lectures for a particularly long period of time, trying to
explain the difficulties of completing a socialist revolution with only “44
%” of the popular vote. The didactic quality of his speech suggests the
rationalized discourse of the intellectuals behind the UP, and the extent
 THE EXCEPTIONAL ART OF GENDERED UTOPIAS, 1970–1973 87

to which that rationality was masculine in nature. At another point in Part

3, a factory worker wearing a hard hat is asked what needs to be done
in order for the UP to be successful; his answer is completely tied to his
masculinity:

No atenernos a la disposición de los momios,22 que únicamente y exclusiva-

mente lo que ellos desean es ahogarnos, asfixiarnos, aprovechando la opor-
tunidad de que los norteamericanos quieren pisotear nuestra dignidad de
chilenos; ellos también se embarcan. Y nosotros no podemos aceptar como
chilenos, como trabajadores, como hombres … de actuar conforme a lo que
ellos desean. ¡No! Ni ahora ni nunca. Todo lo contrario. Siempre nuestra
disposición será luchar por un nuevo Chile, libre económica y políticamente.
(emphasis added)

For this worker, Chilean nationalism, the economic sovereignty of the UP,
and masculine integrity are all tied together: he has staked his concept of
his own manliness on doing his part at work to ensure the success of the
UP’s project. Even though viewers never learn more about the man in
the Patria y Libertad march, the intellectual at the blackboard, the factory
worker, or the women screaming at Prats, each are depicted in the film as
representatives of larger political and economic movements, from which
gender implications can hardly be detached.
At the core of La batalla de Chile lies the retroactive representation
of a struggle between three temporalities: that of the present democratic
framework of the state, that of a future in which democracy would be
overthrown by the Right through a military coup (which effectively
occurred), and that of a future people’s uprising from the Left (which
the film can only imagine and idealize). The film shows how men rep-
resenting these three factions—all of whom, it could be stated, act with
utopian intentions—struggled against one another to make a reality out of
the particular temporality (and accompanying gender performance) they
believed in. There are several telling scenes in which these struggles take
place. About midway through Part 3, a group of campesinos who have
taken over a piece of land in the Santiago-area district of Maipú shows
how the democratic present of the action of the film is a vulnerable and
fleeting utopia.23 The campesinos confront two government functionar-
ies from CORA (the Corporation for Agrarian Reform) who assert that
their toma has been declared illegal, that the original owners of the land
have initiated proceedings against them in the courts, and that there is
88 C. FISCHER

nothing that the government can do about it: the issue “se nos va de las
manos a todos nosotros,” one CORA functionary states, making it clear
that the government is powerless to remedy their situation. In response,
the voiceover asserts, “los ocupantes se atreven a enfrentar la burocra-
cia estatal con plena energía.” A “people’s trial” is held on the spot, in
which the campesinos take one of the functionaries to task for not work-
ing hard enough on their behalf, having been unable to solve “a single
thing” in the area. The defendant stammers with his head down to the
large number of campesinos surrounding him in a subtly menacing way
that he made the mistake of trusting the central government too much.
For the purposes of the film, the functionary embodies the democratic
UP powerless against the “energetic” popular movements at its base. His
penitent posture contrasts with the numerous and much more powerful
campesinos—all men—surrounding him, who render him physically and
politically irrelevant vis-à-vis their demands (Fig. 3.4). The prospect of a
democratic path to socialism is too bogged down in bureaucracy, the film
seems to say: it is utopian in the sense of being impossible to sustain in
light of the (masculine) power of the pueblo.

Fig. 3.4 A “people’s trial” of a government functionary in La batalla de Chile

(Dir. Patricio Guzmán 1975–1979)
 THE EXCEPTIONAL ART OF GENDERED UTOPIAS, 1970–1973 89

On the other end of the ideological spectrum, the military is shown,

particularly in Part 2, as a group of men who stake their masculinity on very
different plans for Chile’s future. One scene, which takes place before the
coup, is particularly telling, as Jacqueline Mouesca (1988) has pointed out:

… hay una escena difícil de olvidar. El Edecán naval del presidente [Arturo
Araya Peters] ha sido asesinado. Lo entierran en Valparaíso con honores
militares. La cámara realiza un movimiento panorámico mostrando a los
asistentes a la ceremonia. Autoridades civiles y militares. Los rostros de estos
últimos nos producen, viéndolos ahora, un inmediato sobresalto: sus ojos
muestran de modo inequívoco el signo de la traición. El cineasta no tenía
consciencia de que estaba en ese instante recogiendo en sus imágenes una
prueba testimonial del golpe de estado que ya estaba en marcha. (73)

A long sequence shot pans across the military officers at Araya’s funeral
in late July of 1973, with Chopin’s “Funeral March” playing in the back-
ground. They all look at the camera with shifty eyes, and they seem to
interrupt their conversations with one another as they see the camera, as if
to avoid letting their words be registered on film. Although, as Mouesca
states, Guzmán may not have known at the moment of filming this scene
that many of the men present were likely already planning the impending
coup, he did know it to be true as he edited this shot. For these men, the
UP was a moral and economic nightmare that needed to be quashed, and
they harbored aspirations for a new Chile—utopian for them—in which
morality, capitalism, and hierarchy would be the key values. In the scene,
we see how their bodies are positioned in strict order, divided by the
branch of the service to which they belong. A sign—marked “JEFES”—
demarcating where they should stand so as to remain separate from the
others offers a strong contrast to the chaotic popular manifestations of the
UP in other scenes. The men of the military are positioned to embody the
aspiration for a Right-wing political economy.24
Part 3 of the film, Poder popular, returns to the UP before the coup,
and centers on the popular movements that overwhelmed the democratic
state apparatus, which many of those who participated in these move-
ments considered irrevocably bourgeois and weak. As Trumper has stated,

the decision to leave ‘popular power’ in a separate section reveals that the
film’s narrative and organizational structure … points to the failure of a rep-
resentational mode that leaned on the language of modernity—articulated
as … an unshakeable belief in the progress of history. (129)
90 C. FISCHER

Here, Guzmán attempts to articulate a utopia of the people, unsullied

by the bourgeois mechanisms of the state, in which participation could
be heightened to its maximum level. This was something of a double-
edged sword, however, because to remove itself from the state, this
popular power would have to undertake an armed uprising. This ideal is
portrayed on film as primarily masculine: first, in the form of the worker
who shoulders the burden of popular power, and second, in the form
of the guerrilla warrior—in the tradition of Cuba, Vietnam, and other
countries—who takes up arms. Perhaps the most visible “model” of this
revolutionary warrior was Enríquez, who had “a political style that …
drew on the romantic theatricality of light and shadow to present … good
looks, virility, youth and daring” (Mallon 180).25 Enríquez appears in Part
2 of La batalla, advocating for armed struggle: “los revolucionarios y los
trabajadores, deben … impulsar el poder popular … autónomo de los
poderes del estado. […] Y en ese caso, todas las formas de lucha serán
legítimas. Entonces … tendrán el derecho a construir su propio ejército:
¡el ejército del pueblo!” Here, Enríquez proposes that those who consider
themselves to be “authentic” revolutionaries need to physically struggle
for their beliefs, both with those who adhere to the state and with those
who want to overthrow it militarily.
Guzmán’s depiction of “popular power” also carries with it a differ-
ent connotation of masculinity, however, and Jameson’s ideal of utopia,
one in which its maximum power lies in its unfeasibility, is relevant to its
illumination. Although Jameson states that the implementation of uto-
pian ideals is what makes them lose their power, he is speaking about
these ideals in their more institutional sense, as policy. By this logic, as
discussed above, Allende’s political initiatives did lose their power once
implemented. I would propose, however, that Jameson’s utopian imagi-
nary can also apply to the bodies that appear on screen. In fact, aestheti-
cized, nostalgic images abound in Part 3 of La batalla that evoke the
power of (male) workers who aspire to directly control their own political
destiny. At one point, elegiac Andean flute music plays in the background
of a long sequence shot that follows a worker pulling a cart behind him.
The cart is extremely large, piled high with cargo—including another man
sitting in the back—and so the man pulling it must counter it with his own
weight. The counterweight almost pulls him completely off the ground,
so he ends up practically gliding: a notably fluid, poetic image of strength
and agility. The camera, meanwhile, keeps up with the cart; the landscape
that flies by is clearly from a poorer neighborhood of Santiago, and cam-
 THE EXCEPTIONAL ART OF GENDERED UTOPIAS, 1970–1973 91

paign signs for Communist Senator Volodia Teitelboim (elected in March

of 1973) painted on the walls suggest that the area is a UP stronghold
(Fig. 3.5). After a long moment with nothing more than music, the nar-
rative voiceover chimes in and talks about how

… casi todos los movimientos de base están vinculados al poder popular.

Es una iniciativa canalizada por el gobierno, pero que no se origina en el
seno de éste. A menudo, este poder causa una gran inquietud en algunos
partidos de izquierda, que se alarman frente a ciertas actitudes espontáneas
de la población.

The body of this worker is positioned as a stand-in for all “movements

in the base” of the UP: a powerful set of factions that manage to oper-
ate with dignity, spontaneity, and fluidity despite the cumbersome weight
of a government whose institutions cannot adequately channel its base.
Although this strength was never translated into public policy, the viewer
catches a glimpse of a utopia, a future passé, a flash that—as Sarlo has writ-
ten—makes history interchangeable with its subsequent representation(s).

Fig. 3.5 A demonstration of “poder popular” in La batalla de Chile (Dir. Patricio

Guzmán 1975–1979)
92 C. FISCHER

La batalla de Chile moves from the utopian present of the UP—the

outcome of which proved its political and economic fragility, as well as the
temporal fragility that envelops it onscreen—to its twin futures, of dysto-
pian (for most) dictatorship and of utopian revolutionary popular strug-
gle. Yet the fragility of the utopias that the film imagines—which, as I have
shown, always take exception to the here and the now—conflicts with the
concrete, material “presence” of the bodies that the film depicts. When
certain subjects in the film, deemed to be exceptionally able to embody
certain political and economic agendas, can illustrate both the temporal
fragility and the material presence of utopia, it would suggest that we can
add another layer to the theorizations of it. Many theorists have sought
to think about ways to reconcile the “breaks” in the temporal and cor-
poreal/spatial logic of utopia: between imagination and implementation
(Jameson), between the past and the representation of the past (Sarlo and
Boym), and between corporeal sensuality and its transcendence (More).
These dualistic logics can be illuminated and bridged by exceptionalism.
A focus on the corporeality of utopia in La batalla de Chile—bodies both
fragile and concrete, both past and present, theorizing about political and
economic agendas but also implementing them—allows for a new way to
think about this exceptional time in Chilean history. The bodies in the
film—construed as exceptionally representative, yet always excepted from
the present through a focus on either their aspirations or a nostalgia for
their past—manage to be utopian and “present” simultaneously.

PERSONA NON GRATA: TRANSNATIONAL GENDERED

UTOPIAS IN CONFRONTATION
Chile’s democratic socialist “experiment” was often compared, in terms of
its exceptionalism, to another country that had moved toward socialism:
Cuba. By Allende’s election in 1970, Cuba’s revolutionary apparatus was
firmly entrenched. As the sole outpost of communism in the Western hemi-
sphere, it caused admiration among UP sympathizers who adopted some
of its exceptionalist rhetoric. Cuba’s government was particularly influen-
tial for the more radical elements of the Chilean Left who were discussing
the possibility of armed struggle. Meanwhile, Cuba had won over a num-
ber of high-profile male Latin American intellectuals to its cause by 1970,
including key “Boom” writers Gabriel García Márquez and Julio Cortázar,
despite the political repression that was commonplace there. Cuba’s cul-
tural influence could be broadly felt throughout the Chilean art and lit-
 THE EXCEPTIONAL ART OF GENDERED UTOPIAS, 1970–1973 93

erature of the UP era, just as its political influence was present in other
spheres. A small channel of cooperation between Chile and Cuba, which
provided for the exchange of ideas and people—Allende himself traveled
to Cuba in 1961 (Cardemil 316)—had gained importance throughout the
1960s, but during the UP years this channel widened greatly as a succes-
sion of Chileans traveled to learn more from Cuba’s experiences and try to
catch a glimpse of what Chile could become (Cardemil 1997).
Jorge Edwards’ memoir of his three months in Cuba, Persona non
grata (1974), focuses on the images of masculinity conveyed by Che
and Fidel as much as on their revolutionary economic or political rheto-
ric, and his critique of their particular brand of leftism made the book
particularly controversial.26 Edwards had spent time in Cuba in 1968 as
a member of the jury of a literary prize for Casa de las Américas, and
his professed sympathies toward Castro were what caused him to sup-
port Allende27; this in turn led to Allende’s appointment of Edwards as a
commercial attaché to Cuba in late 1970 and early 1971, following the
reestablishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries. The
temporalities of Edwards’ memoir are complex, given that it is both a
forward-looking view of Cuba and Chile—whose destinies seemed, for a
time, intertwined—and also a retrospective one. The memoir looks ahead
to the ominous future Edwards sees for Chile when describing how the
Chilean soldiers who visit Cuba during the course of the action see there
what they clearly consider to be a dystopia; Fidel Castro himself intends to
do what he can to extend the Cuban revolution southward; and Edwards
positions himself against Castro in a battle of political ideologies and wills,
in which each man’s masculine self-worth hangs in the balance. Yet at the
same time, since Edwards kept the manuscript in a bank vault (belonging
to the Spanish literary agent Carmen Balcells) and only published it from
exile in Paris (Edwards 1989: 35) following the overthrow of the UP,
the text looks backward as well. Edwards published it knowing that some
of the soldiers who visited Cuba in 1970 had likely participated, later, in
ensuring that a similar reality would not take place in Chile; his critique
of Cuba’s barbudos may have been tempered by the fact that he later saw
them as a lesser evil than Chile’s milicos; and his initial nostalgia for Chile’s
classist structures, expressed as a reaction to Cuba’s allergy to hierarchy,
likely became nuanced by the fact that the coup turned him into a persona
non grata not only in Cuba, but in Chile as well.28 Looking ahead and
backward, the memoir exemplified multiple outcomes for Chile in the
form of different performances of masculinity (including Edwards’ own).
94 C. FISCHER

Excoriating the Left for its recklessness, and the Right for its neoim-
perialism, Edwards relished being caught in the middle of two fiercely
opposed ideological factions, because he could portray himself in the mem-
oir as exceptional—above the fray in a way that had implications for how he
viewed the different masculinities, and temporalities, in play. He positions
himself as a “reasonable” foil to what he portrays as Castro’s arbitrary and
authoritarian ruling style, and he is critical of both the UP and of the mili-
tary government that later overthrew it. In fact, he sees himself as exem-
plary of traditionally masculine, heterosexual values like physical and athletic
prowess, general urbanity, and worldliness. He also highlights his freedom
to express himself politically, independently of the political situation of the
state in which he may find himself.29 His intention to rise above binary poli-
tics—to help “superar el actual primitivismo político de América Latina,”
which he saw as caught up in “Manichaeism” (Edwards 1974: 11)—is, of
course, a utopia in itself, however. Not only did his memoirs exacerbate
ideological rhetoric all along the political spectrum, they exposed the extent
to which his claim to exceptionalism (as an independent, economically self-
sufficient artist who enjoyed freedom from censorship) was a patriarchal
one, made possible through a strict division of labor in which the women
who made his “freedom” possible were largely relegated to invisibility.
Edwards’ pursuit of intellectual freedom of expression while in Cuba
is articulated in traditionally masculine terms, even evoking scenes from
spy novels. He has to evade the numerous cloak-and-dagger techniques
deployed by the Castro regime to keep him and the Cuban dissidents he
spent time with under surveillance. One scene that illustrates this is set
in the Habana Riviera Hotel where Edwards was living, and involves a
discussion of literature with Heberto Padilla, a writer critical of the revolu-
tion.30 The stress of the surveillance soon becomes too great for Padilla:

… al final de una tertulia en mi pieza en que se había bebido bastante,

[Padilla] se puso a gritar en dirección a los supuestos micrófonos empotrados
en los rincones: “¿Escuchaste, Piñeiro? Y toma nota de que aquí estaba X.,
que guardó silencio pero no discrepó de lo que decíamos. ¿Me entiendes?”
Yo tomaba a Padilla del brazo y lo sacaba de la habitación con suavidad, en
tanto que X., intensamente preocupado, movía la cabeza y seguramente se
decía en su fuero interno que mi situación no tenía remedio, que más valía
no aparecerse por ahí. (Edwards 1974: 312–313)

Padilla directly addresses Manuel Piñeiro, the head of Cuba’s state security
apparatus, who is likely spying on the group through microphones planted
 THE EXCEPTIONAL ART OF GENDERED UTOPIAS, 1970–1973 95

in the wall. When Edwards has to delicately lead Padilla out of the room,
he makes the tacit admission that the utopian ideal of an intellectual being
able to speak freely about Cuban politics is impossible as long as he is on
Cuban soil. These maneuvers are dangerous enough that women tend
not to take them in Edwards’ memoir, and indeed it is likely that the men
could only do what they did because their wives were home taking care of
their children: Edwards’ wife is only mentioned a handful of times in the
memoir, and never by name, even though she was with him in Cuba most
of the time. Padilla’s wife, Belkis Cuza, appears only slightly more often.
The “rugged independence” that Edwards sought by breaking with both
the Left and the Right was something that few women would have been
able to carry off at the time.
The principal confrontation of masculinity and different economic and
political visions for Latin America, Chile, and Cuba in the novel is between
Edwards and Castro. It begins in a classroom at Princeton University, when
they first come face to face. Castro has been invited in “March or April”
of 1959 to give a talk in Professor R.R. Palmer’s class on the American
Revolution,31 and his revolutionary masculinity is strongly juxtaposed
against that of Edwards, who figures himself as a hesitant bystander and
passive observer. In the “quarantine” (Edwards 1974: 58) of a small room
in the building of the Woodrow Wilson School—rather than a larger one,
in order to “evitar que la charla … diera pie a una manifestación estudiantil
de apoyo a Cuba revolucionaria” (Edwards 1974: 53)—Castro makes “un
largo alegato en favor de la colaboración entre Estados Unidos y el nuevo
gobierno de Cuba” (Edwards 1974: 56).32 An authoritative orator, he
manages to gain command of the room, and “su actitud era más segura,
más serena; su presencia se imponía por una especie de superioridad
incluso física” (Edwards 1974: 55). Edwards, meanwhile, not only does
not engage with Castro but he also finds himself unable to respond to a
student who comments to him that Castro will “destroy the economy”
(Edwards 1974: 59). Rather, Edwards sets himself apart as a “model” of
intellectual forbearance due to his suspicion of such Manichean political
positions:

Bastaban, probablemente, cinco minutos de conversación conmigo para

que un observador experimentado se diera cuenta. Mi excesiva franqueza
y mi forma dubitativa, interrogativa de plantear los problemas, mi anti-
dogmatismo vocacional y temperamental, eran, sin la menor duda, emi-
nentemente sospechosos. (Edwards 1974: 67)
96 C. FISCHER

Despite Edwards’ apparent admission of his own weakness in contrast to

Castro’s vitality, it is the former who is in control of the narration at all
times. His self-deprecating manner stands in contrast to, and yet bolsters,
his constant attempts to position himself as the hero of the narrative.
In the scene at Princeton—a metaphorical weigh-in for the text’s main
protagonist-contenders—the lines dividing their performances of mascu-
linity from their economic visions are difficult to define.
The confrontation between the two men takes on heroic proportions
and greater economic and political implications over the course of the text,
as critics such as Mario Vargas Llosa (1983) and José Otero (1990) have
stated.33 Ariel Dorfman (1978) also supports this argument, although per-
haps not as he originally intended; portraying the struggle between Castro
and Edwards as one between different ideals of manhood, he shows how
the political and economic worlds that collided in the memoir are insepa-
rable from ideas about masculinity:

[Para Edwards,] Cuba sirve para leer … el desastroso porvenir que espera
a la patria bajo la conducción de Allende. […] Tal como en los cuentos de
Edwards, las fuerzas del pasado, el peso de la noche ancestral,34 las figuras
tradicionales, caerán sobre los rebeldes y volverán a poner orden, aunque sea
un orden sangriento, autoritario, represivo. Chile también confirma, para
Edwards, su irrevocable ley eterna: el que trata de liberarse será devorado por
Chile antiguo y señorial, por la sombra de los antepasados. (Dorfman 78)

Dorfman’s tirade against Edwards contextualizes this ideological struggle as

one of manhood, between a traditional (patri)lineage of a seigneurial order
and rebels who fight to liberate themselves from it. This struggle takes on
personal proportions on the very night that Edwards arrives in Cuba, when
he is received by Castro’s immediate offer to help Chile overthrow its dem-
ocratic institutions. Castro’s heroic masculinity, and willingness to fight,
carry with it the promise of political and economic change: “Fidel me dijo
que no vaciláramos en pedirle ayuda si teníamos problemas de interven-
ción armada. […] ‘¡Seremos malos para producir, pero para pelear sí que
somos buenos!’” (Edwards 1974: 69). Edwards, in contrast, defends the
democratic institutions Castro seeks to overthrow—an “institucionalidad
burguesa” (Edwards 1974: 376) that offers Edwards certain protections.35
For Edwards, perhaps the most damning evidence against Castro lies in
what he sees as the latter’s complete disregard for, and ignorance about,
literature. On a visit to the Esmeralda, a Chilean navy ship that sails around
the world every year for training purposes,
 THE EXCEPTIONAL ART OF GENDERED UTOPIAS, 1970–1973 97

Fidel examinaba un calendario impreso en Chile donde había un fragmento

de poesía chilena al frente de cada mes. Su escaso aprecio por los autores
se manifestó en las exclamaciones burlonas o sarcásticas que le merecía
cada fragmento. Uno de Nicanor Parra le produjo gran hilaridad. Gabriela
Mistral describía en sus versos escuetos, elaborados y ásperos, un erizo.36
“¡Qué tiene que ver con un erizo!”, lanzó Fidel, encogiéndose de hombros
y doblando la página. (Edwards 1974: 255)

Edwards’ representation of Castro’s disregard for literature extends fur-

ther, to all sorts of intellectual thought. In a generalized invective against
thinkers, Castro states that “‘[n]osotros en Cuba no necesitamos críticos.
[…] Criticar es muy fácil. Cualquier cosa puede ser criticada. Lo difícil
es realizar una obra, formar un país. Eso es lo que necesitamos: realiza-
dores, constructores de la sociedad’” (Edwards 1974: 321). According to
Edwards, praxis is clearly the highest priority for Castro, who considers
the role of literature to be ancillary and under the purview of those who
only join the revolution once the hard work has been done: “‘En nuestros
países siempre había un poeta’, me dijo Fidel, ‘que no había hecho nada
por la Revolución y que más tarde se subía al carro, desde afuera, y com-
ponía el himno nacional’” (Edwards 1974: 291). Edwards portrays Castro
as someone who believes art and literature to be the expressions of men
who privilege words over actions37; literary and artistic work are weaker
pursuits that contribute nothing to the revolution. It should be men-
tioned, however, that Castro, by many accounts, was actually quite an
avid reader and a literature enthusiast, and so was Che Guevara (who goes
unmentioned in Edwards’ account, presumably because he was out of the
country at the time). Edwards’ version of events—in which Castro specu-
lates that the fickle political sympathies of artists and writers are due to
their inability or refusal to fight—says more about his own ideas of mascu-
linity than it does about Castro’s.
Even if Edwards’ presentation of himself is not as full of bravado as
Castro’s, however, the former still has a very set notion of heterosexual
masculinity—one which is closely tied to his preferred vision for Chile’s
economic future. The hierarchical structure of the Chilean military offers
a pattern of masculinity that Edwards finds appealing, for example. When
the Esmeralda docks in early 1971 at the port of Havana for the first time
in years, a sensation of nostalgia overcomes him:

El sentido jerárquico y clasista que advertía antes de que el barco atracara

en la diferencia, de uniformes y de actitudes de oficiales y marinos, era de
98 C. FISCHER

un anacronismo evidente. Ese anacronismo, sin embargo, me producía una

desconcertante sentido de alivio, un sentimiento de vuelta a lo conocido
que los comisarios políticos [cubanos] no habrían vacilado un segundo en
calificar y condenar. (Edwards 1974: 236)

Edwards confesses to a feeling of “relief” as he sees representatives of the

extremely hierarchical Chilean military appear on the docks of egalitarian
Havana. This is a curious use of words, considering that this hierarchical
regime would become the hegemonic norm in the future—Edwards knew
at the moment he published Persona non grata that there was hardly a need
for nostalgia for the decline of the ideals of Chile’s military.38 In fact, he has
many positive words to say about its hierarchy, particularly when he eats
a meal onboard the Esmeralda “servido por hombres de nuestro pueblo
que se afanaban, silenciosos … [y] que mantenían … las actitudes sumisas
y criollas de un mundo bien jerarquizado” (Edwards 1974: 241). The visit
of the Esmeralda to Havana may even have helped precipitate the coup two
years later, because most of the sailors were evidently quite critical of what
they saw on their shore leave: “¿Era éste el modelo que les ofrecía la Unidad
Popular? El ochenta por ciento de los marinos rasos, si no más, sintió nostal-
gia de las vitrinas de las sociedades de consumo, por inaccesibles para ellos
que fuesen” (Edwards 1974: 295). The supposedly negative memories of
these sailors of their time in Cuba could well have led to them supporting
the officers who rose up against Allende, in the name of the same hierarchi-
cal masculinity—and capitalist economic system—that Edwards praises.
The salvos that Castro and Edwards fire against one another quickly
begin to escalate, precipitating the inevitable final confrontation between
the two. A golf game they play with Chilean military officers during the
visit of the Esmeralda is another scene in which Edwards builds up to this
confrontation. Castro starts it by predicting, out loud, that Edwards will
play over par at each hole:

El par del hoyo siguiente era cuatro. “Te doy seis,” me dijo Fidel, que ya
me había visto dando verdaderos palos de ciego […]: “Si haces más de seis,
gano yo.”
“Conforme,” le dije […].
“Te aconsejo una política conservadora,” me dijo entonces Fidel: “No
trates de meterla de un solo golpe. Con el primero simplemente te acercas y
con el segundo tratas de meterla.”
“Ir despacio para llegar más rápido,” respondí, citando su discurso en la
Plenaria de la Industria Básica el 7 de diciembre de 1970, fecha que record-
 THE EXCEPTIONAL ART OF GENDERED UTOPIAS, 1970–1973 99

aba por corresponder al día preciso de mi llegada. Fidel me lanzó una breve
mirada de reojo. Mi pelota, entretanto, siguió de largo después del segundo
golpe y perdí la apuesta. (Edwards 1974: 267)

This passive–aggressive exchange is indicative of the subtle way in which

they try to undermine each other. Castro makes it clear that he has little
esteem for Edwards’ golf abilities, and his recommendation of a “conser-
vative” strategy is likely a derisive way of indicating how he sees Edwards
politically. Meanwhile, Edwards’ mention of Castro’s December 1970
speech—which, earlier in the text, he calls “el peor de la vida de Fidel,”
showing his “debilidad” and serving as “el signo de que la Revolución
pasaba por una de sus crisis más graves” (Edwards 1974: 55)—likely serves
as a subtle reminder to Castro that he does not value the latter’s opinions
very highly either. And even though Edwards—typically bumbling and
hesitant—loses at that particular hole, he gets a hole-in-one at the end
of the course: “Mi golpe arrancó aplausos y exclamaciones. Fidel dio un
verdadero salto de asombro. ‘¡Después de esto,’ exclamó, ‘ya no necesitas
jugar golf en un año!’ Reconoció mi triunfo con un fuerte apretón de
manos” (Edwards 1974: 268). This time, Edwards comes off as the victor,
despite Fidel’s attempts to undermine him. This exchange is more than a
competitive face-off; each man tries to impose upon the other an entire
economic and political vision through the traditional masculine (and quite
bourgeois) ritual of golf.
The final confrontation between the two, however, is far less amicable.
Edwards is summoned at 11:30 p.m. the night before his planned depar-
ture from Cuba to the Foreign Ministry, where Castro and Raúl Roa, the
foreign minister, await him. Although the discussion never becomes physi-
cal, it is fraught with physicality: “nos paseábamos en sentidos opuestos—
él tiene el hábito de conversar caminando, sobre todo en los momentos
álgidos de la charla, y yo también” (Edwards 1974: 376). The language
Edwards uses to describe the scene is also one of physical aggression: at
one point Castro tells Edwards that he has given Allende a negative report
of Edwards’ performance in Cuba, thinking that this revelation would
serve as “un golpe definitivo, abrumador” (Edwards 1974: 362, emphasis
added), and that “me aplastaría” (Edwards 1974: 375, emphasis added).
Later, Castro states that the “attacks” of Left-wing intellectuals on the rev-
olution are of no importance to him (Edwards 1974: 372), and suggests
“quizás para amedrentarme … que la política cultural de la Revolución
ingresaba en un periodo stalinista” (Edwards 1974: 373, emphasis added)
100 C. FISCHER

that would evidently privilege “proletarian culture” over its “bourgeois”

counterpart. The language of physicality indicates how the aggressive con-
frontation is “un encuentro decisivo” (Edwards 1974: 356) in which each
man will seek to (at least figuratively) crush the political and economic
raison d’être of the other. Castro makes it abundantly clear, for example,
that he has no faith at all in Allende’s economic program: “Allende hasta
ahora sólo ha conquistado el gobierno, pero eso significa llegar nada más
que a los primeros contrafuertes del poder. Cuando se trate de conquis-
tar el poder, el enfrentamiento será inevitable,” he states (Edwards 1974:
367). Edwards, meanwhile, maintains the position that the UP needs to
remain democratic, because resorting to armed struggle would be a rep-
etition of what he sees as Cuba’s mistakes: “Por eso mismo no quisiera
que se repitan en Chile algunos de los errores que he observado en Cuba.
Porque esos errores, precisamente, harían que la experiencia chilena sea
mucho más frágil y mucho más vulnerable,” he asserts (Edwards 1974:
367). Despite Castro’s best efforts to provoke Edwards, the conversa-
tion proceeds calmly, which surprises the former: “¿Sabe usted lo que
más me ha impresionado en esta conversación? […] ¡Su tranquilidad!”
(Edwards 1974: 380). In the end, Castro has to admit that “es hasta buen
diplomático” (Edwards 1974: 378), and Edwards is able to walk out of
the Foreign Ministry triumphant, despite the fact that Castro has kept him
there until 2:45 a.m. The confrontation ends with Edwards having calmly
stood up to Castro’s aggressive verbal attacks, and having (at least accord-
ing to Edwards’ version of events) successfully defended the economic and
political path of the UP, despite Fidel’s insistence that the “Chilean way to
socialism” is weak and suboptimal.
Edwards’ account of his time in Cuba depicts his host country as a
dystopia, but his own place and motivations within that narrative, as an
exception to almost all of the (many) rules there, are paradoxically uto-
pian, in that their possibility is conditioned by a number of factors that no
one else could have access to. The only beneficiary in Cuba of the “bour-
geois,” democratic institutions that gave him protection as a Chilean dip-
lomat, blessed with a largely invisible wife taking care of his children, and
apparently above the fray of political ideology, Edwards can stand apart
from Castro even as he stands toe-to-toe with him. Moreover, his knowl-
edge of how the UP was defeated at the time the memoir was published
inevitably colors his account, so he is also able to take exception to Chile’s
past and future by abstracting himself from the political vagaries inevitably
wrought by the passage of time. He states in its final section—the “Parisian
 THE EXCEPTIONAL ART OF GENDERED UTOPIAS, 1970–1973 101

Epilogue,” written after the coup—that his retrospective approach to this

divisive time and place allows him to rise above any Manichean political
approach:

El maniqueísmo que todavía domina en la izquierda exigiría que … lo del

socialismo debería ser escrito en color de rosa y lo del capitalismo en carac-
teres como el carbón. Y sin embargo los acontecimientos demuestran que
el enemigo, llegado el caso, no se hace escrúpulos por cuestiones de argu-
mentos, en tanto que la izquierda, ella sí, tiene una necesidad imperiosa de
reflexión y maduración. (Edwards 1974: 477)

Edwards may consider himself exceptional in his ability to rise above

political divisions, but his representations of his own adamant rejection
of Manicheanism—and his heroic moderation—are positions as eminently
masculinist as the supposedly more demagogic stances against which he
contrasts his own. From his initial, tense interactions with Cuban writers
in the Hotel Habana Riviera, to his nostalgic interlude with Chilean sailors
on the Esmeralda, to his final showdown with Castro, Edwards medi-
tates upon the potential political and economic changes that Chile could
experience in the terms of sociability among men. His utopian aspiration
to independence from politics, from family obligations, and even from
time indicates the extent to which exceptionalism, in Persona non grata, is
reserved for those who are male and heterosexual.

THE LOCA OBSESSION WITH PAST AND FUTURE

The first crónica in Lemebel’s 1996 compilation Loco afán is entitled “La
noche de los visones (o la última fiesta de la Unidad Popular),” and is
centered around a photo in which a group of locas39 pose together on
New Year’s Eve of 1972. In fact, the entire collection of chronicles in the
volume gets its title from this photo, described as depicting “locas que
rodean la mesa casi todas nubladas por la pose rápida y el ‘loco afán’40 por
saltar al futuro” (Lemebel 18). The crónica, and the photo at its center,
represent the narrative power of exceptionalism in a number of ways. First,
they imagine the locas in the photo as participants in the public sphere of
the UP and hoping for “emancipación” (Lemebel 21); positioning queer
subjects as protagonists of that period (a narrative decision evidently lack-
ing in verisimilitude41) is a divergence from dominant narratives of the
UP, but at the same time it functions to integrate the locas into those nar-
102 C. FISCHER

ratives. Second, the very idea of loco afán on the part of the locas for the
emancipatory future to come (presumably under the auspices of the UP),
when combined with the fact that the crónica was written with nostalgia
for the UP so long after it actually fell, means that the text takes excep-
tion to the moment in which the photo was taken even as it locates itself
in such a specific day and place. The text manages to both idealize queer
sexual expression under Allende and mourn for its impossibility:

La foto despide el siglo con el plumaje raído de las locas aún torcidas, aún
folclóricas en sus ademanes ilegales. […] La foto de aquel entonces, muestra
un carrusel risueño, una danza de risas gorrionas tan jóvenes, tan púberes en
su dislocada forma de rearmar el mundo. […] Todavía la maricada chilena
tejía futuro, soñaba despierta con su emancipación junto a otras causas soci-
ales. (22)

Lemebel’s image of an expression of a “folkloric” queerness untouched

by either the martial discipline of the dictatorship to come or the invasive
corporeal images of first-world, neoliberal homosexuality is as frozen and
captured in time as it is dynamic and forward-looking. By being both
of a moment and outside that moment simultaneously, the description
deploys the logic of exceptionalism, figures queer subjects to embody the
aspirations of the UP, and ties together nostalgia for a lost predictatorship
expression of queerness with nostalgia for the time before the onslaught
of AIDS.42
“La noche…” opens in late December of 1972, in front of the
UNCTAD building in central Santiago.43 We find ourselves in medias res,
with a group of upper-class blond women to one side, clamoring against
the UP by beating empty pots and pans, and a group of workers on the
other, leering at them with disgust and desire simultaneously (Lemebel
11). Meanwhile, a group of locas moves between the two factions, cruis-
ing the workers and gossiping amongst themselves, planning a party at the
house of La Palma, who has invited locas rich and poor alike to celebrate
New Year’s Eve. The UNCTAD building is located near Plaza Italia, the
traditional dividing line in Santiago where the “barrio alto” begins to the
east and poorer neighborhoods end to the west. The fact that the locas first
appear between members of the upper and lower classes, between a group
of men and a group of women, and squarely in the middle of Santiago’s
urban geography, is surely no coincidence: Lemebel insists throughout
Loco afán and in the rest of his oeuvre on the liminal position of the loca,
 THE EXCEPTIONAL ART OF GENDERED UTOPIAS, 1970–1973 103

between rich and poor, past and future, and, of course, masculine and
feminine.44 The in medias res opening of the crónica is illustrative of the
location of the locas amidst all of the dueling factions in the narrative.
Although the crónica does look backward with nostalgia to the utopian
longings of the UP—including some degree of social integration for queer
people—it also looks ahead to the threats the locas face, including the
dictatorship and AIDS. For example, after the initial scene of the chron-
icle, the action flashes forward to the party itself: the travesti prostitute
Chumilou and her friends meet up on New Year’s Eve (again, in front of
the UNCTAD building) with Pilola Alessandri and her more upper-class
friends,45 and then together they take a city bus to La Palma’s house in the
lower-income (at that time, at least) Santiago district of Recoleta. La Pilola
has been goaded by Chumilou into bringing two of her mother’s mink
coats with her. Chumilou states that the coats, which give the chronicle
its title and which end up getting stolen at the party, will surely add to the
fantasy and cachet of the evening: “El blanco para despedir el 72, que ha
sido una fiesta para nosotros los maricones pobres. Y el negro para recibir
el 73, que con tanto güeveo de cacerolas, se me ocurre que viene pesado”
(Lemebel 1996: 12). When they arrive at La Palma’s house, however,
all the food has been eaten; La Palma’s explanation is that “estas locas
rotas46 son tan hambrientas, no dejaron nada, se lo comieron todo. Como
si viniera una guerra” (Lemebel 1996: 13). Here, already, both Chumilou
and La Palma have foreshadowed a dark future: a coup d’état is coming,
but so is AIDS.47 And despite the fact that eventually “los matices sociales
se confundieron en brindis, abrazos y calenturas desplegadas por el patio”
(Lemebel 1996: 13–14) at the party, an ominous light filters into the
house on the morning after: “Y esa luz hueca … de humo flotando a través
de la puerta abierta de par en par. Como si la casa hubiera sido una calavera
iluminada desde el exterior” (Lemebel 1996: 15). As 1973 approaches,
death is on the horizon, making the utopian innocence of the locas during
the UP era stand out all the more in contrast. The UP’s utopian long-
ings were under constant ideological, sexual, and temporal threat, and
Lemebel’s depiction of these threats to the utopia that the locas suppos-
edly experienced during the UP is a way not only of better articulating
that utopia, but also of drawing connections between the locas’ story and
the larger narrative of the UP.
Not only is the utopia of the locas’ political participation narrated as
being under threat before the dictatorship; so is their freedom to express
themselves outside of neoliberal forms of masculinity, whether gay or
104 C. FISCHER

straight, during and after the dictatorship. The locas depicted in the photo
turn out to be exceptional also because they are expressing in it a form of
queer masculinity that, for Lemebel, set them apart not only from other
UP sympathizers at the time, but also from other expressions of queer-
ness that ravaged Chile once the dictatorship took over. A greater political
presence by locas in the public sphere during the UP years brought about
at least the possibility to broaden what it meant to be both masculine and
leftist, in Lemebel’s retelling. The result was a critique of leftist discourses
of heterosexual masculinity, many of which manifested themselves in La
batalla de Chile and Persona non grata: the “new man,” the MIR revolu-
tionary, the bearded rebel ready to fight.48 Under the UP, they were able
to dress and act in a way that “subverted” capital:

la foto de las locas en ese año nuevo se registra como algo que brilla en
un mundo sumergido. Todavía es subversivo el cristal obsceno de sus car-
cajadas, desordenando el supuesto de los géneros. Aún, en la imagen ajada,
se puede medir la gran distancia, los años de la dictadura que educaron
virilmente los gestos. (Lemebel 22)

The locas were hardly immune to masculinizing influences trying to “edu-

cate” them during the UP—as evidenced by the Carabineros police who
yelled epithets at them as they headed to La Palma’s house on New Year’s
Eve—but Lemebel is less critical of those influences since they at least
came from within Chile, rather than from abroad.
When the crónica flashes forward to the dictatorial 1980s, it makes
clear, by comparison, how exceptional the locas in the photo were. Thanks,
presumably, to the flood into Chile of foreign media purveying first-world
expressions of gay and straight masculinity—which were often wealthier,
whiter, and better-fed—what it meant to express oneself in a queer way
changed drastically:

El “hombre homosexual” o “mister gay” era una construcción de potencia

Narcisa que no cabía en el espejo desnutrido de nuestras locas. Esos cuerpos,
esos músculos, esos bíceps que llegaban a veces por revistas extranjeras, eran
un Olimpo del Primer Mundo, una clase educativa de gimnasia, un fisiocul-
turismo extasiado por su propio reflejo. Una nueva conquista de la imagen
rubia que fue prendiendo en el arribismo malinche de las locas más viajadas,
las regias que copiaron el modelito en Nueva York y lo transportaron a
este fin de mundo. […] Tan diferente al cuero opaco de la geografía local.
(Lemebel 1996: 23)
 THE EXCEPTIONAL ART OF GENDERED UTOPIAS, 1970–1973 105

Lemebel condemns these new forms of queer masculinity as arriviste, over-

inflated, and imperialist—using some of the same anti-capitalist rhetoric
that Allende used. The utopian feathers and laughter that could be seen in
the photo at the center of the crónica were replaced by a market-oriented
“homosexuality,” for Lemebel, in which Chilean gay men were doubly
excluded: both from the “blond image” of New York homosexuality, and
also from even the possibility of being the (heterosexual) protagonist of
the dictatorial “new Chile.” The photo thus marks Lemebel’s attempt to
theorize how economics tried to homogenize the exceptionalism of sexual
self-expression that was allowed to exist (if not exactly flourish) under the
UP.
The particularity of the locas’ perspective is why Lemebel’s evocation of
the UP needs to be read alongside Edwards’ and Guzmán’s, even though
it was written much later. Not only are the locas in this crónica decon-
structing gender binaries, as so many critics have pointed out, but they are
also embodying a particular, historically specific, utopian vision. And yet,
this utopia described by Lemebel was just that—an imagined state that,
according to all available evidence, was hardly a time of liberation for locas.
“La noche…” re-imagines the manifestation of a series of masculinities that
never existed quite as openly as Lemebel would have it. Still, by theorizing
a way for alternative masculinities to insert themselves in the discourse sur-
rounding the UP, even in an unfeasible, impossible way, Lemebel’s locas
will endure in Chilean history long after the political debates surrounding
the UP itself have died down. Eduardo Cadava (1997) has written about
the link between photography and temporality: all photographs offer “a
glimpse of a history to which we no longer belong” (xxviii), since they not
only mark the end of a moment, but also render that moment as eternally
signaling a future in which it can be reproduced.49 This is why Lemebel’s
emphasis on the loco afán of the locas in the photo is so important: the
instant the photo was taken both attests to an exceptional past and harks
ahead to a time that has, like a photo, the potential to be reproduced again
in the future.

CONCLUSION(S)
Boym warns against the way nostalgia can lurk at the heart of ideology,
inducing an emotional desire for some sort of idealized return to the
past. This, of course, is what conservatism is all about, in her opinion:
“Algia—longing—is what we share, yet nostos—the return home—is
106 C. FISCHER

what divides us. It is the promise to rebuild the ideal home that lies
at the core of many powerful ideologies today, tempting us to relin-
quish critical thinking for emotional bonding” (Boym xv–xvi). To whose
“home” are we working to return in the future, and why? Thanks to the
texts examined in this chapter, we can think of Boym’s idea of nostos
in a gendered way. The performances of masculinity of all the figures
jockeying in these texts to embody the economic changes afoot—the
young workers evoked by Allende; the servile members of the military
commended by Edwards; Fidel Castro and the bearded, combative “new
men” of Cuba and the Chilean MIR; the locas in Lemebel’s photo; the
pensive, balanced intellectual espoused by Edwards; and the fascist
shock troops depicted by Guzmán—are “homes” to which these artists
desired, or feared, to return. Moreover, each gendered “home” has vast
political and economic consequences. Looking back upon these differ-
ent models of masculinity, and the economic models that they prom-
ised and portended during the years of the UP, it is clear that utopia,
and the different forms of nostalgia for it, are primarily sexual and eco-
nomic phenomena, in ways that Thomas More would likely never have
imagined.
Instead of using past and (unfulfilled) future temporalities to invoke the
economic systems to which they were attached—whether a destruction of
the bourgeois state, or a military coup, or Allendian Marxism—literature
and art can attest to the models of gender comportment and identity that
came into being in conjunction with them. Analyzing the art and literature
that examine the UP years after the fact offers the potential to capture the
ambiguities of different utopian imaginaries of masculinity as they disap-
pear into time: they look backward (nostalgically or not) and reflect upon
how the utopian future(s) of the UP were espoused primarily by men (and
the exclusions that resulted), in the case of La batalla de Chile and Persona
non grata. They examine a temporality of queer masculinity that was so
utopian it likely never existed, in the case of Loco afán. These models are,
in the end, all that remains, long after these political and economic tem-
poralities have faded away. These literary and artistic invocations of gender
thus take exception to the political and economic aspirations to which they
are positioned to embody, even as they are separate from them. Positioned
as they are between the “free play” of theory and the fixity of implementa-
tion, and between the past and the present, they take exception to a num-
ber of aspects of the history of this period, and highlight other aspects that
have heretofore been ignored.
 THE EXCEPTIONAL ART OF GENDERED UTOPIAS, 1970–1973 107

NOTES
1. For more information about the fascinating Cybersyn project, see
Eden Medina’s 2011 volume Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology
and Politics in Allende’s Chile.
2. First of all, “the monopolistic structure of Chilean industry, rapidly
expanding demands by workers for expropriation of farms and fac-
tories, and the corresponding distrust by private investors of the
government’s ultimate intentions toward private firms, all mili-
tated against substantial new private investment,” as Brian Loveman
has written (250). Meanwhile, inflation rose, due to capital flight,
deficit spending, and “escalating emissions of currency” (Loveman
250). As a result of hoarding (in the hopes that prices would rise),
as well as the cutting off of supplies (due to transport strikes) and
decreased imports from abroad, there were many shortages.
Chileans had to resort to rationing many goods: “thousands of
private supply and price committees, juntas de abastecimiento y pre-
cios (JAP) were organized to cooperate in local distribution of
articles of consumption to urban neighborhoods” (Loveman 250).
Lines formed throughout Santiago of people waiting to buy small
quantities of staple goods. Strikes were commonplace: at different
times during the Allende years, Right-wing public transportation,
trucking, and mining unions held labor stoppages to cripple the
government. Allende himself, in a 1973 speech before the UN
General Assembly (Allende 244–247) referred to a dispute between
the Chilean government and the US-owned Kennecott Mining
Company, whose mines were nationalized and expropriated by the
UP. Because of Chile’s dependence upon “financial, industrial, and
commercial relations with the United States,” the fact that it
incurred the wrath of major US corporate interests led to an “invis-
ible blockade” by the USA, which was intended to “‘make the
[Chilean] economy scream,’ as Nixon had previously ordered”
(Kornbluh 83). The CIA poured funds into covert propaganda
efforts in Chile, concentrating on the country’s newspaper of
record, El Mercurio (Kornbluh 88–89).
3. For example, as Tinsman points out, the fact that Allende’s vision
for agrarian reform in the 1970s was much more defined than
Frei’s had been in the 1960s, meant that the “free play” that
Jameson describes as key to imagining utopia became limited by
108 C. FISCHER

the reality that emerged; this caused major conflicts for the UP’s
agrarian reform efforts: “Ironically, under Frei, collaboration
among men was enabled by the limited and unfinished nature of
the Christian Democrats’ land reform project, which had allowed
campesinos of very different political tendencies and relationships
to the rural economy to interpret the Agrarian Reform as some-
thing on which they could project fantasies of inclusion. Under
Allende, the definition and possibility of realizing a particular uto-
pian project became much more concrete. […] In part, the UP’s
very success exposed the profound differences and conflicting
interests among campesinos” (Tinsman 266, emphasis mine).
4. The research done by Macarena Urzúa using Boym’s theories of
nostalgia in the Chilean context has been very illuminating in this
sense. See, for example, her dissertation Desde la memoria a la
nostalgia, ruina del barrio y la multicancha: Poéticas de la postdicta-
dura chilena (2011).
5. A number of clandestine communications to this effect have since
been uncovered between the USA and the UP’s Chilean opposi-
tion, although, as Loveman points out, “American or other out-
side pressures could not by themselves have ensured” the failure
and downfall of the UP (259).
6. The 2007 documentary Calle Santa Fe is about the legacy of
Enríquez, as told by the film’s director Carmen Castillo, who was
his romantic partner at the time that he was arrested and disap-
peared by the military dictatorship in 1974. Enríquez’s legacy was
also on display (although in a muted form) more recently, because
he is the biological father of Chilean presidential candidate Marco
Enríquez-Ominami.
7. Beverley does, however, admit to the dark side of the Latin
American armed struggle in general, including its complicated
relationships with “indigenous populations or to women and gays”
(56) and “residual colonial prejudices, voluntarism, authoritarian-
ism, sublimated machismo, and even racism” (58).
8. Tinsman, for one, writes about some of the contradictory visions
of gender ideals under Allende. More and more women working
outside the home meant more opportunities for autonomy from
their families, and more opportunities for sexual experimentation
and choosing what kind of gender roles they wished to play. This
went hand-in-hand with UP sexual education programs, which
 THE EXCEPTIONAL ART OF GENDERED UTOPIAS, 1970–1973 109

were related “to issues of personal self-understanding and sexual

fulfillment” (Tinsman 223). These opportunities for women to
envision ways to emancipate themselves from previous patriar-
chal traditions notwithstanding, however, Tinsman points out
that the UP continued to be very much a male-dominated orga-
nization; whatever sexual revolution that was to take place in the
UP would do so within the patriarchal and heterosexual dis-
course of the “new man.” For example, despite Allende’s con-
cerns about the UP being associated with sexual profligacy, the
campesino unionization and agrarian reform efforts “had long
celebrated men’s sexual prowess as an integral part of worker
militancy, and the heightened political mobilization of the late
1960s and early 1970s provided men with ample opportunities
to avoid the scrutiny of wives and to meet other women”
(Tinsman 274).
9. Tinsman writes that this was “a masculinist challenge that real
Popular Unity men took on the heterosexual task of wooing
women over to the right side. […] Allende likened men’s political
education of women to seduction, calling on men to ‘conquer
women for the revolution …’” (219).
10. As Robles has written, “en pleno Gobierno socialista de la Unidad
Popular, los homosexuales eran vistos como escoria, sus demandas
no existían, ni siquiera estaban contemplados en los cambios políti-
cos, sociales y culturales que ambicionó implementar el presidente
Salvador Allende” (13). Although this protest in favor of marriage
equality indicated that the protesters, “un grupo de homosexuales
que poco tenían que perder” (Robles 11) felt solidarity with the
demands for participation in public affairs made by other proletar-
ian groups, it is worth pointing out that gay members of wealthier
socioeconomic sectors of society did not participate at all. The pro-
test seems not to have been repressed by the police at the time, but
the leftist press—not to mention the rightist press—reacted viru-
lently. Robles quotes coverage of the event in the Chilean newspa-
per Clarín, which was otherwise generally sympathetic to the UP:
“‘Pero ligerito [los manifestantes] se soltaron las trenzas y sacaron
sus descomunales patas del plató y se lanzaron demostrando que la
libertad que exigen, no es más que libertinaje. […] Con razón un
viejo propuso rociarlos con parafina y tirarles un fósforo encen-
dido’” (Robles 16).
110 C. FISCHER

11. Power has pointed out that one of the Right’s most stinging insults
to leftists was that they were gay: “Cuando los simpatizantes de la
Unidad Popular se oponían a las mujeres anti-Allende, la derecha
… lo definía como un ataque a la maternidad. Como ningún hom-
bre “normal” sería capaz de oponerse a su madre, entonces los que
lo hacían tenían que ser “hombres antinaturales;” en otras palabras,
homosexuales” (1997: 262).
12. Florencia Mallon (2003) has discussed this in her writing about the
MIR and its Cuban predecessors: “the young mirista leadership
deployed a transgressive masculinity that resonated broadly with
the various forms of gendered rebelliousness … that had already
taken shape in popular political culture” (181), and also “drew
directly on the combination of the Cuban barbudo … and the
emerging ‘hippie’ rebels who preached free love … and stormed
the barricades of the bourgeois state” (180).
13. María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo critiques this idea in her chapter on
Che Guevara in her book The Revolutionary Imagination in the
Americas and the Age of Development (2003). Jorge Edwards,
whose work will be discussed in further detail below, states that
members of the MIR in Chile were close followers of Fidel and
Che, and that the performances of masculinity of the latter were a
major part of how influential they were: “El MIR seguía de cerca
algunas tesis de la Revolución cubana y en especial del Che Guevara,
cuya imagen, de boina y cabellos largos, con la vista fija en el hori-
zonte, presidía las salas de estudio, las veladas y las fiestas de la
juventud chilena rebelde” (Edwards 1974: 16).
14. A May 1973 article in Ramona entitled “Guerra civil: La gran
amenaza” condemns any possibility of uprising (from the Left or
the Right) because “el país sufriría pérdidas irreparables, daños que
nadie puede calcular” (23) (Unknown Author 1973a).
15. It should also be noted that the historical trajectory of utopian
thought in Europe and the Americas is evidence enough of the fact
that utopia is not simply an idea limited to the imagination; imple-
mentations of different versions of it have been attempted at mul-
tiple “moments.”
16. A number of works that analyze La batalla de Chile offer further
insight into the curious history behind its exhibition and produc-
tion, including the way its reels of raw footage were smuggled out
of Chile with the help of French filmmaker Chris Marker; for
 THE EXCEPTIONAL ART OF GENDERED UTOPIAS, 1970–1973 111

further reading, see Ruffinelli (2008), and Burton (1977), among

others.
17. This is the way two of Guzmán’s later documentaries open as well:
Chile, la memoria obstinada (1997) and Salvador Allende (2004).
18. The second part of the film, entitled El golpe de estado, premiered
in 1976.
19. Guzmán has admitted that as he filmed, he was almost certain that
the UP would end either in leftist armed struggle or in a coup by
the Right, but certainly not in a peaceful or democratic fashion
(Burton 41). Indeed, Ana Lopez (1990a, b) points out that “the
events presented by the film are thus constructed as leading to a
foreknown closure” (281), and Camilo Trumper (2010) has
alluded to the fact that the image of La Moneda Palace on fire in
the film’s opening scene “gives the narrator the power of hind-
sight, the objectivity that comes with distance from the event, of an
outcome foretold” (123).
20. Guzmán admits in his interview with Burton that “the daily lives of
the Chilean masses, for example, the changing relations between
men and women … all this was also in the original outline. We
were unable to film but a small part of this however. […] It would
have been very important to show this, particularly in light of the
heavily macho tradition in the rest of Latin America” (Burton
67–68). Curiously, this interview was published in 1977, before
the third part of the film was even released; Guzmán was aware of
this omission even as he was concluding the film.
21. Trumper does come close to saying this, pointing out how the
scene inside the apartment, for example, serves as “a treatise on the
way in which politics and class intertwine, how the material world
reveals these ties …. La batalla closely examines the relationship
between body, clothing, gesture, and accent as the material reality
by which class is articulated and reinforced” (125). The elements
he mentions have to do with gender, but he stops short of extend-
ing them beyond the implications of class.
22. Momios was a term used to insult members of the Right in Chile.
Different versions exist of the etymology of this term, but it is likely
the result of an analogy between what was perceived to be the Right’s
political intransigence and the immobile nature of mummies.
23. The editing process of the film affects our perception of this: Pedro
Chaskel edited it at ICAIC, the Cuban Film Institute (Burton 61),
112 C. FISCHER

after Guzmán smuggled the raw footage out of Chile. In this sense,
the film’s portrayal of the UP’s present was influenced by Cuba,
where “todas las fuerzas políticas de resistencia chilena que han
visto la película … la aprueban,” following the elimination from
the film of what Ruffinelli delicately calls “lo políticamente inopor-
tuno” (94). The film’s present is always fleeting, into other times
and other political contexts.
24. Eduardo Cadava’s (1997) discussion of the debate about the
relationship among fascism, aesthetic images, and politics during
the years of Nazism is pertinent here: Cadava reads Walter
Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction” as “a critical response to the fascist effort to
mobilize works of art—including photography and film—toward
both the production of an organic community and the formation
of this community (the German people or nation) as a work of art
itself. Benjamin’s insistence upon the disintegration of the auratic
character of the artwork, for example, belongs to his effort to
deconstruct the values of originality and community at work
within the fascist program of self-formation and self-production”
(45–47). Just as Joseph Goebbels wrote about art as creating an
ideal form for the national community to follow—an insidious
sort of model that could “expel the sick trends and make room
for the healthy to develop,” in his words (Cadava 45)—the order-
liness and hierarchy of military bodies so valued by the military
leaders in the images Guzmán provides were evidence, for the
military, of a “healthy” sort of masculinity, a “utopia” (for them)
that was antithetical to the sorts of masculinity idealized by other
male leaders like Miguel Enríquez, or by Guzmán himself, for
that matter.
25. Enríquez’s ideal of armed revolutionary masculinity struggled with
other specters as well, such as sexualities from outside of the repro-
ductive arena—heterosexuality was “compulsory” in the MIR,
from which gays were summarily expelled (Mallon 194)—and also
the “class, ethnic, and gender hierarchies” inherent to Chilean
society that, as Mallon points out, were reproduced within the
MIR even though the MIR was “supposedly founded to erase”
them (183). The sort of masculinity idealized by the armed Left
was thus vulnerable to several more threats than those mentioned
in Enríquez’s incendiary speech, as quoted above.
 THE EXCEPTIONAL ART OF GENDERED UTOPIAS, 1970–1973 113

26. Prominent Boom intellectuals sympathetic to the Cuban revolu-

tion, even those who had criticized the revolution in their own way,
gave Edwards the cold shoulder upon its publication. Alfredo Bryce
Echenique stated that “hasta un hombre tan bueno y comprensivo
como Julio Cortázar le quitó el saludo” (Vila 2003: 94) following
the book’s publication, even though Cortázar himself had signed a
letter published in Le Monde critiquing Castro (a propos of his han-
dling of the Padilla case, as we shall see below). Ariel Dorfman, in
an incendiary 1978 article in the Mexican periodical Plural, called
Edwards a “counter-revolutionary” and a “traitor,” and concluded
with the lapidary pronouncement that “su libro es una prueba de
que existen gusanos” (Dorfman 80). On the other hand, the book
was also unpopular with the Right: as Vargas Llosa pointed out, “el
gobierno de Pinochet había expulsado a Edwards del servicio
diplomático por haber denunciado el golpe militar contra Allende y
se apresuró a prohibir la circulación de Persona non grata en Chile”
(289–290). Edwards, however, did not shrink from this contro-
versy and in fact participated in it wholeheartedly, publishing invec-
tives as late as 1989 in periodicals such as Vuelta in Mexico that
defended the positions he first outlined in Persona non grata.
27. Edwards writes that at this time, “en enero de 1968 … las relacio-
nes de Chile con Cuba, además de rotas, estaban congeladas por
algunas declaraciones públicas de Fidel Castro en contra de Frei”
(Edwards 1974: 29). Later, Edwards “era uno de los pocos que en
la campaña presidencial de 1964 no había adherido a la candida-
tura de Frei sino a la de Salvador Allende. Incluso había firmado …
con gran escándalo del mundillo ministerial, el manifiesto de los
intelectuales allendistas” (Edwards 1974: 18).
28. Indeed, as Michael Moody (1985) states, “Persona non grata
enjoyed the dubious distinction of being censored from circulation
in both Castro’s Cuba and Pinochet’s Chile” (38).
29. This latter debate has, of course, been examined by a number of
Latin American thinkers, including Arcadio Díaz-Quiñones
(2006), Nicolás Casullo (2007), and others.
30. Padilla was jailed two days before Edwards was to leave the country
(Edwards 1974: 357), accused of showing the latter “una imagen
negativa de la situación cubana” (Edwards 1989: 35). Edwards
finished his tenure in Cuba on March 22, 1971, and on April 27 of
the same year, Padilla was set free (Casal 1971: 8) and forced to
114 C. FISCHER

make a speech in which he invoked the masculine camaraderie of

the war trench to emphasize the fact that the revolutionary work of
writers and intellectuals is to fight against enemies in opposite
trenches who criticize the revolution, rather than critique existing
structures of power: “¡Que seamos soldados de nuestra Revolución,
y que ocupemos el sitio que la Revolución nos pida! […] Porque,
compañeros, vivir y habitar una trinchera asediada de toda clase de
enemigos arteros, no es fácil ni es cómodo, sino difícil. Pero … ese
es el precio de la soberanía, ese es el precio de la independencia,
¡ese es el precio de la Revolución!” (Casal 104).
31. Edwards does not say whether he went to see Fidel’s speech
because he was sympathetic to the revolution at the time, but one
can surmise that his enthusiasm for it was greater in 1959 than it
was by 1970. The possible discrepancy between Edwards’ 1970
skepticism toward Fidel and his (at least possible) enthusiasm for
him in 1959 is worth noting, in terms of the discussion at hand
about the interactions of past and future, utopia and nostalgia, and
masculinity. The Cuban revolution was still very much a work in
progress at the time of this speech; Cuba’s alliance with the Soviet
Union was not yet on the horizon.
32. Fidel’s main proposal of the day, about which Edwards would
remind him 12 years later (1974: 377), is to enact an agrarian
reform in Cuba that would maintain individual property owner-
ship, with citizen landowners who “constituirían un poder de con-
sumo decisivo para el desarrollo industrial de la Isla, además de un
mercado interesante de importación para los productos del Norte”
(Edwards 1974: 57).
33. Otero points out how the two characters take on heroic propor-
tions—Edwards himself compares Fidel to Neptune (1974: 303),
a sort of all-powerful creator, and Otero compares Edwards to
Ulysses, a “hero-traveler” (52)—that go beyond their place as sim-
ply two characters in a memoir. Vargas Llosa, meanwhile, adds
heroic dimensions to the story without resorting to Greek mythol-
ogy; he points out that “el verdadero héroe de la historia no es
Heberto Padilla, quien, a fin de cuentas, queda bastante despin-
tado … sino Fidel Castro, ese gigante incansable que se mueve,
decide y opina con una libertad envidiable, y cuyo estilo directo e
informal, su aire deportivo y su dinamismo contagioso Persona non
grata recrea espléndidamente” (297).
 THE EXCEPTIONAL ART OF GENDERED UTOPIAS, 1970–1973 115

34. This is a nod to a saying coined by Diego Portales, which referred

to the importance of maintaining authoritarian order in Chile—
particularly at night, when unsavory elements from the “bajo
pueblo” could act out. Edwards wrote a novel with this title in
1965, which, far from validating the power of an old, seigneurial
Chile, is actually quite critical of the entrenched patriarchal norms
of the country’s bourgeoisie.
35. For example, Edwards points out that even if his work as a diplo-
mat were politically unsatisfactory to any particular president, he
still could not be fired without “un sumario administrativo en
regla, aprobado por la Contraloría General de la República”
(Edwards 1974: 276). These “bourgeois institutions” are precisely
what many of the subjects of La batalla de Chile chafe against.
36. To date, I have been unable to find a poem by Mistral that mentions
this “erizo” (in English, a hedgehog or porcupine); however, a prose
quotation from Gabriela Mistral: Su prosa y poesía en Colombia (2002)
contains a reference to “el pueblo raso que mira todavía al libro como
al erizo de púas o a la tortuga pesada de las Galápagos” (Morales
Benítez 59)—which is actually quite apropos to Edwards’ depiction of
Fidel. I thank Claudia Cabello for help with this citation.
37. Later, Fidel criticizes writers who “turned their backs on the revo-
lution” when “the situation became more difficult” (Edwards
1974: 365). Just weeks after Edwards’ departure from Cuba (and
Padilla’s arrest), a group of intellectuals including Simone de
Beauvoir, Italo Calvino, Cortázar, Marguerite Duras, Carlos
Fuentes, García Márquez, Juan Goytisolo, Octavio Paz, Jean-Paul
Sartre, Jorge Semprún, and Vargas Llosa published a letter to Fidel
in Le Monde, in which—from a position of solidarity “con los prin-
cipios y objetivos de la Revolución Cubana”—they request a reex-
amination of Padilla’s case and denounce “el uso de medidas
represivas contra intelectuales y escritores quienes han ejercido el
derecho de crítica dentro de la Revolución” (Casal 74–75).
38. The military’s close association with the Right would soon mani-
fest itself in Chilean culture and politics through non-democratic
means; the Esmeralda was even used for the interrogation and
torture of political prisoners during the dictatorship. The specter
of democracy’s demise is therefore inseparable from the military’s
hierarchical performance of masculinity, which is also on display in
La batalla de Chile.
116 C. FISCHER

39. I will use the Spanish term locas to describe the main subjects of
Lemebel’s text from here on out, because this word takes into
account the ambiguous way in which they position themselves. See
Melissa M. González's article (2014) about the term loca.
40. Jean Franco (2002) states that the title “refers to a poem by …
Quevedo” (229), but Ángeles Mateo del Pino (2010) corrects her:
it actually “procede del tango ‘Por la vuelta’ (1937), letra de
Enrique Cadícamo y música de José Tinelli” (227). She later points
out that the title could also come from José de Zorrilla’s Don Juan
Tenorio (228). The quote from Zorrilla is as follows: “¡Doña Inés!
Sombra querida,/ alma de mi corazón,/ ¡no me quites la razón/
si me has de dejar la vida!/ Si eres imagen fingida,/ sólo hija de mi
locura,/ no aumentes mi desventura/ burlando mi loco afán”
(Quoted in Mateo del Pino 228). Franco translates the title of
Lemebel’s collection as Mad Urgency (229); I translate it as Unruly
Desire (2009: 58).
41. The reality of the time, as described in the magazine Ramona,
was that homosexuality was a taboo, even amidst the liberatory
impulses of the UP. Many Chileans “las tenemos para indignar-
nos y hasta para pegarle un par de coscachos a algún homosexual
atrevido que se equivoque de clientela” (“La homosexualidad es
así,” October 10, 1972, 38), as an article of the time read. This
reality of gay bashing and oppression is not the only thing that
threatens to encroach upon the utopian fantasy at the beginning
of “La noche…”; ominous signs of a darker, dictatorial future
ahead (in addition to the specter of AIDS) can be seen through-
out (Unknown Author 1972a, b, c).
42. Many critics have pointed to the parallel that Lemebel draws
between AIDS and the dictatorship as two factors that limited gay
liberation, including Fischer, Fernando Blanco (2010), and Mateo
del Pino.
43. This building is a key trope throughout this crónica, because its
changing functions are reminiscent of Chile’s recent political
shifts. The building was constructed for the United Nations
Conference on Trade and Development in 1972, and even hosted
the black American political activist Angela Davis when she vis-
ited Santiago that same year (Abarca 1972: 49). It later became
known as the Diego Portales building, and served as the head-
quarters of the military government, and then, once democracy
 THE EXCEPTIONAL ART OF GENDERED UTOPIAS, 1970–1973 117

returned, it held “foros y seminarios sobre homosexualidad,

SIDA, utopías y tolerancias” (Lemebel 16). When the Diego
Portales building burned down in 2006, it was rebuilt and
reopened in 2010 as the Gabriela Mistral Cultural Center. More
information about the evolution of this emblematic building is
available at http://www.gam.cl/gam/memoria/historia-del-
centro/. This calls to mind Angel Rama’s discussion in La ciudad
letrada (1998) of the rapid changes in the nineteenth-century
Latin American city: “… la movilidad de la ciudad real, su tráfago
de desconocidos, sus sucesivas construcciones y demoliciones, su
ritmo acelerado … todo contribuyó a la inestabilidad, a la pérdida
de pasado, a la conquista de futuro. […] Difícil situación para los
ciudadanos. Su experiencia cotidiana fue la del extrañamiento”
(Rama 77). In fact, as Lemebel says of his crónica: “De aquella
sinopsis emancipada, sólo quedó la UNCTAD” (16).
44. This is something that Nelly Richard has pointed out (2004):
“artistic imagery invoking the figure of the transvestite … joined in
a single image two counterposed signals of gender: active (domina-
tion) and passive (submission). […] The convulsion of the trans-
vestite’s asymmetrical madness burst into a wry expression of
identity which signaled the failings of uniform(ed) and uniforming
genders, dissolving their faces and facades into a doubly gendered
caricature that shattered the mold of dichotomous appearances, a
mold fixed by rigid systems of national and civil cataloguing and
identification” (43).
45. To have the last name Alessandri in Chile is to be immediately
marked as a member of the country’s elite: two presidents of Chile
have had that last name (Arturo Alessandri Palma, who was presi-
dent from 1920 to 1924, and then from 1932 to 1938; and Jorge
Alessandri Rodríguez, who was president from 1958 to 1964).
Lemebel also mentions the last names of Pilola’s friends, “La
Astaburuaga” and “La Zañartu” (13), who are thus clearly marked
as belonging to the Chilean elite as well. These more upper-class
locas are treated with disdain in the chronicle: Pilola’s mink coats
are stolen, and as the first loca in the chronicle to get AIDS (fol-
lowing a trip to New York), Lemebel portrays Pilola and her
wealthy coterie as antithetical to the more innocent, autochtho-
nous, and indeed utopian expressions of homosexuality that were
supposedly prevalent in predictatorship Chile.
118 C. FISCHER

46. Oscar Contardo (2008) makes use of this particular word in Chilean
slang to explain some of the nuances of the country’s classism in his
book Siútico: “la palabra ‘roto’ es una bala, un cuchillo […]. Su ori-
gen más probable está en los militares rotosos—harapientos,
desharrapados—de la guerra de Arauco. […] Pero también figura en
figura humorística criolla: el roto desdentado, con ojotas, sonriente,
pícaro, alcoholizado. Verdejo pobretón, consumido en una fatalidad
que no se nota porque se le supone feliz en la rusticidad de su asenta-
miento menesteroso en los arrabales de la ciudad. […] El ejercicio de
‘rotear’ no tiene más objetivo que distanciarse […]. La mujer dice:
‘Yo no soy una rota, estoy por encima de eso, soy mejor.’” (19–21).
47. This is a topic I develop further in Chap. 5. Lemebel ties these twin
threats of AIDS and dictatorship together through neoliberalism,
intimating that AIDS—in Chile at least—is the byproduct of the
new economic model that the dictatorship imposed in reaction to
the UP’s management of Chile. For him, the neoliberal opening
up of the Chilean economy wrought by neoliberalism is literally
what caused AIDS to enter the country. The crónica flashes for-
ward from the “night of the mink coats” to the arrival of AIDS in
Chile in the 1980s, and one by one, the locas who were at the party
(and in the picture) fall victim to it: first La Pilola, then La Palma,
and finally Chumilou, who dies on the same day that democracy is
voted back into Chile in the 1988 plebiscite (Lemebel 1996: 20).
Both the dictatorship and AIDS brought death in their wake: “el
tufo mortuorio de la dictadura fue un adelanto del SIDA, que hizo
su estreno a comienzos de los ochenta” (Lemebel 1996: 16). For
more information about AIDS in Chilean cultural production, see
Lina Meruane’s monograph Viajes virales (2012).
48. However, Lemebel does not simply critique all parties and walk
away; according to Diana Palaversich (2002), there is a model of
masculinity that he does find to be worthy of emulating: “Disillusioned
by the projects of a stagnant, unimaginative left and by the conserva-
tive gay movement, Lemebel finds a potential political idea in the
Zapatistas and in Subcomandante Marcos, exemplars of a revolution
that diverges from strict Marxist models—one in which discrimina-
tion on the basis of ethnicity or class is regarded as one among many
injustices to be rectified. […] Both Marcos and Lemebel practice a
perpetual ‘queering’ of sociopolitical space and possess a broad vision
of revolutionary agency” (109, emphasis mine).
 THE EXCEPTIONAL ART OF GENDERED UTOPIAS, 1970–1973 119

49. As such, Cadava is able to go on to discuss the idea of the photo-

graph as a mode of prophesy: “There can be no passing
moment”—this moment being, presumably, eminently photog-
raphable—“that is not already both the past and the future: the
moment must be simultaneously past, present, and future in
order for it to pass at all. This is why this eternal repetition does
not mean ‘the return of the same’ but rather the return of what is
never simply itself” (31).

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 CHAPTER 4

Queering the State of Exception,

1973–1990

EXCEPTIONALISM AND THE STATE OF EXCEPTION

UNDER DICTATORSHIP
On September 11, 1973, a military junta led by Augusto Pinochet carried
out the infamous coup that overthrew Salvador Allende.1 After bombing
La Moneda Palace, the military imposed its immediate authority though
a series of declarations (bandos) that suspended normal work activity,
eliminated freedom of the press, and limited the free movement of citi-
zens in public spaces.2 Democracy had ended, and the military regime
soon began practicing extremely violent forms of imprisonment, torture,
disappearance, and murder, both at home and abroad.3 Despite these
suspensions of democracy, however, the members of the junta insisted
that it was Allende’s government that had broken Chile’s institutions,
not they; their focus was now on restoring the traditional power struc-
tures and the economic and social normalcy, interrupted, according to
them, by Allende’s UP government. The fifth bando, for example, justi-
fied the coup by pointing out how the UP “ha quebrantado la unidad
nacional, fomentando artificialmente una lucha de clases,” and that by
doing so, it was “evitando así los mayores males que el actual vacío del
poder pueda producir … siendo nuestro propósito restablecer la normali-
dad económica y social del país, la paz, tranquilidad y seguridad perdi-
das” (Gobierno de Chile, emphasis added). The “judo-like” maneuvers
that Steve Stern describes the dictatorship performing in its use of misin-

© The Author(s) 2016 123

C. Fischer, Queering the Chilean Way,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-56248-7_4
124 C. FISCHER

formation following the coup—such that “violence [the killing of leftist

dissidents] equaled salvation from violence [saving Chile from commu-
nism]” (36)4—constituted an entire discursive regime of concealment
and Orwellian doublespeak, in which sociopolitical rupture was masked
as restitution.
The dictatorship grounded this authoritarian language of restitution
in the terms of heterosexual masculinity, and aimed it as much abroad as
to Chileans. Portraying its interruption of democracy in the comforting
terms of patrimony, lineage, and perpetuation inherent to patriarchal fam-
ily life was an attempt to allay the fears of instability held by citizens and
foreign investors alike. Moreover, the rigorous political controls it would
place on the bodies of Chileans could be extended to shore up the rigor-
ous gender roles of the nuclear family. In March of 1974, for example, in
a glossy edition with translations in English, French, and German, and
clearly meant for circulation abroad, the junta published its Declaración
de principios del gobierno de Chile, in which the roles of men and women
are clearly delineated and circumscribed. While men were to focus on
ownership of property and the means of production, it was up to women
to uphold the more “sacred” aspects of these values.5 Pinochet’s memoir,
The Crucial Day (1982)—whose translation into English is further evi-
dence of the dictatorship’s obsession with its image abroad—also couches
the coup in the comforting terms of heterosexual masculinity. Pinochet
portrays the urgent need he felt to carry out the coup as an obligation to
uphold both his place in history and his masculine honor:

This state of affairs led some Generals … to exclaim with sorrow and pain,
“What will history say of us? How will it condemn us when the events of
these shameful days are studied, now that Chile advances towards Marxism?
The least that will be said of us is that we were weaklings because we stood
passively by while our country was destroyed ….’” (Pinochet 69)

Representing himself as a historical figure on par with “liberator” forefa-

thers of Chile like Bernardo O’Higgins, Pinochet defends his imperative
to act on behalf of the country. In addition, Pinochet’s self-designated
position in the book as one of Chile’s forefathers deepens his role as head
of household and paterfamilias, which offers him the perfect alibi to plan
the coup in his home with other members of the junta two days before
it took place: his daughter Jacqueline’s birthday. He writes, “[w]hen I
returned to the living room someone enquired about so many military
 QUEERING THE STATE OF EXCEPTION, 1973–1990 125

guests, and I answered [that] my daughter was receiving many gifts that
day. My calm demeanor and the birthday celebration allayed any suspi-
cion” (Pinochet 116). Here, Pinochet positions his patriarchal credibility
as one of the primary factors that make the coup possible. The paternalis-
tic order that he saw himself establishing and perpetuating into the future
was key to the dictatorship’s entire rhetoric, as Robert Neustadt (1995)
has pointed out:

Nuclear families were to support the great “national family,” la patria, as

directed by Pinochet, the father figure purportedly serving the will of God.
The discurso pinochetista deployed the image of the ideal woman within the
symbolism of the Catholic church, the Madonna, in order to (re)produce
la patria. (220)

By imposing dictatorial order using the language of heteronormative mas-

culine sexuality, particularly in contrast to supposed chaos and dissolution
during the Allende period,6 the new government shored up its overall
historical imperative to carry out the coup. Its use of the language of
paternity and filial loyalty—exercising its authority over the Chilean “fam-
ily” and projecting it forward in time—was the backbone of its attempts to
legitimize the intervention it had made in Chilean history.7
The appearance of political restoration that the dictatorship seized upon
to legitimize its authority abroad in the immediate aftermath of the coup
had economic implications as well. It projected itself to potential foreign
investors not only as politically stable, but as a place where an exception-
ally pure form of neoliberalism was being implemented. Although a more
corporatist style of authoritarian economic management was what many
military leaders favored when the coup first took place,8 the increasing
dominance in Pinochet’s cabinet of “Chicago Boys”—economists trained
at the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman—brought about
Chile’s evolution toward neoliberalism:

Led by the “Chicago Boys” economists, the junta moved toward free-
market-oriented policies that scaled back state spending and protective tar-
iffs, devalued the escudo and set aside price controls, and dismantled labor
rights and resistance. In April 1975, a “shock” policy announced by Finance
Minister Jorge Cauas sealed this transition by cutting money supply, state
spending, and public employment drastically. The Cauas plan set the stage
for Chile’s emergence as Latin America’s pioneer of neoliberalism and priva-
tization. (Stern 75, emphasis added)9
126 C. FISCHER

Dictatorship officials claimed that they had saved Chile from foreign eco-
nomic domination by the Soviet Union and that the economy would be
able to thrive following the coup—the hoarding, food lines, and scarci-
ties of the UP years would all be things of the past. A particularly strik-
ing visual registry of the dictatorship’s projection abroad of a new, more
capitalist view of Chile can be found in the book Chile ayer hoy (1975), in
which photos of UP “chaos” were placed alongside photos taken after the
coup of the same spaces, which had since been cleaned up. These images
are accompanied by text, in multiple languages, narrating the apparent
progress made in the meantime. The last page of the book contains only
English text (albeit poorly composed), without any Spanish at all, and thus
aimed squarely at Anglophone readers/investors:

The free world owes Chile a lot. Do not fall in the web of communist pro-
paganda. Give Chile a chance. Let Chileans do their work to build their own
future. Chileans have the faith to do it. The Communist echo boxes [sic] are
screaming at the United Nations and everywhere. They invent all sort of lies
[sic]. This is the price Chile is paying for not having accepted Russia at its
God Father [sic]. (last page)

The message was twofold: Chile had heroically freed itself of communism
in an exemplary way, and it was exceptionally ripe for capitalist investment.
Just as the dictatorship’s suspension of democracy was portrayed as
necessary for upholding traditional heterosexual values, the rhetoric of
economic exceptionalism espoused by the dictatorship established hetero-
sexual family men as its ideal protagonists. Nowhere was this fact made
clearer than in dictatorship collaborator and Chicago Boy Joaquín Lavín’s
1989 treatise Chile, revolución silenciosa, which proclaimed Chile to be
“un país líder” (93):

las compras en el supermercado se han transformado, para la familia, en un

verdadero paseo. […] Especialmente en las tardes, y a toda hora los fines
de semana, la familia entera, con el matrimonio y los hijos, va de paseo al
supermercado. […] Entre tanto, el padre podrá probar los licores, papas
fritas y numerosos otros productos que simpáticas jóvenes le ofrecerán en
los stands de degustación. (75)

Chile, revolución silenciosa outlined a number of ways in which the Chilean

economy had been “modernized” under the dictatorship, as well as how
the economic reforms of the late 1970s and 1980s also changed the ways
 QUEERING THE STATE OF EXCEPTION, 1973–1990 127

families interacted with one another. In keeping with the binary gender
politics of the dictatorship, Lavín talks about how these reforms were very
much in keeping with heterosexual family unity. The family spends time
together at the supermarket,10 which in turn makes concessions to hetero-
sexual masculinity by offering the father the diversion of promotoras whose
drink and snack samples can distract him from the drudgery of choosing
the regular groceries—leaving his wife “free” to take care of that. This was
the male prototype of Chile’s exceptional neoliberalism. The opening of
the Chilean economy thus had major symbolic implications for the coun-
try’s social relations: according to José Joaquín Brunner (1981), “el mer-
cado viene a ocupar … el lugar central como mecanismo de coordinación
de los intercambios entre los individuos” (88), including family members.
Despite the attempts of Lavín and others to “whitewash” the dictatorial
origins of Chilean neoliberalism,11 the teleology inherent to this masculin-
ity—one involving legacy and perpetuation—provided a template for the
indefinite projection forward of the economy.
The junta was able to portray itself as economically exceptional and
politically dominant thanks to the “state of exception” it declared. This
term was first coined by the philosopher Carl Schmitt (1922) when justify-
ing policymaking outside of democratic institutions in Weimar Germany,
and has long been used to describe the Chilean coup.12 The ambiguities
of the state of exception, in which governmental authority is exercised
outside of that very government’s juridical institutions—the law is sus-
pended so that it can, at a later time, be preserved—allowed the military
government to disguise its rupture of democracy as the restoration of core
Chilean values. The supposedly temporary suspension of the law takes
place in order to reinforce that same law; the fact that the law will always
suspend itself as needed to reinforce itself means that the temporariness
of the state of exception can quickly become permanent. The blurring of
the boundaries of governmental authority was key to Giorgio Agamben’s
reading (2005) of Schmitt, such that the “transformation of a provisional
and exceptional measure into a technique of government … appears as
a threshold of indeterminacy between democracy and absolutism” (2–3)
and lends itself to the proliferation of liminality and ambiguity. When
Agamben called the state of exception a “paradigm” (1) of government,
this was what he meant: an arrangement theorized as temporary could
quickly become permanent in practice. Indeed, the Pinochet dictator-
ship revealed itself to be very interested in perpetuating non-democratic,
authoritarian ideas into the future, and used the rhetoric of heterosexual
128 C. FISCHER

reproduction to confer an aura of permanence and legacy upon the eco-

nomic exceptionalism it wrought under the state of exception.
The central semantic ambiguity wrought by the state of exception—
that restoration could be confused with rupture—extends to many others,
given that, for Agamben, all language could be called into question in such
a state. This would have implications for art as it was produced under the
dictatorship. As Agamben points out, the state of exception’s rendering
of a law still valid in theory, effectively unenforceable in practice, is similar
to how a linguistic signifier can lose its correspondence with a signified to
which it previously had a tight, unquestionable bond:

Just as linguistic elements subsist in langue without any real denotation,

which they acquire only in actual discourse, so in the state of exception the
norm is in force without any reference to reality. But just as concrete lin-
guistic activity becomes intelligible precisely through the presupposition of
something like a language, so is the norm able to refer to the normal situa-
tion through the suspension of its application in the state of exception. (36)

For Agamben, the state of exception is not intelligible in the legal lan-
guage of the rule (even though the rule is suspended, in practice, under
the state of exception), in the same way that certain ideas cannot be named
by language (even though in practice, those ideas exist). This “excess of
signification over denotation that Lévi-Strauss was the first to recognize”
(Agamben 37) meant certain suspensions of rules under Chile’s state of
exception, but it also allowed for works of art to practice new responses
to this oppression, in the form of coded references to abuses, censored
ideas, past times, and subversive meanings left unnamed. For Willy Thayer
(2006), in fact, Chile’s state of exception made for a manipulated, simplis-
tically forward-looking vision of time, which art would question by plac-
ing multiple time frames into dialogue with one another (28–29).13 Art,
then, was uniquely able to take advantage of the loopholes and instabilities
inherent to the dictatorship’s discourse.
Certain works of Chilean cultural production did this by contesting
the dictatorship’s state of exception in a way that focused on the trope of
reproduction—both sexual and artistic. Deploying queer masculinity, dia-
metrically opposed to the reproductively oriented heterosexual discourse
at the heart of the dictatorship’s rhetoric, these works de-naturalized the
political teleologies that the dictatorship sought to construct through its
glorification of reproductive heterosexuality, in which legacy, progress, and
 QUEERING THE STATE OF EXCEPTION, 1973–1990 129

forward-lookingness were highly prized. In response, they mobilized what

Thayer calls “los efectos nihilizantes del suceso” (30), calling attention
to the ambiguity between continuity and rupture that had been created
by the dictatorship. Moreover, their queer focus on parody and citation
undermined the dictatorship’s projection abroad of its newly liberalized
economy as unique and exceptional, by pointing out how the dictator-
ship’s emulation of policies conceived at the University of Chicago was
what allowed them to copy and parody mass culture that was flooding into
Chile from the USA. They were thus able to offer the reminder that the
coup—couched in the rhetoric of heterosexual, masculine bravery—was,
paradoxically, what had made it possible for them to create queer art.
Overall, the art in this period played with the interchangeability of artistic
reproduction with originals, of lo chileno with the foreign, and with the
mutability between reproductive sexuality and queer refusals to reproduce.
By showing the effects on his body of “new media,” such as video and
(often imported) ready-made objects, Carlos Leppe’s performance art
pieces El happening de las gallinas (1974), El perchero (1975), Sala de
espera (1980), and Prueba de artista (1981) denounced the rhetoric of
Chile’s new dictatorial lineage of success and progress. Leppe explicitly
linked this progress to the procreative lineage of heterosexuality, and acted
out its queer interruption in his art through the performance of anonymity
(a paradoxical feat). Carlos Flores Delpino’s 1984 documentary El Charles
Bronson chileno, meanwhile, tells the story of Fenelón Guajardo López, a
Chilean man who wins a television contest for Charles Bronson look-alikes.
The film chronicles Guajardo’s quixotic attempts to make a contribution
to the circulation of Chilean art abroad by doing public impressions of the
American movie star. In the film, Flores moves within the ambiguous spaces
of signification opened up under the state of exception, oscillating between
a critique and an admiration for foreign mass culture, between an examina-
tion of neoliberal Chile as an importer and as an exporter of that culture,
between stardom and anonymity, and between Fenelón’s performance of
masculinity not only as simultaneously sincere and parodic, but also as both
a notably globalized embrace of foreignness and as a patriotic gesture of
Chilean skill and prowess. Finally, Alberto Fuguet’s under-examined 1990
novel La azarosa y sobreexpuesta vida de Enrique Alekán presents a mascu-
line protagonist moving between the dictatorship’s authoritarian, insular
narrative for Chile (a Christianized, family-oriented rhetoric constructed in
opposition to communism) and the foreign mass culture let in by the radi-
cal opening of the Chilean economy, thereby eroding its insularity (and,
130 C. FISCHER

inevitably, the tyranny of its heterosexism). Leppe, Flores, and Fuguet all
exposed how Chile’s promotion of itself abroad as exceptionally neoliberal
was equated with representations of idealized, heterosexual masculinity.
Whether their work was seen as supporting or critiquing the permanence
of the dictatorship’s state of exception depended on the interpretation of
how their respective works deployed queerness to mediate Chile’s hetero-
sexualized economic exceptionalism.
Although a number of critics have referred to a dearth of cultural pro-
duction—an apagón cultural14—during the dictatorship, this was actually
quite a productive time for art and literature produced in Chile. Although
the art that resisted the dictatorship was less visible during this time—
indeed, artistic anonymity is a trope shared by the three creators under
examination here—it was no less vital and cosmopolitan. As Flores put it,
“no estábamos retrasados culturalmente, estábamos súper al día” (Morales
and Maza 62), and a focus here on cultural production made inside the
country—as opposed to other studies focusing primarily on the (quite
vibrant) archive of Chilean culture produced in exile during this period—
illuminates strategies deployed by cultural producers to mediate authoritar-
ian rule from within. Although other dissident works of art produced from
within Chile’s dictatorship made use of feminist ideals to express a lack
of conformity with Pinochetista authoritarianism—most notably that of
CADA members like Diamela Eltit, Raúl Zurita, Lotty Rosenfeld, and Paz
Errázuriz—Leppe, Flores, and Fuguet used queer masculinity to specifi-
cally contest the heterosexual, reproductive, masculine terms within which
the state of exception was imposed. They worked in subtle and oblique
ways, within the very real confines of censorship, but they were able to
point out the semantic inconsistencies inherent to Chile’s state of excep-
tion. The gendered link between economic exceptionalism and the state of
exception during this period thus set the stage for the rhetoric of reproduc-
tive sexuality to become one of the most visible targets for art seeking to
critique the abuses and exclusions of both (Morales and Maza 2012).

CONTESTING THE SEXUAL AND NARRATIVE TELEOLOGIES

OF CHILE’S STATE OF EXCEPTION

The junta used the discursive ambiguities inherent to its state of exception
not only to disavow the central, devastating rupture of the coup under the
guise of heteronormative continuity and teleology, but also to perform
other disavowals. First, as seen with the above discussion of Pinochet’s
 QUEERING THE STATE OF EXCEPTION, 1973–1990 131

autobiography, reproductive masculine sexuality was key to the military’s

validation of its own credibility and strength—ostensibly offering it the
backing of continuity and legacy—and yet that supposed strength was
being deployed biopolitically to interrupt the lives of members of the
“national family” it professed to protect. Second, its patriotic rhetoric of
having “purified” Chile of outside economic influences (i.e., those of the
USSR) rang false in light of the military regime’s depiction of itself abroad
as so open to capital investment from the so-called first world. Third, the
assurances by the military that the country’s laws had been suspended
only temporarily in order to restore them in the future were soon over-
shadowed by the phase of the regime’s “institutionalization”: the new
constitution of 1980 aimed to project the laws imposed by the dictator-
ship forward indefinitely.15
In Chile, one thinker who focused on critiquing the teleological rheto-
ric of the dictatorship in the context of exceptionalism was Tomás Moulián
(1997). Though his work sought to expose the fact that the Chile of 1997
(“Chile Actual,” in his terms), even seven years into Chile’s restoration of
democracy, was the work of “militares, intelectuales neoliberales y empre-
sarios nacionales o transnacionales” (27) during the dictatorship, it also
performed a masterful deconstruction of its rhetoric of neoliberal excep-
tionalism. For Moulián, the supposed progress that neoliberalism had
brought to Chile was exemplified in the Antarctic iceberg put on display
to represent the country at the 1992 World Expo in Seville, Spain:

Tampoco era solo la puesta en escena de un distanciamiento de América

Latina. […] El iceberg representaba el estreno en sociedad del Chile Nuevo,
limpiado, sanitizado, purificado por la larga travesía del mar. En el iceberg
no había ninguna huella de sangre, de desaparecidos. No estaba ni la sombra
de Pinochet. Era como si Chile acabara de nacer. (41)

The iceberg, which denied the progressive passage of time both literally
(it was kept frozen even in the blistering heat of southern Spain) and
metaphorically (by hiding and whitewashing Chile’s bloody past), became
a metaphor in the service of Moulián’s much-cited denunciation of con-
temporary Chile’s dictatorial origins—and a point of contention for other
critics as well.16 It was a way for the Concertación governments that had
taken over from Pinochet to deny the fact that the neoliberal success
Chile was enjoying (at a macroeconomic level) had taken place on the
backs of so many dead citizens, and to hide its past behind a smooth, icy
132 C. FISCHER

façade. Even as Moulián’s analysis replaced the false teleology of neoliberal

“Chile Actual” by linking the past to the present in a new way—restoring
the memory of the past through sociological and economic analysis and
making an attempt to “establecer el lazo, el vínculo histórico, que une a
este Chile del pos-autoritarismo, con el Chile pasado, el de la dictadura”
(141)—it critiqued dictatorial and neoliberal appropriations of ideas of
teleology, progress, and modernity. For Thayer, in fact, the ferocity and
arbitrariness of neoliberalism in the postdictatorship is the clearest expres-
sion of the state of exception’s extension into democracy:

Y si no hace mucho la excepción concernía a la norma como excepción de la

norma, y se mantenía atada a ella como término correlativo, hoy en día, en
globalización, lo que corre es la excepción como regla, el estado de excepción
como proliferación empírica de la norma fuera de toda norma general: el
mercado, el arbitrio empresarial de la norma, en la anomia como mercado, o
como norma en cada caso … o en el arbitrio sin norma de la decisión. (24,
emphases in original)

Moulián’s contestation of the dictatorship’s teleology of exceptionalism

and the state of exception implies the importance of what Thayer calls lo
inactual (166), that is, what the construct “Chile Actual” represses17; that
Moulián uses a gendered metaphor to explain the dictatorship’s repres-
sions of its own origins opens up space for thinking about the parallels
between lo inactual and the portrayal in queer art of the refusal to repro-
duce and perpetuate oneself. In a quote apparently so important to the
text as to appear repeated on the back cover of the book, Moulián states:
“[l]lamo ‘transformismo’ a las operaciones que en el Chile Actual se reali-
zan para asegurar la reproducción de la ‘infraestructura’ creada durante la
dictadura, despojada de las molestas formas, de las brutales y de las des-
nudas ‘superestructuras’ de entonces” (141). The term transformismo in
Spanish refers, in Moulián’s work, to how Chile’s democratic governments
and other actors worked to launder the dictatorial origins of the economic
policies of the 1990s into a more palatable (even exceptional) model of
economic management. However, transformismo is also used (in Chile, at
least) to describe cross-dressing or drag. Moulián’s use of this particular
term to describe the dictatorship’s attempt to ensure the “reproduction,”
“continuity,” and “perpetuation” (141) of its neoliberal project by mask-
ing its authoritarian origins tacitly demarcates the claims of the dictator-
ship to (masculine and heterosexual) exception as queer in their falsified
attempts to reproduce. For Moulián, transformismo disqualifies the ability
 QUEERING THE STATE OF EXCEPTION, 1973–1990 133

of “Chile Actual” to project itself forward by putting its neoliberal legacy

in queer terms. Intentionally or not, then, Moulián opens up a space for
queerness to disrupt the legacy of dictatorship. Moulián’s choice of words
highlights the relationship between political and reproductive teleologies
both in the dictatorship’s claims to exceptionalism and exception, and in
the art and critical theory that contested them.
The dictatorship’s suspension of the law (in the state of exception)—tem-
porary at first, but soon exposed as a much more enduring situation (i.e., the
rule)—was predicated upon a simultaneous denial and embrace of (reproduc-
tive and political) continuity into the future. Given that its state of exception
was conceived under the aegis of heterosexual reproduction, its permanence
and legacy depended upon the dictatorship’s erasure (whether tacit or not) of
subjects whose creative articulations constituted queer effacements of repro-
ductive lineages. Yet at the same time, the exceptional neoliberal market ethos
the military regime professed to promote meant the visibility of a variety of
lifestyle choices and mass culture products, including some portraying non-
reproductive sexualities. It is perhaps for this reason that the Pinochet dicta-
torship did not apply harsh repression to sexual minorities as other regimes
in the Southern Cone did. Given Agamben’s insistence on the detachment
of signifiers from signifieds in situations such as this, dissident art was able
to call attention to other terms that had become interchangeable as well18:
original and reproduction, rupture and foundation, and queerness (the inter-
ruption of lineage) and reproduction (legacy). I argue that, for these reasons,
it was unclear whether an artistic character’s “exceptional” aptitude for life
under the state of exception would be composed of an embrace of reproduc-
tive masculinity and authoritarian teleology, or whether it meant—given the
prevailing need to distinguish oneself (or one’s product) in Chile’s neolib-
eral marketplace—taking exception to, standing apart from, that masculinist,
heterosexual authoritarianism. In what follows, then, I will focus on certain
works of art with masculine characters whose meditations upon, and incur-
sions in, reproductive sexuality served as proxies for how the works them-
selves mediated the state of exception’s purported permanence over time.

CARLOS LEPPE: ARTISTIC EPHEMERALITY AS SEXUAL

STERILITY
Carlos Leppe’s first piece of corporeally based art was shown in 1974, and
he was the first in a long line of artists to do performance art in Chile.19 His
work consistently offered up his own body as a model of frustrated sexual
reproduction—so as to interrupt the reproductively oriented teleologies of
134 C. FISCHER

the dictatorship—but the form his work took on dealt with artistic repro-
duction as well. In effect, as Gaspar Galaz and Milan Ivelic (1988) point
out, one of the principal aspects of performance art is its ephemeral nature,
due to the fact that the body always returns to its habitual functions once
the work of art has concluded: “cuando el cuerpo del artista pasa a ser el
soporte, la ‘obra’ es efímera: el cuerpo retorna a la condición de cuerpo
(en blanco), una vez finalizada la autopresentación … no hay relecturas: es
irrecuperable” (192).20 In the case of Leppe, this ephemerality performed
an economic critique. Given that his performances were one-off events—
albeit captured photographically—Leppe guaranteed that they would dis-
appear, or at least that they could never again be reproduced exactly. In
this way, he sought to counter the overwrought, extravagant discourse of
capital that had flooded Chile. In the opinion of Galaz and Ivelic, Leppe
was one of the many artists who were compelled to respond to neoliberal-
ism: “El verbo tener se conjugó masivamente. Las expectativas económicas
que se abrieron provocaron una reacción en cadena que afectó a la socie-
dad al generarse una psicosis de posesión, de exhibicionismo consumista,
de vocación mercantilista. […] Fue … un contradiscurso que surgió de un
marco teórico común, fruto del esfuerzo intelectual e interdisciplinario”
(205–208). Instead of accumulation and acquisition—and the status that
came along with them under capitalism—Leppe’s work performed loss,
disappearance, and anonymity21: “se redituaba frente al espectáculo que
ofrecía el país, evitando las luces, los brillos y el maquillaje que lo envolvían
y lo disfrazaban” (Galaz and Ivelic 208). This ethic of self-effacement set
Leppe strongly apart from (and allowed him to critique) the personalis-
tic, authoritarian presence that Pinochet had begun to command in order
to enforce repression and censorship in Chilean public life. Moreover, it
counteracted the dictatorship’s rhetoric of lineage and legacy with queer-
ness and estrangement—his own silence, the masking of his face, the trans-
vestism of his body, and the performance of the refusal to reproduce—that
interrupted the teleologies so valued by official discourse at the time. In
all, Leppe’s work demonstrated, and imagined alternatives to, the dicta-
torship’s appropriations of authoritarian masculinity, heterosexual repro-
ductive teleology, and neoliberal spectacle when intervening in Chile’s
historical narrative.
Leppe was loosely associated with a group of performers, artists, and
writers working under the dictatorship that was known collectively as
La escena de avanzada.22 The members of the avanzada firmly inscribed
themselves as an avant-garde movement, in that they worked to “sublate”
 QUEERING THE STATE OF EXCEPTION, 1973–1990 135

art into “the praxis of life where it would be preserved, albeit in changed
form,” as Peter Bürger (1984) has written (49). The theoretical writings
of Nelly Richard, who had come to Chile from France, were produced
alongside, even as they legitimated (particularly abroad), the art of the
avanzada.23 This integration of artistic theory with praxis mediated the
instantaneity of the performance with a “discurso teórico que … prob-
lematiza, se interroga, pone en juego conceptos críticos destinados a la
revisión de la estructura lingüística y las implicancias textuales” (Galaz and
Ivelic 201). Richard wrote that the avanzada sought to interrogate “every
artifice of representation serving tradition and its sleight of hand” as a
reaction to “the coup that shattered the preceding framework of social and
political experiences” (1986: 17–18). They did this by seeking to bring art
into spheres in which it could critique the existing status quo and function
in novel ways, but also by breaking down the disciplinary barriers among
different types of art forms (and theory), to effect

the destruction of the compartmentalization of cultural works into different

academic disciplines […]. This desire to eradicate the boundaries—or as
[Diamela] Eltit says, to ‘commit incest’—between the genres of art was
expressed, in the most significant works of the period, by a whole range of
displacements. (Richard 1986: 75, emphases in original)

By taking art outside of the institutions of the museum—to the street,

to performance, to politics—as well as beyond the frameworks of con-
ventional art forms like painting and sculpture, the work of the avan-
zada sought to democratize art and critique the representations of (often
heavily institutionalized) progress and modernization put forth by the
dictatorship. Within this movement, Leppe’s work came early and was par-
ticularly innovative; even if it was far from the most radical, it was unique
to the avanzada in its use of queer themes. Richard (2004) has written
that “visual arts were the first space [in Chile] to introduce the theme of a
gay aesthetic as a form of questioning sexual identity and social repression,
patriarchal culture and liberating utopias of revolutionary desire” (44),
and points to Leppe’s work, along with that of Juan Dávila,24 as a “decisive
precedent” in this sense. Leppe’s work functioned apart from mainstream
art institutions in the late 1970s and early 1980s, in the sense that it took
exception from them on economic and sexual grounds; however, just as
Bürger predicted, it was constantly on the verge of being recaptured into
official circles, precisely because of the obliqueness of its critique.
136 C. FISCHER

In Leppe’s performances, he publicly admitted his homosexuality by,

paradoxically, putting it in corporeal, non-verbal terms that were in acces-
sible to most. The highly coded nature of Leppe’s work—and that of
the avanzada as a whole—meant that its effectiveness was subject to cri-
tique, particularly in later years when political repression became lighter.25
Cuerpo correccional, Richard’s early (1980) volume about Leppe’s work,
was typical of other critics at the time in that it made repeated references to
queer themes in his work without ever directly mentioning homosexual-
ity.26 For Richard, however, theorizing about Leppe’s art was secondary to
the expression of Leppe’s body, which, for her, was the only way for “any
superfluous discourse or unspoken pressure which escapes or undermines
the syntax of the permitted” to manifest itself under dictatorial censorship
(1986: 72). In this sense, his body operated like a coiled spring, expressing
itself by explosively relieving the tension imposed on it by outside authori-
tarian and sexually normative forces: the seemingly involuntary nature of
its outbursts of meaning exceeded words. This was typical of work under
the state of exception, under which semantic ambiguities blurred the lines
between censorship and confession, as well as between original and artistic
copy: words about Leppe’s work, subject as they were to censorship, were
not always able to openly describe the sexually and politically dissident
aspects of Leppe’s body (of) work. These aspects had to come across as an
unspeakable and unwriteable excess—the actions outside of language that
corresponded, analogously, to the practices of repression that could be
enacted outside of the written law under the state of exception. Richard,
evidently aware of this, made use of the avant-garde complicity between
artist and critic—of which her second-person interpellation of Leppe
throughout Cuerpo correccional is proof—by reinforcing her reading of
Leppe’s work as a performance of self-containment with her own criti-
cal self-containment through euphemistic language. If, under the state of
exception, rupturing democracy could be made in official discourse to
mean the continuity of the law, then Leppe’s and Richard’s repressions
could also mean confessions and exposures, and Leppe’s corporeal pres-
ence could also mean his own effacement. Since, as Neustadt writes, “the
concept of ‘performance’ [functions] not only in terms of theatrical or
dramatic representation, but also in the sense of accomplishment, achieve-
ment, and success” (220), Leppe’s performances were paradoxically suc-
cessful to the extent that they modeled failure, in terms of economics and
of sexual and aesthetic reproduction.27 Since Chile’s state of exception
was a heterosexual phenomenon, a politically dissident artist with a queer
 QUEERING THE STATE OF EXCEPTION, 1973–1990 137

body such as Leppe’s became doubly subject to repression, and doubly

likely to crack under the pressure in the face of internal urges and external
forces that would inevitably lead to leaks (both bodily and informational)
and betrayals.
The coded nature of Leppe’s work allowed for a queer critique of
Chile’s discourse of neoliberal exceptionalism as well as of the coun-
try’s state of exception. His use of corporeality to exceed the meaning
of words about it meant that his body stood apart from those words,
even as it functioned in conjunction with them (particularly when he
was being addressed by Richard in the second person). This was a way,
too, of turning Chile’s heterosexualized neoliberal discourse on its ear:
Leppe, like the Chilean economy seeking to distinguish itself abroad
as a place for foreign investment, distinguished himself under dicta-
torship, as one of the only artists at the time to use both sexually and
politically dissident themes. Leppe’s complex location in Chile’s offi-
cial art world—from which he stood apart even as he was written up
in El Mercurio, the periodical most associated with the dictatorship—
was also a way for him to critique Chile’s exceptionalism. As a mem-
ber of the avanzada, which professed a position of dissidence from the
Chilean art world as it stood in in the 1970s and 1980s,28 Leppe’s work
was often read as politically dissident. Yet at the same time, his presence
in the mainstream media meant that he could insert issues of queer-
ness into public discourse, albeit in roundabout ways.29 Leppe, in this
sense, stood apart from, and yet worked within, the official circles of
the dictatorship, which allowed him to critique the dictatorship by say-
ing things like “la vida ‘censurada’ me violenta” in a mainstream maga-
zine like Paula in 1977 (Marchant Lazcano 41) even though his work
was never in fact subject to censorship. He was the author of more
than ten performances held between 1973 and 2001, but my analysis
here focuses primarily on four: El happening de las gallinas (1974), El
perchero (1975), Sala de espera (1980), and Prueba de artista (1981).
These works offer the most illuminating examples of the ways in which
Leppe brought an innovative, gender-oriented bent to the work of the
Escena de avanzada, while also posing an important sexual, political,
and economic critique of the military regime’s discourse of exception-
alism (Romera 1973; Marchant Lazcano 1977).
In El happening de las gallinas,30 held in Santiago’s Carmen Waugh
Gallery, Leppe sat on a platform, wearing regular clothing but with a floral
funeral wreath around his neck. The public was invited to circulate around
138 C. FISCHER

him, amidst life-sized plaster hens that had been distributed throughout
the floor. Behind the platform was a large wardrobe (possibly a veiled ref-
erence to the “closet”),31 on whose shelves had been placed a number of
plaster eggs; a cello—which Leppe later said was a $160,000 Stradivarius,
confessing his “terror” that it would be broken (Ercilla 1974)—was
placed next to the wardrobe (Fig. 4.1). An atmosphere of shock and
confusion prevailed during the event: first, because of the camera flashes
“bombarding” (Qué Pasa) the spectators (photos of the performance were
put on display in the gallery a few days later), and second, in reaction to
an unnamed but “muy seria” art critic shattering one of the plaster hens
against the wall amidst an atmosphere of “locura” (Paula 1974).32 A num-
ber of articles about El happening mentioned the “lack of understanding”
(Ercilla 1974) and “disinformation” among some spectators (Marchant
Lazcano 41). A number of people stole eggs and hens. Afterward, there
was a cocktail party in which pickled eggs and pipeño wine were served.

Fig. 4.1 El happening de las gallinas (1974), by Carlos Leppe. Image courtesy of
the D21 Gallery, Santiago, Chile
 QUEERING THE STATE OF EXCEPTION, 1973–1990 139

Aside from being the first work of Chilean performance art, El happen-
ing was groundbreaking because it made use of queerness to counter the
dictatorship’s appropriation of reproductive teleology, patrimony, and
lineage. Fertility, legacy, and existence itself were all called into question
with Leppe’s playful use of the (proverbial and literal) chickens and eggs
(Richard 1980: 19): which came first? Which begat which? Could the
objects—spread as they were all over the gallery in random ways—be put
into any kind of order that could lend them the comforting sequence of
teleology? Leppe, sitting amidst the chaos, said nothing to the gathered
spectators walking around the gallery, denying them the opportunity
to read any order into what they saw. Even though Richard and other
critics33 writing about Leppe in Chile and in Spanish made only oblique
references to the queer aspects of the work—Richard writes that Leppe
“construy[e]—a escala materna—[s]u propia teleología, enmarcada en el
formato del Happening” (1980: 21)—Patricio Marchant (1983) wrote
much more explicitly about Leppe, in English and in a foreign publica-
tion, that “the gay work of art presents itself in this coming-out pre-
sentation as a struggle against official truth, as rage … against a truth
which—as it must assert—is simply falsehood” (77). Other than through
photography, El happening could never again be seen as it was when it
was first performed; by frustrating not only heterosexual reproduction
but also exact technological reproducibility, it tied content to form. The
political critique in El happening was not only of dictatorial heteronor-
mativity, however: the work also exposed the falsity of the dictatorship’s
appropriation of teleology to legitimize its economic policies. The fact
that the spectators of the work stole so many of the chickens and eggs, in
this sense, revealed that behind the façade of legitimacy projected by the
dictatorship, there was rapacious, uncontrolled robbery and disappear-
ance. For Richard, the fact that the objects were “llevados a la fuerza,
arrebatados por los espectadores” was “una metáfora voraz en cuya rel-
ación el saqueo general de las piezas se compara—por compulsión, por
agresividad—con el acto de la devoración” (1980: 23). Although the
dictatorship had not yet embraced neoliberalism in 1974, capitalism
had definitely been incorporated into its discourse, and Leppe’s work
reminded all present of the fact that much of what had happened in
Chile in the previous year, in the name of heterosexuality and capitalism,
had involved sacking, compulsive and often arbitrary aggression, and
forced disappearances.
140 C. FISCHER

By keeping the performance wordless, he allowed his body, and the

signs all around him, to exist both in conjunction with, and in excess of, the
words of his critics and the spectators. In this way, he took advantage of the
state of exception to allow (for example) the plaster hens to divulge (and
parody) his stereotypically homosexual attachment to his mother, without
him having to say a word, in the same way that under the state of exception,
the letter of the law is simultaneously in effect and violated (Agamben 36).
Meanwhile, his rejection of reproductive sexuality—exemplified, as Richard
wrote, “en lo incalculable de los huevos o gallinas seriados en yeso, en la
sin numeración de las copias (de divulgación) y perennidad de la matriz
exotérica/en tu propia incontinencia, tú exhibes la dimensión incontrol-
able y fácilmente catastrófica de la función reproductora” (1980: 19)—was
a critique of the excessive investment by the dictatorship in heterosexual
rhetoric, such that it equated success with accumulation and proliferation
(of money and of procreative, heterosexual family life). El happening cri-
tiqued reproduction and itself could never be reproduced, and as such, it
critiqued both the state of exception and exceptionalism.
Leppe’s second installation was entitled El perchero, and was held in
1975 in the Módulos y Formas Gallery in Santiago. The work consisted
of three life-sized, full-body photographs34 of the artist hung from hang-
ers—as with El happening, a possible reference to the epistemology of
the closet. Two of the photos were of the artist wearing a nineteenth-
century-era dress complete with ruffles and petticoats; in one, two breasts
protrude from the dress, and in the other, just one breast protrudes. In
both of these, the artist is hiking up the dress, revealing legs bandaged
up to the knees. The third photo is of the artist naked, except for two
bandages covering his nipples and a third covering his genitals, in a simu-
lation of castration (Galaz and Ivelic 197) or androgyny (Huneeus 463).
In all three photos, Leppe has his head bent over backwards but he is
still recognizable; he has made no attempt to use makeup to disguise his
unshaven, masculine features (Fig. 4.2). The three photos were placed
inside transparent plastic sheeting and then hung such that the portraits
were folded at the height of the artist’s waist. The viewer could thus never
see the entire bodies at the same time; he or she had to look at the body
either from the waist down or from the waist up. Once the photographs
were hung, it appeared as though the artist’s face were aimed squarely at
the floor. El perchero marked a continuation of the motifs of sexual ambi-
guity, repression, and critique of dictatorial economics that had become
dominant in Leppe’s artistic work.
 QUEERING THE STATE OF EXCEPTION, 1973–1990 141

Fig. 4.2 El perchero (1975), by Carlos Leppe. Image courtesy of the D21 Gallery,
Santiago, Chile

In contrast to Pinochet’s insistence on his own individual subject-

hood in the official history of the dictatorship, Leppe opted for anonym-
ity and disguise in El perchero. Since his physical body was not present
at the performance, the work’s use of photography allowed an infinite
number of copies of Leppe’s body to be theoretically available, and their
interchangeability with the original meant a symbolic renunciation of the
prestige that comes with artistic originality. The way he tears his dress is an
evocation of Biblical descriptions of those who tore their garments as an
expression of mourning and loss (Richard 1980: 45): in this case, for his
own individual subjecthood, as well as for the absence (or impossibility)
of words for him to express himself. Silencing himself, mass-producing
images of himself, partially masking his identity35 through the position of
his face, and dressing in drag, Leppe rejected the individualistic “afán de
142 C. FISCHER

figurar” that had become the dominant mode of the dictatorship’s eco-
nomic and historical discourse. Simultaneously covering up and exposing
his body—a dialectic between lying and admission (mentir and desmentir,
or cubrir and descubrir, as Richard artfully puts it (1980: 43))—Leppe’s
mourning and effacement were expressions of presence and revelation.
Thanks to the state of exception and the semantic slippages it made pos-
sible, his disguise became an open declaration of truth.
Leppe’s performance Sala de espera, held in Santiago’s Sur Gallery, was
a tour de force that included a number of disparate elements, “challeng-
ing” viewers to “encontrar una lectura que le[s] permitiera relacionar los
múltiples signos que articulaban la puesta en escena” (Galaz and Ivelic
204). Like the eggs and chickens strewn about in El happening, view-
ers were called upon to create some sort of order, and teleology, from
the chaos. The space was illuminated with 40-watt neon tubes, with all
the wiring exposed, making for “una atmósfera artificial de iluminación”
(Galaz and Ivelic 202). A number of televisions were set around the room;
one was tuned to a regular commercial station, and then there were three
others showing a video entitled “Las cantatrices,”36 which included shots
of the artist made up as a woman and wrapped in a plaster cast,37 and foot-
age of Leppe’s mother talking about him and their life together, all while
various Wagner operas played in the background. The space was comple-
mented by a clay object made to look like a television that was actually an
altar (known in Chile as an animita) with the Virgin Mary, photos of the
artist as a child with his mother, and other objects from his childhood.
There was also a projector that showed slides of Leppe’s “ámbito famil-
iar” (Galaz and Ivelic 202–204). Once again, Leppe’s physical body was
absent, and thus the potential for exact photographic reproducibility of
the work was missing; moreover, the objects installed in the gallery were
gradually removed, so again, technological reproduction was impossible
(and, in effect, only two components of it have been preserved, according
to Galaz and Ivelic (204)).
In addition to performing, in terms of form, the impossibility of
technological reproduction, the work’s content posed queerness as the
“containment” (to use Richard’s term) of lineage, both reproductive and
political. Situated at the intersection of all the conventional, mainstream
(and, by implication, heteronormative) discourses that circulated in Chile
at the time, including those that were medical, popular (television and
music), and family-based, the performance showed the effect that the
reproductively oriented discourse of the dictatorship had on the queer
 QUEERING THE STATE OF EXCEPTION, 1973–1990 143

body. In a 1977 interview, Leppe stated that waiting rooms—as well as

other public places where institutional discourses made their Foucauldian
impact on bodies, like crematoria, saunas, and restrooms—interested him
because of the “aggressive” aspects of their “asepsia” (Díez 29): people
are often impassive in such public spaces, to hide their own private suffer-
ing and inner conflicts. Sala de espera performed these conflicts by mak-
ing repeated, if cryptic, references to gay culture—the opera music, the
video images of Leppe wearing makeup, and the recorded monologue
by Leppe’s mother detailing her close relationship with him.38 The work
was an illustration of a body in the crossfire between the heteronorma-
tive and the queer: the sounds of the different recordings clashed and
were distorted, and Leppe’s body—immobilized in a cast and yet with
his mouth pried open—appeared grotesque and contorted. As Fernando
Balcells has pointed out, Sala de espera is a continuation of many of the
major tropes in Leppe’s work, including sexual identity, psychoanalysis,
and social criticism (Díez 1977):

… it is not an act of exhibitionism or of personal liberation (which is proven

by the plaster cast), but a statement on the fragmentation of identity. […]
Its aim extends beyond the … analogy between masculinity/authority and
femininity/affectivity […]. The work of Leppe points to the establishment
of a creative subject capable of recognizing in his own body the social con-
flicts which traverse him and which make him conform to society. (quoted
in Richard 1986: 72–73)

The year 1980, when Sala de espera was performed, brought with it the
plebiscite in which Chilean voters maintained Pinochet’s government in
power for eight more years and approved his constitution, projecting the
lineage of the dictatorship forward in time. In this sense, Sala de espera
can be read as a performance of conflict: one that may have taken place
between Pinochet’s pretenses to reproductive, political teleology, on one
hand, and Leppe’s resistance to reproductive lineage, on the other.
The last work by Leppe to be discussed here is Prueba de artista, which
was performed at the Taller de Artes Visuales in 1981. Carried out along-
side Pablo Dittborn, who wrote a text about the performance, it involved
two unnamed shirtless men—referred to in the text solely as “ele and
eme”—embracing one another. One of them had the word “ACTIVO”
stenciled on his chest in wet paint; following their embrace, the other also
ended up with the same word on his own chest, but in reverse (Fig. 4.3).
144 C. FISCHER

Fig. 4.3 Prueba de

artista (1981), by Carlos
Leppe. Image courtesy of
the D21 Gallery,
Santiago, Chile

The performance queered both sexual and artistic reproduction: the

embrace between two men to potentially mass-produce art evoked non-
reproductive sexual activity (the word activo, in Spanish, describes the
penetrating partner in gay sex, but it also refers to an economic “asset”—a
reference to the dictatorship’s turn toward the neoliberal). If an artist’s
main assets are her original ideas, and those ideas are no longer proper
to her, thanks to the existence of infinite copies of them, then the artist’s
economic power is rendered moot, and she becomes impoverished and
vulnerable in a capitalist society where she must live from the sale of her
creations—another reference to Leppe’s ethic of self-effacement. Prueba
de artista thus followed Leppe’s earlier performances in that it employed
aesthetics to critique the dictatorship’s way of using the discourse of het-
erosexual reproduction to perpetuate authoritarian economic and political
ideas.
 QUEERING THE STATE OF EXCEPTION, 1973–1990 145

Like many works of the avanzada, Prueba de artista played with the
semantic ambiguities of a number of words to interrogate their deploy-
ment by the dictatorship in the name of political and sexual repression
and exclusion. La feliz del edén (1983), the title of Dittborn’s text about
Prueba de artista, refers to a line in Chile’s national anthem calling the
country’s “campo de flores bordados … la copia feliz del Edén.” Even
though (or perhaps, because) his title omits the word copia, Dittborn calls
attention from the very beginning of the work to the hierarchical relation-
ship between artistic original and copy: “se quiebra … la relación autor/
itaria, jerarquizada y dependiente entre una matriz única y un número
indeterminado de copias: a partir de la primera copia se abre la posibilidad
de producir una matriz, impresión mediante” (35). Like the interrogation
of the chicken/egg conundrum in El happening de las gallinas, this work
questioned artistic—and commercial—originality, de-authorizing any one
original production vis-à-vis its copies by making it impossible to distin-
guish between the two. Moreover, by mobilizing—through his paradoxi-
cal omission of the word—the ambiguity of reproduction as “copious”
fertility but also mechanically copied sterility, Dittborn was able to make
judicious use of semantic slippages by relating artistic reproductions (and
copies) to sexual reproduction (or the lack thereof), while also joining the
long list of critics making veiled references to Leppe’s homosexuality. One
page containing solely a reprint of the Real Academia Española’s mul-
tiple definitions of the word madre, pointing out how it refers to (among
other things) the mother and also to the idea of the “root,” or “stem,”
or—more loosely—the origin, tied together ideas about queerness (in
another reference to Leppe’s relationship to his mother, from whom he
supposedly never fully distanced himself in a “healthy,” heterosexual way)
and artistic reproduction (52). Moreover, Dittborn compared the trope
of artistic reproduction to that of contagious disease: “cada contaminado
es un agente contaminante, cada copia es a su vez una matriz que, descen-
trada y proliferante, se encuentra en todos y cada uno de los puntos de
la epidemia” (35). It is certainly no coincidence that AIDS was spread-
ing quickly among gay men around the world in 1981, proliferating into
multiple bodies and afflicting all sufferers of the disease equally, regardless
of who gave it to whom, and rendering moot the difference between the
“original” AIDS sufferer and the person to whom he or she gave AIDS
(the copy). Dittborn’s analogy between blood and ink (24) invokes the
idea of ritual sacrifice: Leppe compares the blood of the contagion to the
ink that paints the word “ACTIVO,” so as to expiate the evils of the dic-
146 C. FISCHER

tatorship.39 The word prueba, which not only means “evidence” but also
“exam” both in the academic and medical senses, can thus refer to a blood
test, as well as to a test of a more institutional nature. Prueba de artista can
be read as an attempt by Dittborn and Leppe to contest dictatorial ideas
about heterosexuality and the individualism of neoliberal exitismo with an
artistic representation of anonymity and interchangeability: it was an act
of reproduction of sorts that did not end in the continuation of anyone’s
legacy, whether sexual or historical. The only thing passed on here was
an “impression”—a word Dittborn used to mean both a reprint and an
impressive thing (126)—that quickly fades away. In this way, Dittborn and
Leppe reappropriated the semantic ambiguities inherent to the language
of the dictatorship, to great effect.
The invocation of the word reproducir, the word used in Spanish for
the verb “to play” a video (as well as, of course, “to reproduce”), is an apt
way to conclude this discussion of Leppe’s work, which operated simulta-
neously on the planes of sexuality, the economy, and aesthetics. The word
comprises an attempt to introduce the same kind of semantic slippage that
Leppe and his critics used to critique the state of exception. Moreover, it
offers a way to discuss both the form and the content of Leppe’s work.
Here and now, his performances can only be reproduced in mediated form,
through visual and textual archives; they can never be directly witnessed
again. In terms of content, meanwhile, they interrupted the dictatorship’s
capitalist-oriented, teleological “great man” history by rejecting the het-
erosexual reproductive praxis within which it was conceived. As the first
performance artist in Chile, Leppe used his body to take exception to
the idea of artistic originality, to the spectacle and recognition that come
with fame and notoriety, and to the legacy and prestige that go along
with heterosexual paternity. He thus rejected the forced teleology that
the dictatorship had created to legitimize itself historically, and remained,
paradoxically, the embodiment of ephemerality.

EL CHARLES BRONSON CHILENO: BETWEEN SINCERE

MASCULINITY AND PARODIC CRITIQUE
Carlos Flores’ 1984 film El Charles Bronson chileno, also known as
Idénticamente igual, was one of the few films to be produced in Chile dur-
ing the dictatorship. The film offers a profile of Fenelón Guajardo López,
a “fabricante de letreros publicitarios” who made a career out of his resem-
blance to the American movie star Charles Bronson (Fig. 4.4).40 Guajardo,
 QUEERING THE STATE OF EXCEPTION, 1973–1990 147

who died in 2013, first appeared in an episode of Don Francisco’s televi-

sion show Sábados Gigantes in 1975 in which audience members voted on
a series of Bronson lookalikes. He won, and this led to a degree of fame
in Chile, including appearances in an advertising campaign for Wrangler
jeans. In the film—a curious hybrid of documentary and fiction—we are
first introduced to Guajardo as a hero as tough in real life as the characters
in the films in which Bronson appeared. He recounts increasingly exagger-
ated tales of his boxing career, the people he beat up throughout Chile’s
rough northern mining country, his travels abroad, and his exploits saving
beautiful women from the hands of dangerous characters. Soon enough,
it becomes unclear whether the admiring women and men around him are
fawning over Guajardo as a proxy for Bronson, or over Guajardo himself.
Later in the film, Guajardo begins to talk about his intentions to use his
physical likeness to Bronson to package himself as a Chilean export prod-
uct that would hopefully circulate abroad (just like Don Francisco, Mario
Kreutzberger, and his show, later beamed via satellite from Miami to all

Fig. 4.4 Fenelón Guajardo López, in El Charles Bronson chileno (Dir. Carlos
Flores Delpino 1984)
148 C. FISCHER

of Spanish-speaking America). In the final part of the film, Flores turns

the camera over to Guajardo, allowing him to give a short demonstra-
tion of the kind of cultural product with which he hopes to, in the words
of his manager, “difundir el arte chileno fuera de nuestras fronteras”: he
directs and stars in a poorly produced attempt at an American-style action
sequence, in which he beats up everyone around him in the way Bronson’s
characters did. In this way, the film moves not only between fiction and
documentary, but also between parody and sincerity, and between a cri-
tique of derivative art under a dictatorship that celebrated imported mass
culture, and a celebration of the possibilities for original creation through
the “inventive potential of imitation,” as María Berríos (2009) calls it
(292). Such ambiguities were typical for cultural production during this
period in Chile, subject as it was to censorship, and El Charles Bronson
chileno navigates a number of them. However, the film’s portrayal of
Guajardo’s devotion to his family—he appears in a long scene with his wife
and children, and he remained a conventional family man until the end
of his life—lends his often-ridiculed persona a degree of credibility and
earnestness. Thus, his performance of masculinity becomes the fulcrum
upon which the ambiguities of the film rest. On one hand, El Charles
Bronson chileno can be read as a parody that excoriates Guajardo’s attempt
at notoriety, fame, and capital by copying, somewhat pathetically, a model
of foreign masculinity. On the other hand, though, the film can also be
read as the portrait of a family man, thrust into the spotlight because a
twist of nature and fate caused him to resemble a famous American movie
star, who tries to make the best of his situation in an adverse economic
and political time. Whether the viewer reads Flores’ film as a critique of
the dictatorship or as another example of the exceptionalistic neoliberal
rhetoric of the period, then, depends on the extent to which she reads
Guajardo’s masculinity as reproduced (derivative) or as (re)productive (ear-
nest and heterosexual, as well as marketable).
When a text (or any product) that displays essentially and uniquely
exceptional characteristics is subject to export, that product trades on pre-
cisely those characteristics to distinguish itself in that marketplace. In the
context of neoliberalism, a country exploits its comparative advantages by
exporting products that it can reasonably expect to be competitive in the
global marketplace, and this was certainly the case for Chile, as stated in
the text Bases de la política económica del gobierno militar chileno (78–82),
which outlined the policies that would later form the foundation of neo-
liberal thinking there.41 A product becomes desirable abroad (or at least it
 QUEERING THE STATE OF EXCEPTION, 1973–1990 149

seeks to be) because of its uniqueness, and ideally this desirability will trans-
late into profits for its vendors, and, by extension, into economic prosperity
for their country.42 Indeed, this is likely why the essayist Francisco Mouat
included a profile of the “Chilean Charles Bronson” in his 2011 compila-
tion of profiles of “famous” Chileans entitled Chilenos de raza. Most of
the personalities profiled in Mouat’s collection have, in some way, brought
(or tried to bring) international distinction to Chile for their exceptional
“Chileanness”: for example, Jenaro Gajardo Vera, who took out a title
deed to be owner of the moon, or Leontina Espinoza (the only woman
profiled in a notably masculinist line-up), who sought a place for herself
in the Guinness Book of World Records for supposedly having given birth
to close to 50 children, all by the same man (this turned out to be an
exaggeration, and she was duly expelled from the Guinness Book). Yet
Guajardo’s exceptional Chileanness comes, paradoxically, for his likeness
to an icon of US popular culture. “Creía que lo habían importado,” says a
female bystander in Flores’ film who observes Guajardo walking down the
street, “como ahora que todo es importado.” From Sarmiento to Martí
to Borges, Latin American critics, writers, and artists have debated about
a uniquely “Latin American” literary and cultural tradition, particularly in
light of the images such traditions project abroad43; Flores, for his part,
is making an intervention in this area. In terms of the Chilean economy,
Guajardo is the antithesis of that which is “Chilean,” and yet he is also
a source of pride for his compatriots who see him triumphing (possibly
abroad) and making a name for their country, thanks to his exceptional
imitative abilities. His appropriation of the foreign is the very thing that
makes him a local phenomenon (Mouat 2011).
The fact that El Charles Bronson chileno was made during a supposedly
dead time for cultural production, as well as its low production values
and scarce distribution, meant that its focus on masculine identity was
precisely what made it a vibrant cultural product. Made with little to no
funding over the course of eight years (Morales and Maza 55), the film
received scarce notice both in Chile and beyond, and fell into obscurity
almost from the moment it came out44: it was difficult to compete with
US mass entertainment, designated as the “official culture” of the dic-
tatorship (Berríos 293).45 However, Berríos emphasizes the experimen-
tal, avant-garde nature and the originality of El Charles Bronson chileno,
along with Enrique Lihn’s avant-garde novel Batman en Chile (1974) and
the “happening” Adiós a Tarzán, as evidence of cultural ferment in Chile
under dictatorship that has received very little critical attention.46 When
150 C. FISCHER

Berríos argues that El Charles Bronson chileno is “un experimento conduc-

tista sobre la subjetividad, la continuidad del yo y la pérdida de identidad”
(293), she contends that Flores’ film’s lack of distribution and relative
obscurity is evidence of how “se practica y concibe el anonimato como un
lugar social críticamente productivo” (295). That is, it critiqued Chile’s
neoliberalism—which often took the form, in mass culture, of starring
roles and larger-than-life figures—by insisting on anonymity. Since het-
erosexual masculinity is so often linked, as R.W. Connell points out, to
“exemplary” cultural artifacts produced for “disciplinary purposes” like
“setting standards, claiming popular assent and discrediting those who fall
short” (214), Flores’ film’s aggressive embrace not of exemplarity but of
anonymity could be read as a critique of the idea of such a violent figure
(i.e., Guajardo or Bronson, or both) embodying the most common and
admired form of masculinity at the time. I would thus extend Berríos’
argument to add that the film’s critique of the mass-culture, action-star
masculinity so highly valued by the dictatorship is also a major part of its
originality and value. As Flores himself puts it: “era un problema del país.
[Capté] que la sociedad chilena quería ser otra, pero no podía ser otra”
(Morales and Maza 63).
Indeed, the film offers a parody of Guajardo’s pretensions at interna-
tional stardom, which are imbricated in violence. The kind of action movie
Guajardo feels that Chile needs to make would be for mass consumption
(resulting, of course, in economic success) and also one in which the more
violent aspects of heterosexual masculinity are prominent:

Me gustaría … realizar un cine positivo, en bien de nuestra patria … [para]

que nos admiren en el mundo. Cine a nivel internacional, no a nivel casero.
[…] Y que el mercado sea más grande: si nuestro mercado es chico, bueno,
se va a agrandar porque la admiración va a venir de afuera, y van a solici-
tar esa cinta … donde esté mezclado lo fuerte con los temas románticos y
los temas tiernos […]. Quiero llamar la atención. […] Porque en el fondo
somos … sádicos, crueles, nos gusta la violencia […].

In this long disquisition, Fenelón calls for the creation and export of Chilean
films that are copies of foreign ones,47 and makes the case that violent US
action films—such as Charles Bronson’s 1974 film Death Wish—are actu-
ally essentially Chilean because of his compatriots’ affinity for sadism and
violence. This is a somewhat ironic assertion in light of the sadistic, violent
dictatorship currently in power, though Guajardo was acutely aware of
 QUEERING THE STATE OF EXCEPTION, 1973–1990 151

it.48 The film-within-a-film in which Flores and his crew give Guajardo
carte blanche to make his ideal action movie, meanwhile, is a complete
disaster: the audio is badly dubbed, the production values are almost
laughably poor, and the action (Guajardo, with his arm in a cast, beats
up a number of criminal characters in a cabaret located in Chile’s north-
ern mining country, while the transvestite Ñata Gaucha tends bar in the
background) is sordidly improbable. The occasional lapses of Guajardo’s
spoken Spanish into an Argentine accent, at moments when he is trying
to portray himself more bravado than usual, add to the film’s ridicule of
him. The existential irony of Guajardo’s words is that they are heard not
in a film to be distributed as widely as, say, Death Wish, but rather in a
film that was shown publicly for one week only, in just one movie theater.
Flores’ take on Guajardo is parodic and critical to the extent that it por-
trays the latter’s obsession with violence as both crudely unsophisticated
and also, possibly, complicit with the dictatorship’s violence (“nos gusta
la violencia”). This critique is a more humorous version of the one carried
out in Pablo Larraín’s 2008 film Tony Manero,49 which—through fiction,
albeit with a debt to Flores’ work that is acknowledged in the credits—also
portrayed a period in which “working-class Chileans … retreat[ed] from
the realities of life under dictatorship into fantasies of other lives and other
identities,” as Jonathan Romney (2009) pointed out in a review (46). As
with Tony Manero, Flores’ film can be read to undermine, through parody,
the heteronormative, masculinist, violent, and spectacle-obsessed rhetoric
of Chile under dictatorship (Tony Manero 2008).50
On the other hand, however, the ambiguity of El Charles Bronson chile-
no’s critique lies in the fact that it often treats Guajardo with a great degree
of respect and sincerity, particularly when it comes to its portrayal of him
as a heterosexual family man. Since Guajardo’s masculinity of upwardly
mobile, capitalist self-sufficiency is not treated with the parody surround-
ing his more spectacle-oriented endeavors, the film cannot be read as
wholeheartedly critical of the dictatorship, which prized those very same
values. Guajardo is surrounded by a number of people who seem to ear-
nestly care about him and hope for his success. In Mouat’s chronicle about
him, Guajardo describes Don Francisco’s supportive words to him when
he appeared on Sábados Gigantes (“para callado, con el micrófono abajo
… me dice quédate tranquilo, porque todos esos premios que estás viendo ahí
van a ser tuyos” (255, italics in original)); his manager, whose intense gaze
upon Guajardo betrays his admiration for him, has clearly hitched his for-
tunes to those of his client, and Guajardo’s family believes in him as well
152 C. FISCHER

(in Mouat’s profile, Guajardo recounts how he resisted going on Sábados

Gigantes until his daughter “se sentó en mi falda y me dijo papito, hazlo
por mí, y botó una lágrima […]. Ya, dije, por ti lo voy a hacer” (253–254)).
Guajardo is represented in the film as squarely situated within a reproduc-
tive family environment, which undercuts the possibility of reading the
film as an artifact of anti-dictatorial dissidence. His wife and children (Fig.
4.5) serve to ratify the good intentions, credibility, and even innocence
of his imitation: even if Flores is right in his hypothesis that “él no vivía
con su mujer, pero armaron un mundo familiar para que [yo] lo filmara”
(Morales and Maza 67), the film’s portrayal of the contrary is unironic.
Guajardo’s conventionally heterosexual, masculine attempt to provide for
his family weakens the acidity of the film’s parody and thus casts its cri-
tique of the dictatorship into more ambiguous terrain.
The traits that distinguish Guajardo’s exceptionally “Chilean” perfor-
mance of Bronsonian masculinity are caricatured by the film as foreign;
yet the traits that the film treats with sincerity—the fact that Guajardo is
a heterosexual family man—are very much in keeping with the rhetoric
of modernity, patriarchy, and authoritarianism that the dictatorship used

Fig. 4.5 El Charles Bronson chileno (Dir. Carlos Flores Delpino 1984)
 QUEERING THE STATE OF EXCEPTION, 1973–1990 153

to maintain its exceptional image abroad. The film seems to suggest that
self-effacement and parody are the optimal ways of resisting the seduc-
tion of neoliberalism that had become so dominant in Chile by the mid-
1980s; it thus turns inward, moving away from trying to distinguish the
country abroad. However, the film allows Guajardo some leeway to serve
unproblematically as the heterosexual and male embodiment of Chile’s
exceptionalism-for-export. Given that under the state of exception, the
lines between sincerity and parody, between the foreign and the Chilean,
between stardom and effacement, and between fatherhood and patriar-
chal authoritarianism became increasingly blurry, one’s interpretation
of Guajardo’s performance of masculinity is what demarcates the film’s
approach to critiquing Chile’s economic exceptionalism.

LA AZAROSA Y SOBREEXPUESTA VIDA DE ENRIQUE ALEKÁN:

PATRIARCHY IN THE TIME OF NEOLIBERALISM
In concluding this chapter with the work of Alberto Fuguet, who began
writing toward the end of the dictatorship and who continues to be a
prolific author to this day, one can track the evolving ways in which art
and literature mediated the dictatorship’s heterosexual, masculine rheto-
ric from the coup up to Chile’s transition to democracy. Fuguet’s work,
which was first published at a time when neoliberalism had taken a firm
hold of the Chilean economy, has been commonly read since then as
complicit with Right-wing economics, if not with the dictatorial policies
that implemented them. For critics like Luis Cárcamo-Huechante (2007),
for example, Fuguet’s triumphalist embrace of neoliberal culture means
that he writes “una literatura cuyo lenguaje resulta aplanado por (y en) el
tráfago de la circulación: la envolvente cultura del libre mercado” (234)51:
his literature becomes subsumed to the market conditions it depicts, and
in which it is produced. An example that would seem to confirm this is
Fuguet’s best-known novel, Mala onda (1991), about a male adolescent
coming of age under the dictatorship; the novel ends with the protagonist
in a brothel, having sex with a prostitute while his father—who has made
quick money, thanks to Chile’s favorable economic climate of 1980 and
his close ties with the military regime—does the same in the bed next to
him. This gesture has been read as one of complicity with neoliberalism as
well as with the heteropatriarchal structures that introduced and sustained
it.52 Another example of Fuguet’s neoliberal political outlook during the
transition to democracy is his and Sergio Gómez’s manifesto “Presentación
154 C. FISCHER

del país McOndo” (1996),53 the prologue to an anthology of young Latin

American writers. Known much more widely than the collection of short
stories that followed it, the manifesto gained worldwide notoriety for its
iconoclastic vision of Chile and Latin America that embraced the importa-
tion into Latin America of McDonald’s, Mac computers, and condos, while
taking a critical distance from Macondo, the fictional setting of several of
Gabriel García Márquez’s novels. The manifesto was an attempt to disen-
gage this new generation of writers not only from the magical realism pre-
viously considered to be the dominant motif of Latin American literature at
the time, but also from García Márquez’s leftist political beliefs. Moreover,
Fuguet has pointedly stated that García Márquez’s own son, a filmmaker,
is as much a citizen of McOndo as Fuguet himself: in his review of Rodrigo
García’s 1999 film Things You Can Tell Just By Looking At Her, Fuguet
writes that the film “reeks of suburbia and all things American” and is “a
perfect example of a certain new Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA)
sensibility” (2001: 68). Fuguet may embrace neoliberal politics, then, but
he also reckons with how the masculinist, patriarchal rhetoric within which
those politics was imposed in Chile and projected abroad—after all, Fuguet
was featured on the cover of Newsweek magazine in 2002 as the fresh face
of a new, post-“Boom” Latin American literary generation.54
The novel Fuguet wrote before Mala onda, entitled La azarosa y sobre-
expuesta vida de Enrique Alekán, was published in 1990, just after Chile’s
return to democracy, though it was partially written (and first published as
a series of columns in Wikén, the Friday entertainment supplement to El
Mercurio) before the dictatorship ended. Hardly ever mentioned by critics
of Fuguet’s overall work,55 the novel was based on more than 60 columns,
entitled “Capitalinos.” The columns were published from June 9, 1989,
to May 4, 1990,56 under the pseudonym Enrique Alekán,57 who also func-
tions as the narrator of the action, though the novel itself was later pub-
lished in Fuguet’s name.58 Even though the column “Capitalinos” was
originally conceived as a space in which to simply discuss trends, fashion,
and “los lugares que estaban haciendo noticia entre los jóvenes” (Fuguet
1990: 12), Fuguet points out in the introduction to the novel that the
columns “captaron de alguna manera lo que ahora ha pasado a llamarse
‘la transición’” (13). In the novel, Alekán goes through his own transi-
tion, from an affinity with the family-oriented narrative that the dictator-
ship constructed for Chile, to an embrace of (moderate) social openness
and sexual difference made visible in the foreign mass culture let into the
country by neoliberalism. I am hesitant here to call that difference queer-
ness, because even though he challenged the masculinist authoritarian-
 QUEERING THE STATE OF EXCEPTION, 1973–1990 155

ism underpinning Chile’s exceptionalistic economy by portraying certain

aspects of sexual comportment outside of the most orthodox rules of
Chile’s upper classes, this comportment was neither politically threatening
nor homosexual. After all, Fuguet was writing in El Mercurio: his politics,
hardly leftist, never challenged neoliberal economic structures, and his
protagonist’s sexual escapades had to fit within certain norms.
Enrique Alekán is a young, wealthy, male professional with disposable
income and time on his hands: the very snapshot, it would seem, of a
(small) class of men who had benefitted from Chile’s neoliberal economic
development by the end of the dictatorship. Alekán is thus exactly the kind
of man imagined in Lavín’s Revolución silenciosa to be most apt to embody
the ideal of the dictatorship by the late 1980s: he is heterosexual, wealthy,
and an avid consumer of the latest imported trends flooding Chile’s open
markets. He introduces himself early on in the novel as a model of eco-
nomic prosperity and attractiveness:

Veamos: tengo 29 años, soy bastante alto, me preservo bien … y soy gerente
de marketing de una importante empresa transnacional […]. Mi nombre,
por cierto, no es exactamente Enrique Alekán pero casi. Creo que es mejor
el anonimato, así me va a ser más fácil opinar y rondar los lugares in. Trabajo
en el centro (en el Wall Street capitalino) […]. Bueno, digamos que estoy
casado pero ya no vivo con mi cónyuge debido a que ella me abandonó ….
(Fuguet 1990: 21–22)

Thanks to his linguistic abilities and cultural knowledge, Alekán knows

how (and how not) to adapt into the Chilean context foreign ideas—about
sexuality, economics, and other things—flooding the country thanks to
neoliberal reforms.59 Paradoxically unique in his knowledge of US mass
culture—“si ellos me habían contratado, era por mi talento, mis contactos;
en definitiva, por mi know how. […] Yo nunca tan perdido y sé cuando una
campaña [de marketing] es una copia de Los intocables, de Nueve semanas
y media o de un comercial inglés” (Fuguet 1990: 163),60 he points out—
Alekán is the embodiment of neoliberal consumption as it was idealized
by the Chicago Boys.
Yet Alekán’s brand of exemplarity differs in several important ways from
the patriarchal rhetoric of Lavín and Pinochet. He is more sexually liber-
ated, and rejects dictatorial repression—part of an anti-authoritarian streak
amply chronicled in Fuguet’s work by his critics (Urbina 87; Cánovas 79;
Ortega 102). Alekán explicitly identifies his family’s conservative values
and beliefs with Pinochet, and condemns them for it, referring critically to
156 C. FISCHER

his house as a place where “las mujeres que estaban separadas o tenían
mala fama no podían entrar” (Fuguet 1990: 46) and where his father
enforces an atmosphere of “incomunicación” (Fuguet 1990: 115). When
Patricio Aylwin is inaugurated as the first postdictatorship democratic
president, Alekán enthusiastically watches it on TV with his family and
becomes angry at their negative reactions:

Mi madre lloraba por Pinochet, que lo iba a echar de menos, que ya iba
a volver, era cosa de esperar no más. Mis otros hermanos y yo queríamos
ver el cambio de mando tranquilos, en especial porque yo estaba más que
enganchado y feliz con el nuevo Presidente y con el Congreso y, la ver-
dad, estaba muy emocionado porque me di cuenta que en realidad era un
momento histórico […]. Pero mis viejos y los invitados … se pusieron en
la más agresiva y faltó poco para que lamentaran que no hubiese un nuevo
golpe de Estado y yo me enfurecí … de repente los años de autoridad y
represión familiar pasaron por mi lado. Choqueado, asqueado, me levanté
de la mesa. (Fuguet 1990: 170)

Explicitly identifying the dictatorship and Pinochet here with “aggres-

sion” and “family repression,” Alekán mirrors the end of the dictatorship
with an expression of defiance against patriarchal authority in his own fam-
ily home. Meanwhile, it is with a tone of sensationalistic glee that Fuguet
describes the exploits of Alekán, whose lifestyle would have seemed as
excessive and showy to Chile’s moneyed, patriarchal elite as it would have
been to the approximately 40 % of Chileans living under the poverty line
at the time. For example, Alekán takes a business trip to Buenos Aires and
has a three-day affair with a woman he meets on the plane:

Renata hablaba un inglés genial y fumaba Gitanes. Le dije que yo pensaba

que ella era modelo, lo que fue clave para partir. Después, nada nos detuvo.
Yo, no sé por qué … le inventé que era colaborador de una revista chilena
tipo Blitz y que escribía sobre turismo, lugares exóticos, restoranes, y que
iba a Buenos Aires para ver si la crisis había afectado la gastronomía. […] Por
suerte Argentina estaba barata porque ya que estaba metido en esta mentira,
debía ser capaz de financiarla. […] Estuvimos tres días juntos. Buenos Aires
con ella es aún mejor. (Fuguet 1990: 43)

Many of Alekán’s opinions and actions thus undermine his position as a

patriarchal figure whom someone like Lavín could identify as the ideal
embodiment of the late dictatorship, his impeccable neoliberal credentials
notwithstanding.
 QUEERING THE STATE OF EXCEPTION, 1973–1990 157

These ambiguities in La azarosa y sobreexpuesta vida de Enrique Alekán

complicate not just the idealized, heteropatriarchal terms in which Chile’s
exceptionalist rhetoric was placed, but also those under which the state
of exception was imposed. The novel’s anti-patriarchal bent disrupts the
discourse of continuity of the state of exception, which had previously
been laid out in the terms of legacy and normative fatherhood. Even
though, as many critics have argued, Pinochet and his fellow ideologues
sought to project Chile’s state of exception indefinitely into the future,
Alekán’s gleeful depictions of sexual liberation and his ruminations—as
we shall see—on alternative forms of fatherhood outside of marriage inter-
rupt some of the ways in which idealized, family-oriented, heterosexual
masculinity was deployed in the dictatorship era to bolster the state of
exception’s appearance of permanence. Initially he refers to himself as a
particularly eligible candidate because of the fact that he has an apartment,
a car, and a good job (apparently the main requirements for someone to
succeed in a marriage in his social circle). Later, however, when taking care
of a friend’s son, he imagines himself as a single father, raising his own
son outside of the confines of a conventional family: “me lo imaginé más
grande: pidiéndome prestado el BMW (que yo debería tener en unos 18
años más) para salir con una mina [a la] que desea impresionar. Me vi en su
graduación, enfermo de orgulloso, hablándole a todas las viejas: ‘Lo crié
solo, sin ayuda de nadie’” (Fuguet 1990: 176). Here, German luxury car
and all, Alekán imagines a new vision for reproductive maturity and legacy
in the context of Chile’s economic progress: one that means a significant
departure from the conventional, patriarchal values of his own family (and
Pinochet’s). Fuguet took advantage of his tribunal in El Mercurio—which
also practiced the semantic slippages inherent to the state of exception,
in order to censor dissent and disguise violence as progress—to lay out
a coded vision for the transition whose more ambivalent investment in
patriarchal lineage could threaten the veneer of perpetuity that the state of
exception had projected not only in Chile, but also abroad.
The ambiguities throughout La azarosa y sobreexpuesta vida de Enrique
Alekán not only lead to confusion between the exceptional and the con-
ventional, and between (patriarchal) continuity and (libertine) rupture,
but they also bring the figure of Alekán himself—despite being the protag-
onist of the novel—to teeter on the verge of effacement and oblivion. The
central conceit of the columns (and the novel) is that Alekán has decided,
following his separation, to write for Wikén but under an assumed name
(Fuguet 1990: 24), while he continues his job as an executive. For this
158 C. FISCHER

reason, in the introduction to the novel, Fuguet has to “come out” as

the writer behind Alekán: “Y a todas aquellas que me preguntaron tantas
veces: sí, soy yo. Yo soy Alekán. O, al menos, yo soy el que le dio vida”
(Fuguet 1990: 13). Meanwhile, within the context of the columns, Alekán
himself hides his identity as a writer: for example, a friend of his who
knows about his alter ego introduces him to others as “mi amigo yuppie,
onda Enrique Alekán” (Fuguet 1990: 49): as if he were the pseudonym he
has actually assumed. To add another layer of anonymity, Alekán the char-
acter assumes alternative identities, such as when he makes the woman he
dates in Buenos Aires think he’s a wealthy restaurateur. Alekán’s ambigu-
ous persona extends to his politics as well: in a reference to the 1983
Woody Allen film about a character able to assume multiple identities, a
friend calls him a “Zelig” for having attended both a pro-Concertación
rally and also one for Hernán Büchi, who ran against Aylwin (Fuguet
1990: 108).61 Though Alekán has positioned himself as a character with
whom readers are supposed to strongly identify62—either as a symbol of
their own upward mobility and aspiration to his commanding dominance
of neoliberal economic structures and culture, or because they are already
in his social class, or simply because they like him—it is often unclear
what it is about him that they are supposed to identify with, consider-
ing the ambiguity of his politics and his identity. In this sense, Alekán’s
supposedly exceptional prominence threatens to bleed into transformismo
(to use Moulián’s term) and anonymity, just as the identity of Fenelón
Guajardo alternated between his stardom as the Chilean Charles Bronson
and his own indistinctness as a copy. Since, as I have been arguing, Chile’s
state of exception shored up its own credibility through the deployment
of masculinist ideas about legacy and permanence, the effacement of one
of the figures who most closely embody its regime constitutes a definite
challenge to its authority.
The ambiguous effacement of heterosexual (af)filiation and economic
exceptionalism in Fuguet’s novel finds its analogue in the ambivalent criti-
cal debates about the place of Fuguet’s work in the Chilean, and Latin
American, literary canons, which have also taken place in the terms of mas-
culine affinity and affiliation.63 A graduate of José Donoso’s literary work-
shop in the 1980s (where Eltit also studied), Fuguet has stated multiple
times his kinship with this “forefather” of Chilean literature in order to
legitimize himself.64 Catalina Forttes (2010) claims Fuguet for the canon
of Chilean literature as a way to contest readings of Fuguet’s work, such
as Cárcamo-Huechante’s, that take place in purely material terms. She
 QUEERING THE STATE OF EXCEPTION, 1973–1990 159

thus reads Fuguet, and particularly Mala onda, as both a meditation on

the bildungsroman form imprinted by Chile’s nineteenth-century foun-
dational fiction Martín Rivas (32), and as emblematic among Chilean
post-Boom novels in which “las posturas ideológicas ya no pueden ser
entendidas en los clásicos términos de izquierda o derecha política, sino
por medio del nivel de autoconsciencia que el escritor tenga de su rel-
ación con el mercado” (40). She thus shows how this process of “apren-
der a empatizar y a hacer consensos” is similar to “la proclama electoral
con la que la Concertación de Partidos por la Democracia logra llegar al
poder” (122). Cristián Opazo (2009), meanwhile, argues that Fuguet’s
characters express their affinities with previous works of Chilean literature
through coded language that cites queer sexualities, so as not to have to
explicitly state any queer identities of their own.65 Cárcamo-Huechante,
on the other hand, would seem to disavow Fuguet’s place in the country’s
literary canon, stating that his work presupposes a practical oblivion of
Chilean culture through his “afán de abstraer e idealizar los espacios de
circulación transnacional y, por consiguiente, de obliterar las contingencias
perturbadoras de lo local” (227).66 It would seem, then, that La azarosa
y sobreexpuesta vida de Enrique Alekán anticipated many of the critical
debates about Fuguet’s work by showing a character torn between the
local and the global, between coded queerness and heterosexuality, and
between neoliberal consensus and anti-authoritarianism.
By the end of the novel, instead of reconciling with the contradictory
aspects of transition-era Chile, Alekán leaves the country and moves to
New York City. Despite expressing his hope that the transition to democ-
racy would bring about more radical social change—Alekán calls for “la
instalación de la movida … destape incluido” (Fuguet 1990: 79)—in
the end Alekán chooses to break with Chile’s social system completely,
while embracing its economic system so wholeheartedly as to move to the
USA. The central tension in the novel, then, is about how to read Alekán
as the embodiment of the supposedly exceptional economic development
installed by Pinochet when Alekán himself rejected many of the terms
of the masculine, reproductive teleology of Pinochet’s state of exception
(albeit without embracing queerness outright)—a conundrum echoed in
critical debates about reading Fuguet himself. La azarosa y sobreexpuesta
vida de Enrique Alekán thus performs the tensions inherent to whether,
by the time Pinochet left office, art could reconcile the masculine images
that the narrative the Chilean junta had constructed for itself with the
masculine images flooding the country from abroad.
160 C. FISCHER

CONCLUSIONS
By appropriating ideas that were flooding Chile’s newly opened markets
at an increasingly vertiginous pace as the dictatorship went on, Leppe,
Flores, and Fuguet contested the ways in which the dictatorship had fig-
ured heterosexual bodies as those most apt to participate in the neoliberal
marketplace and project its economic exceptionalism, both at home and
abroad. True, narratives like Lavín’s and Pinochet’s had telegraphed an
image of Chile in which binary gender roles were left undisturbed by the
roiling changes wrought in the country by new products and ideas from
the USA and other places. But Leppe showed how, among other things,
the advent of AIDS in the world had profoundly disturbed the ways in
which legacies—sexual, aesthetic, and economic—would be passed along
to new generations and transmitted abroad. Flores, meanwhile, graphically
illustrated how easily the transnational circulation of heterosexual mascu-
linity in the service of capital could be parodied. And Fuguet’s contesta-
tion of authoritarianism with unconventional ideas about sexuality, albeit
inexorably imbricated in capital, indicated new ways for men to “embody”
neoliberalism. Overall, these artists contested the dictatorship’s rhetoric of
exceptionalism by showing how exclusive it was of bodies that either man-
aged reproduction—both artistic and sexual—in unconventional ways, or
refused to participate in it altogether. Moreover, they showed how the
state of exception can manipulate time and teleology by deploying the
language of heterosexual reproduction, and they thus brought up new
questions about gendering Schmitt’s, Agamben’s, and Thayer’s concep-
tions of exception itself. Contesting the projection both forward in time
and outward to other countries on the part of Chile’s “model” economy
by modeling the interruption of lineages political and sexual, these artists
exposed the temporal inconsistencies of the dictatorship’s linear appro-
priation of Chile’s historical narrative, the impossibility of completely
dismissing queer sexuality, and the shades of gray in the seemingly stark
dichotomy between original and derivative cultural forms.

NOTES
1. Particularly gripping visual and written testimonials of the coup
itself, from a variety of different perspectives, can be found in
Patricio Guzmán’s La batalla de Chile, especially its second part;
Luz Arce’s 1990 declaration before the Chilean National Truth and
Reconciliation Commission (excerpted in Michael Lazzara’s 2011
 QUEERING THE STATE OF EXCEPTION, 1973–1990 161

volume Luz Arce and Pinochet’s Chile: Testimony in the Aftermath of

State Violence); Gonzalo Leiva Quijada’s 2008 compilation of pho-
tographs AFI: Multitudes en sombras; and Augusto Pinochet’s 1982
memoir The Crucial Day, which will be discussed below.
2. The first bando, for example, established, among other things, that
“La prensa, radiodifusoras y canales de televisión adictos a la
Unidad Popular deben suspender sus actividades informativas a
partir de este instante. De lo contrario recibirán castigo aéreo y ter-
restre” (Gobierno de Chile).
3. These assassinations of critics of the dictatorship abroad included
that of the former Army Commander-in-Chief Carlos Prats and his
wife Sofía Cuthbert in Buenos Aires in 1974, that of Allende’s
former Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt in
Washington, DC, in 1976, and the attempted murder of Christian
Democratic leader Bernardo Leighton and his wife Anita Fresno in
Rome in 1975 (Stern 106).
4. One major attempt by the military government to justify its repres-
sion of the Left was the so-called Plan Z. In a perversely impressive
PR offensive, the military claimed to discover “secret war plans and
assassination lists … weapons arsenals, guerrilla training camps,
war clinics and hospitals, and underground tunnels and storage
depots,” all of which supposedly indicated plans by the UP and
other leftists to “lop off the military leadership and take control of
the country” (Stern 42). Most, if not all, of these supposed discov-
eries were subsequently discredited (Stern 48).
5. In the Declaración de Principios—a document commonly attributed
to, but left unsigned by, Jaime Guzmán, the framer of the country’s
1980 Constitution (Stern 58)—women are to serve as “pilares de la
reconstrucción nacional”: “En la familia, la mujer se realza en toda
la grandeza de su misión, que la convierte en la roca espiritual de la
Patria” (21). Stern points out how the rhetoric of dictatorship pro-
moted a much more binary-oriented view of gender: “… high mili-
tary men played the individual roles as heroes who rescued a nation.
[…] Women played a group role as voice of a people in need of res-
cue” (Stern 63, emphasis in original). As Mary Louise Pratt (1996),
who along with Jean Franco (1992) and Nelly Richard (2004) has
made valuable contributions to criticism related to the Pinochet dic-
tatorship’s rhetoric of gender, puts it: “citizenship consists, as
Pinochet loved to say, in either ordering or obeying, and only those
who do one or the other well are useful to the state” (151).
162 C. FISCHER

6. Pinochet’s description of himself as a sober father figure contrasts

starkly with descriptions of Allende in the same autobiography as
effeminate and decadent, “wrapped … in [a] blue cloak with a
blood-red lining and a wide fur collar … as though Mephistopheles
himself had come” (Pinochet 105). In portraying Allende as sexu-
ally and politically corrupt, the dictatorship could undermine the
memory of the UP government following the coup. By focusing
attention on this, as well as on Allende’s supposed stockpile of por-
nography, cash, imported foodstuffs, liquor, and luxury goods, the
utopian economic goals articulated by Allende himself from the
first day of his presidency—made alongside calls for sexual rectitude
among Chilean youth, as discussed in the previous chapter—could
be dismissed outright as hypocritical. Stern discusses an article in
the magazine Ercilla—an outlet favorable to the dictatorship at the
time—that used the evidence found in a search of Allende’s private
home, known as El Cañaveral, to portray him as a fraud. In the
article, Allende was called “a man who proclaimed loyalty to the
poor and democracy while wedding himself to a life of bourgeois
opulence, moral laxity, and political violence” (Stern 39).
7. This was particularly true in the adoption of Chile’s 1980
Constitution, through which Pinochet sought to project his gov-
ernment forward indefinitely. With this, “[p]ermanent rules and
institutions, suitable to the building of a modern and prosperous
society, would define a new normalcy and stability. [On July 9,
1978], at Chacarillas Hill in Santiago, Pinochet for the first time
announced a calendar of institutionalization. The evening cere-
mony, timed for National Youth Day, featured future-oriented
symbolism. […] Pinochet stated that an end to “recuperation”
would come in 1980. Civilians would help finish drafting a new
Constitution and fundamental laws, and a transitional period
would begin in 1981” (Stern 139).
8. Corporatism was one of the most important currents of intellectual
and economic thought in the Chilean Right before the dictator-
ship, and—as Loveman (2004) has pointed out—it was part of
what Chile used to justify itself as a model of economic manage-
ment in the early- to mid-twentieth century: “corporatist-like insti-
tutions … were blended, sometimes overtly and other times almost
invisibly, with the apparently democratic institutions that made
Chile ‘exceptional’ in Latin America” throughout the country’s
history (Loveman 2004: 112).
 QUEERING THE STATE OF EXCEPTION, 1973–1990 163

9. In addition to opening up the country to foreign imports, the

Chicago Boys—economists trained at the University of Chicago
following the neoliberal economic ideals of Arnold Harberger and
Milton Freedman—generally advocated for a much smaller state:
they “dismantled fundamental labor and social welfare rights …
and turned policy making into a game of fiat by economic techni-
cians and ideologues—not a set of options to be considered within
a broader political conversation about wise social policy” (Stern
142). By 1980, these reforms included “labor flexibility to fire
workers more easily and cheaply,” the transfer of state enterprises to
private ownership (although CODELCO, the National Copper
Company, remained public after being nationalized by Allende),
and privatizations of social security, healthcare, and education
(Stern 169). For more information about the nuts and bolts of the
dictatorship’s economic policies, see “El ladrillo”: Bases de la política
económica del gobierno militar chileno (1992), a publication of the
Centro de Estudios Públicos (CEP) with a prologue by “Chicago
Boy” de Castro, who was finance minister for the military govern-
ment from 1976 to 1982. For a detailed history of the imposition
of ideas from the University of Chicago in Chile, see Juan Gabriel
Valdés’ 1989 volume La escuela de Chicago: Operación Chile.
10. As the Chilean economy has become more liberalized, the trope of
the supermarket has outpaced that of the casa patronal as a key
space in which Chilean cultural production is mediated, and Lavín’s
mention of this space is one of the first signs of this change. Rubí
Carreño (2009a, b) discusses this transition in further detail.
Alessandro Fornazzari (2013) also discusses at length the trope of
the supermarket in Chilean literature (57).
11. Luis Cárcamo-Huechante (2007) points out how Lavín’s book
served to dissociate neoliberal from dictatorial policy (126)—a
move that Tomás Moulián (1997) called central to the “white-
washing” of the dictatorial origins of postdictatorship Chile (38) in
order to emphasize the exceptionalism of Chile’s economy (98).
12. See, for example, Brian Loveman (1993), Willy Thayer (2006),
Renato Cristi (2011), and Eduardo Sabrovsky (2013). Cristi, for
one, states that Schmitt’s ideas were long known in Chile, having
been cited by legal scholars in the country as early as 1934, and
later by Chilean admirers of Francoism (101).
13. Thayer writes: “La relación entre acontecimiento y lenguaje nunca
se da en el orden de lo mismo (lo mismo es lenguaje y ser). Se
164 C. FISCHER

dispara en la interrupción de la mismidad. Es en la interrupción de

la mismidad que acontecimiento y lenguaje tienen lugar” (28).
14. Luis Cárcamo-Huechante (2007) makes reference to an “apagón
cultural” (169) during the dictatorship, as do articles by Raúl
Zurita and Bernardo Subercaseaux in Hernán Vidal’s 1985 volume
Fascismo y experiencia literaria: Reflexiones para una recanon-
ización. Neustadt also mentions this term (220).
15. Indeed, as Sabrovsky points out, the constitution ensured that the
state of exception would be “permanent” in Chile, given that it
enshrined—through the binominal system in Congress, which was
only finally repealed in 2015—the right of a minority to veto poli-
cies voted on by the majority (80).
16. Several other critics have offered important readings of the iceberg
as well: see Macarena Gómez-Barris (2009: 2–6), and Nelly
Richard (1998: 163–177).
17. Thayer elaborates: “Lo inactual, lo intempestivo desde donde
Moulián lee la actualidad, es aquello que en medio de actualidad
brilla por su ausencia: […] los desaparecidos … la miseria absoluta
… lo perdido en lo ‘ganado’, o lo ‘desaparecido’, a saber, la
economía, la salud … la experiencia del golpe militar reprimida en
las narraciones chovinistas, en el blanqueo y eufemización de la
firma ‘Pinochet’” (166–167).
18. For Yúdice, it is the avant-garde that most effectively denounced
Latin America’s repressive regimes, given that it “exposed moderni-
ty’s ideological strategies of ‘naturalization’ and inverted the para-
digm, transforming innovation—ruptura—into a continually
self-supplementing process” (22). That is, it shocked spectators into
new awareness of art, and subjects, that played with the inversion of
paradigm and rupture under limit circumstances such as the state of
exception. Willy Thayer also focuses on the avant-garde, particularly
the escena de avanzada, in his writings on the state of exception. He
begins them with the iconoclastic bombing of La Moneda Palace,
which he describes as “la representación más justa de la ‘voluntad de
acontecimiento’ de la vanguardia” (15), given that it had the effect of
dwarfing future groundbreaking “happenings” (acontecimientos) or
ruptures (16) and made it impossible to think about this event with-
out also thinking about representations and mediations of it (35).
19. Chilean artists to make use of performance art after Leppe included
Raúl Zurita in 1975, who attempted to burn part of his face in an
 QUEERING THE STATE OF EXCEPTION, 1973–1990 165

“act of self-atonement … thus initiating the form of poetry which

he later on came to develop in his first book Purgatorio (1979)” in
an untitled performance (Richard 1986: 66). Diamela Eltit, Lotty
Rosenfeld, and Pedro Lemebel and Francisco Casas (Las Yeguas
del Apocalipsis) also followed in this tradition. For more informa-
tion about Las Yeguas, see Francine Masiello (2001) and Fischer
(2009). In an interview with Federico Galende (2009), Casas calls
Leppe a groundbreaker in this sense, and even though he mentions
the fact that Francisco Copello was the first Chilean to do perfor-
mance art, he calls Copello’s work more “choreographic” (168),
and thus more theatrical than artistic. Copello also spent much of
his career outside of Chile, so at the very least, Leppe was the first
to do performance art within Chile.
20. The idea of the “ephemerality” of body-based performance was
elaborated upon by Diana Taylor (2003: 5).
21. Galaz and Ivelic write that the idea of anonymity, at least, was one
that was embraced by many artists who opposed the dictatorship at
the time; they quote the folklore artist Eduardo Peralta in this
sense: “‘Noto una impresionante pulsión por la expresión que
requiere espacios adecuados para manifestarse. […]
Despectacularizar significa también desmitificar al artista, aban-
donar lo mesiánico para buscar juntos’” (208). CADA, too, wanted
to make “trabajos de arte en forma colectiva, obviando los nom-
bres propios” (Galaz and Ivelic 208).
22. In Chile and abroad, the best-known wing of the avanzada was the
Colectivo de Acciones de Arte, or CADA, which sought to decon-
struct “el comportamiento social para expresarlo a través de nuevos
sistemas de producción y difusión artísticos” including, but not
limited to, the body (Galaz and Ivelic 209). CADA’s members
included Carlos Altamirano, Eugenio Dittborn, Gonzalo Mezza,
Lotty Rosenfeld, Diamela Eltit, and Raúl Zurita. Although Eltit’s
and Zurita’s works were perhaps the best-known interventions
associated with CADA, I will mention them only peripherally here
and in the next chapter. Leppe’s association with CADA was less
close, although he did collaborate with Zurita on a performance
piece entitled Visualizaciones del Purgatorio de Raúl Zurita in
1979 in the Cal Gallery (for more information about this collabo-
ration, in which Dittborn and Altamirano also participated, see
Richard 1986: 78).
166 C. FISCHER

23. Leppe’s work incorporated the writings of art critics such as

Richard, Adriana Valdés, and Cristián Huneeus within it—another
way in which he inscribed himself within the tradition of the avant-
garde. As Richard has pointed out, this creation of art theory
alongside its practice had very pragmatic implications as well: since
the dictatorship sought to “keep the production of meaning under
surveillance” (1986: 23, emphasis in original), artists were “forced
to negotiate, from within the work, the conditions of their institu-
tional participation” (1986: 24) by working alongside critics of
their work. However, this meant that they also had more control
over those conditions.
24. Juan Dávila’s work includes a 1993 painting entitled The Liberator
Simón Bolivar, a portrait of Latin America’s hallowed forefather in
drag and with breasts that was shown in the Chilean Embassy
London in 1994 using government funding. Pedro Lemebel writes
about this infamous episode in Loco afán (1996). Francine Masiello
discusses the painting, which she reproduced on the cover of her
book The Art of Transition (2001), as a “suggestion to viewers that
even marginal citizens have the right to interpret their national
hero, thereby reversing the common symbolic legacies that have
included considerations of gender” (54).
25. Francisco Casas in particular points out: “Leppe se propone Cuerpo
correccional en una época en la que hay ausencia de cuerpo, en la
que los compañeros y las compañeras están en Villa Grimaldi, en
Cuatro Álamos, están en centros de detenciones, y curiosamente la
obra nunca habla de eso” (Galende 2009: 168).
26. In fact, none the critics writing about Leppe at the time of his
performances explicitly mentioned his homosexuality. Galaz and
Ivelic only make reference to a “tacit confession” in Leppe’s
work, and Cristián Huneeus (1977) is similarly enigmatic, call-
ing one of Leppe’s performances a “manifestación revelatoria”
(460) without saying of what. Casas, speaking in 2009, calls this
a form of homophobia, stating that Leppe, in his work, “no
comparece como sujeto homosexual, comparece mediado por
algunos signos mezquinos, mucho más actorales que performa-
tivos […]. Eso a uno le seguía produciendo muchos problemas.
Algo está pasando, algo huele mal” (Galende 2009: 169).
Thayer offers a critique about the politically veiled nature of the
work of the entire avanzada, which, he says, “mantuvo complici-
 QUEERING THE STATE OF EXCEPTION, 1973–1990 167

dad con el corte estructural del Golpe, al reiterar dicho corte en

el campo cultural” (18). These critiques, while legitimate,
underestimate the force of the repression and censorship that
reigned at the time.
27. See Judith (Jack) Halberstam’s volume The Queer Art of Failure
for further exploration of this topic.
28. Richard explicitly positions the work of the avanzada as “unoffi-
cial” (1986: 17), but the work of several of its artists moved
between official and unofficial artistic circles. The presence of arti-
cles about Leppe’s work in El Mercurio, for Casas, “permití[a] …
que El Mercurio … dijera: oye, aquí hay arte experimental, aquí no
ha pasado nada, de qué se quejan” (Galende 169), and thus implied
a complicity with the dictatorship. But Casas’ singling out of
Leppe’s work as not entirely “unofficial” is somewhat unfair, given
that avanzada member Raúl Zurita, whose “Purgatorio, and the
works which follow, paradoxically retained their official acceptance
at the same time as providing a key for both the avanzada and vari-
ous sectors of the opposition … because of the contradictions
inherent in his work: on the one hand, his Catholic brand of
humanism … was easily adapted to the idealism of [El Mercurio
literary critic Ignacio] Valente, while on the other, the critical
materialism assumed by his writings was in conflict with Valente’s
position” (Richard 1986: 26–27). Ignacio Valente is the pen name
of José Miguel Ibáñez Langlois, a priest and “el crítico literario
más influyente de la época, a pesar de haber sido vocero de la cul-
tura oficialista durante la dictadura,” in the words of Catalina
Forttes (2010: 18). It is worth mentioning that Ibáñez Langlois
was the inspiration for Sebastián Urrutia Lacroix, the protagonist
of Roberto Bolaño’s 2000 novel Nocturno de Chile. It is likely due
(at least in part) to this official acceptance of Zurita that Roberto
Bolaño, in Estrella distante (1996), parodies the former’s perfor-
mances—particularly one in which five airplanes wrote verses of his
poem “La vida nueva” in the skies above Queens, New York, on
June 2, 1982 (Galaz and Ivelic 213–215)—as so inscrutable as to
be fascist (Gareth Williams (2009) offers an interesting discussion
of this viewpoint).
29. For example, in an interview in Paula magazine in 1977, Leppe
stated that “Me interesa la no reminiscencia, la no huella […]. Me
interesa la vida pública y censurada” (Díez 29). This reference to
168 C. FISCHER

the absence of legacy, particularly in conjunction with this com-

ment about self-censorship in public, seems to be related to both
queerness and political repression together.
30. The title of this work was a reference by Leppe to the tradition of
avant-garde performances, known as “Happenings,” that origi-
nated in the New York area in the late 1950s and early 1960s. For
more information about this current in modern art, see Michael
Kirby’s volume Happenings (1965).
31. The epistemological implications of the closet for gay art and lit-
erature have been discussed at length by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
(1990).
32. It would be hard to imagine that these mentions, in the press of
the time, of words like locura, bombardeo, and terror would not be
read as implicit references to the political situation.
33. One example of Richard’s coded references to Leppe’s homosexu-
ality comes in her reading of Leppe’s performance El perchero, to
be discussed in further detail below: “tu castrado como tal estig-
matizado por la vivencia simbólica de la tajadura/ tajadura no úni-
camente anatómica (tajo fálico) sino procedente de cualquier otra
circunstancia divisoria o separativa atentando en contra de la pri-
maria homogeneidad de tu extensión biológica o pulsional o frac-
turando tu unidad subjetiva” (49). Here, Richard makes a typically
veiled critical reference to the openings in the dress Leppe wore as
symbolically vaginal or anal, placed on his body instead of a phallus
to represent the “stigma” he may have felt for any “impulses” he
had that might have gone against the “homogeneity” and “subjec-
tive unity” (read: heterosexual masculinity) expected of him; but
this is as far as she goes in this text.
Galaz and Ivelic’s text is also extremely circumspect when it
comes to the central theme of the piece, which is Leppe’s homo-
sexuality: “La fecundidad frustrada … abrió la primera interro-
gante pública respecto a la crisis de la identidad sexual. Su tácita
confesión planteó aquella tensión a la que nos referimos entre el
cuerpo privado del artista y el cuerpo institucionalizado de la socie-
dad. El conflicto se objetivó en el gesto del público de apoderarse
de las gallinas de yeso y comerse los huevos, arrasando con la insta-
lación de objetos que acompañó su acto” (196).
34. The use of photography in El perchero was one of many attempts
by the Escena de avanzada to incorporate this medium, which—as
 QUEERING THE STATE OF EXCEPTION, 1973–1990 169

Galaz and Ivelic point out—can help to mitigate the fleeting nature
of performance art. Still, they continue by saying that photography
“adquiere las mismas características de mediación que la pintura o
la escultura,” while warning that “la fotografía, el cine y el video
son registros parciales, insuficientes” (192).
35. In this sense, his performance was reminiscent of the Chilean folk
trope of the imbunche, the Chilean folk legend of children whose
bodily orifices were sewn up, denying them self-expression, iden-
tity, and, ultimately, life—and, in effect, Catalina Parra’s exhibition
Imbunches was shown in Santiago’s Epoca Gallery that same year.
I discussed the trope of the imbunche in further detail in the sec-
ond chapter, apropos of José Donoso’s novels El lugar sin límites
and El obsceno pájaro de la noche.
36. “Las cantatrices” was “un trabajo colectivo con la participación de
especialistas en televisión, en música y en traumatología. La direc-
ción … fue de Juan Enrique Forch y Nelly Richard; la asistencia
traumatológica del Dr. Víctor Henríquez y la selección de óperas a
cargo de César Secchi y Carlos Leppe” (Galaz and Ivelic 202).
37. The cast left “parte del pecho y vientre descubiertos como símbolo
de lo potencialmente femenino” and “el cuerpo inmovilizado
intentó mover los brazos en un gesto que se tornó aún más paté-
tico por el dramático intento de gesticular. La boca, entre tanto,
permanecía abierta debido a un instrumento metálico que impedía
cerrarla” (Galaz and Ivelic 201).
38. In the recording of Leppe’s mother, she talks in graphic detail
about the actual mechanics of the birth of her son, as well as about
raising him. What she said was reprinted at length in a glossy
appendix at the end of Cuerpo correccional—another example of
how Leppe’s work disclosed his homosexuality by parodying sim-
plistic Freudian parlance about the homosexual’s supposedly close,
unhealthy bond with his overbearing mother and his distance from
an absent father. Leppe’s mother speaks frankly of her preference
for her son over his father: “El pudo no haber nacido. Ni sé cómo
nació. El médico quería que yo tuviera un parto normal porque
pensó otra cosa, él creyó que yo tenía más vida de matrimonio.
Total, no tuve ninguna dilatación y sufrí lo indecible. Ya estaba
perdiendo sangre y él no nacía. […] Nació con fórceps horrible: un
cuerpecito inmensamente grande. Que eres lindo le decía yo. Tuve
que permanecer 17 días en la clínica. En la casa dormíamos en la
170 C. FISCHER

misma pieza porque él no quería dormir solo. […] El, mi marido,

se hizo el enfermo diciendo que estaba en una clínica. Según dice
la gente … por capricho no quería venir a la casa. Desde los cinco
meses de embarazo no apareció más porque se había enamorado de
otra. Yo no hice vida de matrimonio, esa es la verdad” (Richard
1980: 106–107). The admissions of Leppe’s mother—that she had
very little sexual contact with her husband, that her husband later
left her alone with her son, and that her son slept beside her—drew
attention to the close bond between Leppe and his mother, a
recurring theme in Leppe’s work and one of the most explicit ways
in which he admitted his homosexuality.
39. This was an appropriation of Christian imagery similar to those of
Raúl Zurita, such as when he burned his face in a photograph used
for his poetry book Purgatorio, as described by Richard (1986:
78). Dittborn refers to how “Le entintaron con un rodillo de
esponja impregnado en tinta litográfica negra la palabra activo de
menos en la plantilla y la tinta cubrió el pecho descubierto a través
del calado de la plantilla de papel […]. Peñas quebradizas salpi-
cando un pecho despeñado, aglutinaciones rojas impresas y piedras
ensangrentándose, en coágulos tersos …” (24).
40. In a profile written about Guajardo by Francisco Mouat, Fenelón
even recounts his contact with the “real” Charles Bronson: “‘Habla
tu amigo,’ fue lo primero que me dijo, ‘y quiero ver si tú puedes
doblarme en algunas películas que estamos haciendo acá en Estados
Unidos. ¿Puedes venir?’ Yo le contesté don Charles, y él al tiro me
interrumpió: ‘Dime Carlos no más.’ Bueno, Carlos, yo gustoso iría,
pero estoy demasiado viejo para reemplazarte a ti. ‘¿Cómo que
viejo?’ me dijo. […] Y yo le digo: No, Carlos, eres tú el que se parece
a mí. […]” (Mouat 257, italics in original).
41. This text—also known as el ladrillo—was released in 1992 but was
actually finalized shortly before the Pinochet coup took place. It
was written by Sergio de Castro (an economist who served as
finance minister from 1976 to 1982, presiding over the military
regime’s principal transition to neoliberalism), as well as Pablo
Barahona, Sergio Undurraga Saavedra, and Emilio Sanfuentes.
42. Oftentimes, a product only becomes desirable for domestic con-
sumption after distinguishing itself as properly “unique” when
being traded abroad: in literary terms, José Donoso’s and Pedro
Lemebel’s work are evidence of this, as discussed here in other
 QUEERING THE STATE OF EXCEPTION, 1973–1990 171

chapters; perhaps a more commercial counterpart for this argu-

ment would be Carmenère wine, which went unnoticed in Chile
until French connoisseurs began buying it.
43. Carlos Alonso’s 1990 study of the costumbrista novels of early
twentieth-century Latin America, to which I referred briefly in
Chap. 2, makes a key intervention in these questions by examining
the tension between the desire for the cultural production of that
period to be essentially “Latin American” (Alonso uses the term
“autochthonous”) and the fact that “the absence of particular cul-
tural traits identified as such in a text … could provide the stron-
gest evidence of autochthonous production” (3, emphasis in
original), and therefore, “modernity.” In his introduction, Alonso
cites Jorge Luis Borges’ text El escritor argentino y la tradición,
which famously stated that the Koran was authentically “autoch-
thonous” text because of its lack of gauche cultural references like
camels, as evidence of this.
44. Critics offering overall descriptions of this period focus primarily
on films made by Chileans in exile. See Schumann 1979: 13, Pick
1987: 15–16, and King 1997: 409 and 416. These critics only
mention Flores’ film briefly, without going into depth about it,
though Pick goes into slightly more detail than the others. Two
reviews of El Charles Bronson chileno exist from the time it came
out. In one—a short piece in La Segunda, an afternoon daily
owned by El Mercurio, in 1984—Italo Passalacqua (1984) laments
the lack of infrastructure to support local Chilean films, referring
to “los problemas típicos de un medio que … no posee una legis-
lación acorde con las necesidades” (27): ChileFilms had been dis-
mantled shortly after the coup, as had the Center for Experimental
Cinema (for more information see Salinas and Stange (2008), par-
ticularly pp. 141–144). In 1984, the film was shown, for one week
only, at EspacioCal, an art house theater; larger movie theaters at
the time were mainly reserved for foreign commercial productions.
Héctor Soto (1985) also wrote a short review of El Charles Bronson
chileno in the film magazine Enfoque in 1985, focusing on its
ambiguous approach to Guajardo, and by extension, to identity
itself: “¿Hasta qué punto Fenelón está poseído por el mito? ¿Hasta
qué punto él cree ser el poseedor? ¿En qué medida Guajardo creyó
estar fortaleciendo su imagen al filmar esta película? ¿Hasta dónde
es consciente de sus imposturas? ¿Dónde comienza el embaucador?
172 C. FISCHER

¿Dónde termina la conciencia de un ser completamente enajenado

a un cuerpo y un alma que han dejado de ser suyos?” (Soto 17).
45. Two critics who wrote about this “invasion” during the UP
period—long before it took place on a massive scale—were Ariel
Dorfman and Armand Mattelart. Their 1972 book Para leer al
Pato Donald: Comunicación de masa y colonialismo uses Disney
cartoons as an example of a type of popular culture “donde la bur-
guesía industrial puede imponer sus leyes a todas las actitudes y
aspiraciones de los demás sectores … utilizando ideológicamente el
sector terciario de la actividad económica como utopía, como
proyección sentimental, como único futuro” (Dorfman and
Mattelart 133–134). Berríos critiques this position, however, call-
ing them “paternalistas” and “casi mesiánicos” (292).
46. Although dictatorial repression had a devastating impact on the
departments of humanities and social sciences at the University of
Chile, a more low-profile group of humanities academics at that
university was largely spared, due to their less militant (although
still leftist) political stances. Carlos Flores, despite being a member
of the MIR, moved in these circles, and so did a number of partici-
pants in La escena de avanzada, which will be examined below and
which has received much more attention from literary and cultural
critics than the work of Flores and his immediate contemporaries
(such as Jorge Guzmán and Enrique Lihn, to name but a few).
Lihn and Jorge Guzmán, meanwhile, were affiliated with the
Departamento de Estudios Humanísticos, which had been created
by Cristián Huneeus within the University of Chile’s (much less
“subversive”) Facultad de Ingeniería. The department was home
to a number of other important artists and critics who ended up
not going into exile, including Nicanor Parra, Lihn, Patricio
Marchant, and Ronald Kay; Diamela Eltit, Eugenia Brito, and Raúl
Zurita began their careers there as well, the first two as students
and the latter as an affiliated artist. In fact, far from being a place
where culture was dead, Chile in the late 1970s and 1980s was a
place of debate, creativity, and dissent, if fairly veiled. An example
of this budding cultural scene can be found in a 1984 article writ-
ten by Lihn for Cauce, a magazine aimed at challenging the
supremacy of the dictatorial news apparatus. In it, Lihn describes a
“happening” of sorts in which a number of artists in Chile at the
time, including painters Gracia Barros and Patricia Israel, came
 QUEERING THE STATE OF EXCEPTION, 1973–1990 173

together to commemorate the death the month before of Johnny

Weismüller, the actor who had played Tarzan in 12 of Edgar Rice
Burroughs’ films. Lihn states that “podía ser un ‘punto de unión
de todos los chilenos’ contra la dictadura (Tarzán tuvo la suerte de
dominar a los gorilas) … y como denuncia irónica de la inserción
de imágenes hollywoodenses en el ‘inconsciente colectivo’ latino-
americano” (32). Flores made a film of the event, and there are
several images of it published in conjunction with Lihn’s article.
47. Earlier in the film, Guajardo’s manager Juan Meza makes this
intention explicit: he and Guajardo are working on a television
program to “difundir el arte chileno fuera de nuestras fronteras,”
and have already put out a recording in Argentina as proof of their
intention to encourage “intercambio cultural.”
48. Even though Guajardo makes no explicit reference to the regime in
Flores’ film, he is much more forthcoming in a text written by
Francisco Mouat: “… usted debe saber que Charles Bronson a mí
me salvó la vida. […] Pero usted no se confunda, porque yo no
tengo nada que ver con política. Resulta que una noche me quedé
fuera de mi departamento en el centro … pero estaba todo cerrado
porque había toque de queda … y de lejos veo a un grupo de mili-
tares y uno de ellos me dice: Alto, ahí, conchatumadre, párate,
huevón … y yo obedezco … entonces ahí yo le dije señor, yo soy el
doble de Charles Bronson, el de los programas de Don Francisco. […]
Y el tipo saca el carnet y ve: Fenelón Guajardo. ‘Fenelón, te pedimos
disculpas, pucha, Fenelón, amigo,’ y se me acerca un milico … y me
vuelve a pedir perdón. […] Por eso digo que a mí me salvó Charles
Bronson, a él le debo la vida, porque yo iba a ser fusilado” (262–263,
italics in original). The sole fact that Fenelón had been the imper-
sonator of Charles Bronson was enough to completely excuse his
violation of the curfew—proof of the extent of the dictatorship’s
official celebration of the importation of US mass culture.
49. In Tony Manero, a character named Raúl Peralta seeks to win a
television contest seeking lookalikes of Tony Manero, the name of
John Travolta’s emblematic character in John Badham’s 1977 film
Saturday Night Fever—a scenario similar to Guajardo’s undertak-
ing at Sábados gigantes.
50. Indeed, Pablo Larraín calls the Chile in which both his film and El
Charles Bronson chileno take place “a society whose hands are cov-
ered in blood, but which tries to look stylish and trendy, dancing
174 C. FISCHER

under the flashy lights while ignoring the suffering of others. A

country that turns its back on itself in exchange for the dream of
progress. […] But attaining this modernity—moving up the social
scale—is impossible” (Larraín 2009: 47).
51. In this way, Cárcamo-Huechante claims Fuguet for a canon of
neoliberal, globalized writing in Latin America, making use of
Baudrillard’s theories to argue that Fuguet “no sólo tematiza sino
que incorpora la retórica y la trama de signos del libre mercado: el
libre mercado adquiere así el estatus de ficción literaria. Producto y
proceso, ficción y ficcionalización del mercado como espacio(s) de
intensiva circulación” (165). He does not, however, make a case
for Fuguet as an apologist for dictatorship.
52. Catalina Forttes’ entire reading of Mala onda is as a novel of
“deformation,” instead of as a traditional bildungsroman, in which
the young protagonist accepts political and economic situations in
which “la gente por lo general evita el cambio y prefiere el doble
estándar y la hipocresía antes que modificar sus vidas” (86).
53. Forttes cites an interview with Fuguet in which he expressed his
dissatisfaction with critical reactions to the McOndo manifesto and
anthology: “… cuando se habla de ‘McOndo’ no se habla del libro.
Esa es la principal razón por la cual nunca se va a reeditar. Jamás se
comentaron los cuentos, el libro no se transformó en una antología
literaria con la convicción tipo ‘nace una generación’ […]. Cuando
se habla de ‘McOndo,’ se habla del prólogo que hicimos. Los
cuentos o no fueron leídos, o fueron bien leídos, o fueron olvida-
dos o una mezcla de todo eso” (Forttes 37).
54. In this sense, the McOndo manifesto—which explicitly refuses to
apologize for excluding women from the field of those selected in
the anthology it precedes—was yet another example of a new gen-
eration of male authors deploying an anxious rhetoric of patriarchy
in order to distance themselves from a previous generation of male
authors, as Diana Sorensen describes the writers of the “Boom”
doing in the 1960s, and which I explored in the second chapter.
The article in Newsweek that had featured Fuguet on the cover,
incidentally, was titled “Is Magical Realism Dead?”
55. In her dissertation, Forttes says Mala onda is his first novel, even
though it was published a year after Enrique Alekán (88); she does
offer a short historical discussion of it. Cárcamo-Huechante dedi-
cates just two sentences to it (167).
 QUEERING THE STATE OF EXCEPTION, 1973–1990 175

56. Fuguet edited the columns of “la censura y la autocensura” which

“ya no corren” (13), and controlled them for quality and “pro-
gresión dramática” (13), into a novel that could serve as “símbolo
o recuerdo de esta etapa” (13). The novel version also eliminates
the practice, in the column, of putting references to brands and
places to eat in boldfaced type, which was presumably the result of
advertisements paid for by different companies to appear associ-
ated with the columns (the constant references to brands remained
in the final version, however).
57. The name Enrique Alekán comes from Henri Alekan (1909–2001),
a French filmmaker associated with the Nouvelle Vague who
worked closely with Jean Cocteau, Wim Wenders, and—interest-
ingly—Raúl Ruíz. The back flap of Fuguet’s 1990 novel includes a
photo and a biography of Alekan, describing him as “el más grande
fotógrafo clásico del cine galo” and a “maestro de la iluminación y
los efectos ópticos.” This is a tribute (Fuguet had previously
worked as a film critic in El Mercurio, and more recently he himself
has become a filmmaker) and almost an attribution of co-
authorship, considering that Fuguet’s own biography and photo
occupy the front flap of the novel.
58. Although the action I will discuss in my reading of La azarosa y
sobreexpuesta vida de Enrique Alekán did first appear in column
form, my discussion will be based on the more definitive, novelized
form these stories took. I will refer to the sections making up the
novel as “vignettes” or “episodes” rather than “columns” in order
to reflect that.
59. These abilities were shared by Fuguet himself, who lived in the
USA as a child and who distinguished himself in Chile as a critic of
American films.
60. This stream of citations in Fuguet’s work continues in Mala onda,
which references the iconic images of foreign masculinities por-
trayed in J.D. Salinger’s novel Catcher in the Rye, the films Saturday
Night Fever and American Gigolo, and the music of Faith No More
and The Doors.
61. On one hand, Alekán reads letters reacting to his column as “un
cúmulo de mensajes subliminales hechos por la burguesía para
mantenerse cohesionada” (Fuguet 1990: 154). Yet at the same
time, he offers a sympathetic portrait of the Concertación, whose
supporters he portrays as intelligent, progressive, and liberated:
176 C. FISCHER

“Mujeres solas, intelectuales … estupendas y seguras de sí mismas”

(Fuguet 1990: 57). Pamela, the woman with whom Alekán has the
longest relationship in the novel, works for the Aylwin campaign
and is explicitly identified as a literate intellectual when she buys
Alekán a copy of Donoso’s 1986 novel La desesperanza: “Mira,
Alekán, estamos en la transición,” she tells him. “Más vale que
atinís” (Fuguet 1990: 91).
62. Alekán’s makes this desire for identification explicit later on in the
novel, expressing relief at his affinities with his readers when
responding to letters that they have written to him: “NO ESTOY
TAN SOLO … hay muchísima gente allá afuera que piensa más o
menos como yo y que ve la vida parecida” (Fuguet 1990: 51).
63. Incidentally, these debates have not taken place in conjunction
with La azarosa y sobreexpuesta vida de Enrique Alekán.
64. A letter from Fuguet to Donoso, posted from Iowa City, Iowa
(where Fuguet was studying at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, which
Donoso had begun) dated September 19, 1994, and available in
the Princeton University archives, is proof of that, as is an in-depth
allusion to Casa de campo (1974) in Mala onda, and an adulatory
chronicle that Fuguet wrote about Donoso, reprinted in Primera
parte, a 2000 compilation of his journalistic texts (53–56). In
Entre paréntesis (2004), Roberto Bolaño famously wrote of those
who saw Donoso in that light as “los donositos” (100), although
it is unclear whether he would count Fuguet among them, particu-
larly since later on in the text, he mentions Fuguet among other
writers such as Alan Pauls, Pedro Lemebel, Mario Bellatín, Daniel
Sada, César Aira, and Juan Villoro as those “sin los cuales no se
entendería esta entelequia que por comodidad llamamos nueva lit-
eratura latinoamericana” (313). One last curious piece of trivia: in
Mala onda, the protagonist makes reference to “las mellizas
Garmendia” (190), and in Bolaño’s 1996 novel Estrella distante,
the principal motive that the narrator of the novel has for attend-
ing a literary workshop is “las hermanas Garmendia, gemelas
monocigóticas y estrellas indiscutibles del taller de poesía” (15).
65. Opazo writes: “las glosas y las tachaduras a los libros de José
Donoso, Jorge Edwards o Alfredo Gómez Morel inscritas en los
relatos de Fuguet, ofrecen a sus personajes un conjunto de figuras
retóricas, de citas, de máscaras y de disfraces que les permite decirse
‘desviados,’ ‘homosexuales (de clóset),’ ‘misóginos,’ ‘perdidos,’
 QUEERING THE STATE OF EXCEPTION, 1973–1990 177

pero de manera oblicua” (82). Fuguet’s work is more focused on

popular culture and new media, but for Opazo, one has to be
extremely well-versed in the Chilean literary tradition, not obsessed
with Fuguet’s politics, in order to “truly” understand the queer
possibilities of Fuguet’s political and identitarian positions. It is
worth noting that Opazo’s use of the pathologizing term desviados
to describe Fuguet and his queer forefathers is a critical term as
coded and veiled as Fuguet’s references. This was in keeping, how-
ever, with Fuguet’s own coded affiliation to homosexuality; he
publically admitted he was gay only recently, in an October 3, 2015
interview with La Tercera: see http://www.latercera.com/noti-
cia/cultura/2015/10/1453-649791-9-alberto-fuguet-no-fic-
cion-es-lo-mas-lejos-que-puedo-llegar-antes-de-escribir-mis.shtml.
66. In response to critics who call his vision of Latin America “neolib-
eral, or even fascist,” and who say that he is “suggesting that the
poor had been all but erased from the continent and that the new
Latin American fiction was no more than the rants of U.S.-style
alienated rich kids” (Fuguet 2001: 71), Fuguet has offered acidic
responses to what he considers an outdated nostalgia for a folkloric
Latin America all-too-common in North American cultural studies-
oriented readings of the region. In his 2010 novel Aeropuertos, for
example, he makes a sly, if somewhat implausible, reference to “los
cientos de estudiantes de colleges americanos … que … leen bio-
grafías de Rigoberta Menchú” in the waiting room of the Cancún
airport (17). His (understandable) suspicion of North American
universities only extends so far, however: the 2011 film Música
campesina/Country Music, which he wrote and directed, was co-
produced by Vanderbilt University’s Center for Latin American
Studies (CLAS). Forttes, meanwhile, critiques readings like
Cárcamo-Huechante’s as “lecturas sociológicas que anteponen la
crítica a la instauración de un sistema neoliberal de mercado al
análisis literario e histórico de la obra” (22).

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 CHAPTER 5

Politicizing the Loca Body After

the Dictatorship, 1990–2005

INTRODUCTION: LOOKING BEYOND

THE POSTDICTATORSHIP?

The dictatorship did not end with an immediate, clean break from
Pinochet; there was a long process of institutional negotiations and pacts
that brought the military regime to a more gradual fade-out.1 Despite
its newly reestablished democracy, Pinochet left Chile with a firmly
entrenched neoliberal economic framework. Its economy now bearing the
badge of democratic legitimacy, then, Chile was poised for major growth
and investment in the 1990s and 2000s. Accordingly, the country posi-
tioned itself as a model of human rights-oriented reckoning as well as
of good economic management practices: “Chilean memory struggles
had an influential place in the epistemic and practical transformation of
international culture,” Steve Stern has pointed out (2010: 383).2 Patricio
Aylwin, the first democratically elected president following the dictator-
ship, implemented a truth and reconciliation commission and made a
number of other important gestures to reckon with the violent horrors
of the previous 17 years, though his administration did maintain constant
dialogue with dictatorship-era officials. His three immediate successors—
Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle, Ricardo Lagos, and Michelle Bachelet, all mem-
bers of the Concertación de partidos de la democracia, a political coalition
that ran the gamut from Socialists to Christian Democrats—all continued

© The Author(s) 2016 181

C. Fischer, Queering the Chilean Way,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-56248-7_5
182 C. FISCHER

in the same moderate vein as Aylwin, although the terms of their negotia-
tions with the military and the Right-wing changed over time:

What was unthinkable or impossible in 1990—that Manuel Contreras, the

former head of the DINA, could be jailed while Pinochet continued as army
commander—was not so unthinkable in 1995. Likewise, the unthinkable in
1995—that Contreras would turn out to be the first in a string of high officers
prosecuted for human rights crimes, rather than the exception that proved the
rule of impunity—was indeed imaginable in 2005. (Stern 2010: 360)

All four Concertación presidents thus performed a balancing act when

negotiating with the legacy of the dictatorship. They maneuvered carefully
within dictatorially conceived institutions while gradually modifying them
bit by bit; they backed reports revealing the human rights abuses com-
mitted in the 1970s and 1980s; they moderated Chicago School neolib-
eralism with a small but growing social safety net;3 and they loosened the
tightly patriarchal, normative, family-oriented discourse of the dictatorship
while still maintaining a relatively conservative stance on social issues.4 In
this way, official circles were able to justify the country’s moderate eco-
nomic and human rights record, in the aftermath of the dictatorship, as a
“model” of economic growth within the framework of democracy.
Meanwhile, a number of critics in this period—particularly those working
outside of official circles—resisted this rhetoric of economic exceptionalism
by pointing out the extent to which Chile’s economic success in the 1990s
depended on the economic framework that the dictatorship had previously
established. These efforts to point out a past left sedimented beneath a layer
of capitalist prosperity had political as well as economic implications, given
that they sought to uncover traces in the present of other residues of the
dictatorial past as well, such as disappeared persons and the leftist ideas they
represented. A subdiscipline of “memory studies” emerged in the academy
in order to carry out this long “labor of memory,” to borrow the phrase of
Elizabeth Jelin (2003). Even the work of Tomás Moulián (1997), which
I discussed at length in the previous chapter, can be considered a labor of
memory, given that it looked to the past to examine how the economic suc-
cess of Chile Actual largely owed itself to dictatorial brutality. Debates over
the legacy of the dictatorship continue to this day. Idelber Avelar (1999), for
example, focused on the idea of mourning,5 by which he meant the effort
to identify allegorical traces of the (leftist) past in the present (throughout
Latin America, not just in Chile). With this, critics could resist neoliberal
regimes whose explicit function is to erase those traces:
 POLITICIZING THE LOCA BODY AFTER THE DICTATORSHIP, 1990–2005 183

Whereas the hegemonic political discourses in Latin America would like

to ‘put a final stop’ to ‘the fixation in the past,’ the vanquished, those who
were defeated so that today’s market could be implemented, cannot afford
to have their tradition relegated to oblivion. […] In the very market that
submits the past to the immediacy of the present, mournful literature will
search for those fragments and ruins … that can trigger the untimely erup-
tion of the past. (2–3)

The mourning to which Avelar refers concerns cultural production,

remembering those who were “defeated” (in political and economic
terms), as well as those who were physically erased, by dictatorial regimes.6
Certain aspects of the past are erased and defeated, but so is the very
notion of memory in free market capitalism’s endless search for the new.
To remember leftist thought and action, then—at least in unofficial dis-
course—is to snatch the history of the defeated from the jaws of regimes
that function(ed) by forgetting.
Debates about how to come to terms with the legacy of the dictatorship
in the 15 years after it ended often took the form of questioning whether
Chile’s neoliberal economy was, in fact, exceptional, and much of Chilean
cultural criticism on the Left worked under the sign of the term postdicta-
torship in order to question this exceptionalism. This field of critique largely
coalesced around the Revista de Crítica Cultural, edited by the French-
Chilean thinker Nelly Richard from 1990 until 2008. The Revista focused
on how dissident art complicated official state and market hegemony dur-
ing the Chilean postdictatorship, and it ensured that ideas coming from
outside of the circles of economic, political, symbolic, and sexual power
in the country did not go unpublished (as well as the debates about those
unofficial discourses from within, as Michael Lazzara—who also made
key interventions in this debate—points out (2006: 26)). In this sense,
debates in Chile mirrored others taking place in postdictatorial contexts
throughout Latin America.7 The magazine offered a key forum for them
to look back and methodically reconstruct the different “discursive lenses”
through which narratives—both political and poetic—were constructed in
“an intense struggle over how to remember the past” of the dictatorship
(Lazzara 2006: 12–13). Their attempts to do so often took the form of
denouncing the whitewashing of Chile’s image—and the repression of its
violent past—to portray it as economically exceptional, particularly abroad.
Although these critics found a number of different ways to look back
upon how the dictatorship’s legacy seemed to stretch forward into the
present, they were much more ambivalent about looking beyond that
184 C. FISCHER

legacy. Rather, they advocated against signifying (which could possibly

mean imposing) an end of the “postdictatorship” or “transition” period,
and instead called for a radical openness with regard to such a future.
For example, Avelar’s take on Walter Benjamin’s idea of untimeliness
means “a radical discord with the present precisely in order to foreground
the absolute, unimaginable, unrepresentable openness of the future,
[given that] the untimely only experiences the latter in the form of an
open promise” (231, emphasis in original). Lazzara, meanwhile, advo-
cates for deconstructionist-style resistance to any “totalitarian recastings”
of the sociohistorical narratives of dictatorship: not to “arrest the sign a
priori” or “seal off meaning,” but rather “to question correspondences,
to intervene signifiers that in other instances appear naturalized” (2006:
157). Their resistance to closure rightly equated a gaze toward the (non-
postdictatorial? postpostdictatorial?) future with rigid discourses of “mov-
ing on” (or “punto final”8).
Still, other critics have brought up the possibility of moving beyond the
postdictatorship period, expressing hope in a time when Chile’s authori-
tarian past would cease to dictate (so to speak) the terms of public debate.9
Would making sexual (rather than solely political) dissidence the princi-
pal term around which to organize a discussion of this period combat
the rhetoric of Chilean exceptionalism by representing a more inclusive
(as well as more forward-thinking) way to discuss the country’s political
and economic sphere? Although the term “postdictatorship” looks back
to the dictatorship, it also implies an imperative for a time in which the
word “dictatorship” is no longer necessary to define the debate. In this
sense, Francine Masiello’s (2001) readings of Southern Cone art and lit-
erature in this period question the focus of critics like Avelar on “frag-
mentary” discourses of the postdictatorship, in favor of a “reflection on
alliance through critical thinking” informed by “a constant longing for
completion”:

… we awaken to interpretation and the desire to travel en route to a concep-

tual whole, one which is not an allegorization of national quandary … but
more likely a response to the flattening gloss of the market, the so-called
waning of affect that has been identified with the times. […] Rather, I am
urged to track the linkages between order and difference, their overlaps and
points of conjuncture in order to show how a critical sensibility is shaped
from the realm of cultural texts and offers the potential of a political future.
(13, emphasis in original)
 POLITICIZING THE LOCA BODY AFTER THE DICTATORSHIP, 1990–2005 185

Eschewing allegory, Masiello looks ahead to forms of art that both con-
test the hegemony of the market and also take into account the practices
of difference—particularly sexual difference—that such political stances
often ignore. Calling for an “affective” form of intellectual engagement,
she advocates for a future that looks ahead without forgetting the past or
remaining stuck in a mode of mourning that can easily slip into melancho-
lia.10 Although many discussions of the postdictatorship period, including
Masiello’s but also Richard’s, have kept gender at their center,11 they, too,
are often structured around an ideal model—one whose political and sex-
ual orientations are easily intelligible and classifiable under the sign of the
Left. Few critical discussions of the period following Chile’s dictatorship
have focused on sexually dissident subjects who may actually feel excluded
by larger narratives of leftist mourning. Is it possible to look ahead to a
time when queer affects can evade not only the marketplace, but also the
leftist political affiliations that sometimes circumscribe their movement,
and even exclude them altogether?
The lens (to use Lazzara’s term) that I am thus proposing for narrat-
ing this period of cultural production in Chile lies at the nexus of these
debates about forward-lookingness: the loca, a queer subject who resists
being categorized within larger political agendas.12 First, I will briefly
examine certain short stories from the volume Vidas vulnerables (2005)
by Pablo Simonetti, whose portrayals of gay life in 1990s Chile are ori-
ented less at the “practices of difference” (to use Richard’s term) of the
loca, and more toward a normalization (and a political and economic neu-
tralization) of that difference. Pedro Lemebel’s representations of locas,
from his early performances as part of the duo Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis
to his crónicas (in his 1996 volume Loco afán) set at the sexual margins of
Chile’s national, economic, and political discourses, will provide the foun-
dation for the chapter, however. In fact, as in previous chapters, Lemebel’s
work will also function as a theoretical apparatus,13 so as to think about
the complicated, delicate movement of the loca between a critique of the
Right and an explicit solidarity with the Left. Finally, I will focus on one
particular figure in Lemebel’s chronicles who resurfaces in the work of
Roberto Bolaño’s 1996 novel Estrella distante and a number of other
works of art and film: Lorenza Böttner, a Chilean-born transgender per-
formance artist whose remarkable life defied geographical, gender, media,
and canonical boundaries, and in doing so, exemplified how the loca can
fashion herself outside of political schema that would limit the signifying
potential of her self-expression.
186 C. FISCHER

Though visible in new ways in the 1990s Chile, when individual

identity-based discourses took on increasing importance in the con-
text of market and social liberalism, the loca has been around since long
before.14 Born a man but simulating the gestures of a woman, her rejec-
tion of the binary of gender allows her to undermine other binaries and
hierarchies as well, as Néstor Perlongher (1997) has acutely observed in
his reading of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.15 Deleuze and Guattari
refer to “becoming” as, among other things, the renunciation of one’s
defined, fixed place—within an identity, an archive, or a genealogy—and
the opening of oneself to crossings, exchanges, and losses of clarity (11);
Perlongher extends this idea to include the renunciation of any fixed
gender. According to Richard, meanwhile, the loca is at once “active”
(activa,16 dominant) and “passive” (submissive), and this, Richard claims,
makes the loca an apposite figure from which to critique a “regulatory
and superficial” (2004: 43) military regime that tended to schematize late
twentieth-century Chilean society and history—and sexuality itself—into
unproblematic binaries:

[o]n one side of this double face, [is] the Chile involved in taking power and
in armed intervention imposed a militaristic-patriarchal discourse … And on
the other side … was the Chile submerged in obedience to the disciplinary
model, submitting to orders, like a woman, in obligatory silence. (2004: 43)

For the loca, then, militancy of any kind—whether associated with the
dictatorship or with the Left—often takes a backseat to affective and iden-
titarian ties, and as such, “the ‘peripheral persona’ of the loca, with her
roaming metaphor of superimposed and interchangeable identities, pres-
ents ‘one of the most potentially subversive challenges’ confronting sys-
tems of univocal characterization of normative identity” (Richard 2004:
52). The loca can thus be an anti-relational figure who can set her own
path outside of political ideologies inherent to, say, postdictatorship cri-
tique. She can inhabit a number of spaces in Chilean society (albeit some
of them rather tensely), moving among rich and poor, between the statist
ideals of the Left and the conservative, free-market capitalist logic of neo-
liberalism, as well as between complicity with the repressive military dic-
tatorship apparatus and resistance to it. This is not to deny, however, that
locas have a great deal to mourn in the aftermath of dictatorship—not only
loved ones who disappeared, but also, those who died of AIDS, as we shall
see.17 In this sense, locas have an important stake in the politicization of
 POLITICIZING THE LOCA BODY AFTER THE DICTATORSHIP, 1990–2005 187

the postdictatorship, and do not undermine the work of resisting official

discourse in Chile. Still, though, a certain amount of skepticism on the
part of locas even in regards to parts of the postdictatorship critical agenda
is understandable, given the homophobia that was so common in the Left.
Locas can thus critique monolithic political and economic examinations of
literary and cultural production, both official and unofficial—those that
promote Chile’s exceptional neoliberal economic success, and those that
deconstruct that exceptionalism—through their enactment of an evasion,
albeit a selective one, of political categories.18

FUTURITY AND THE LOCA: QUEER TELEOLOGIES

AND CANONICAL LEGACIES

Placing the loca at the heart of political debates about Chile’s recent past
is also a useful way of rethinking a long, productive debate in Anglophone
theory about the place of queer subjects in the transmission of political
ideology and teleology—a transmission that often takes place in the con-
text of heterosexual praxis, with ideas being passed down over time within
normative family structures in order to maintain a set social order. On
the one hand, Lee Edelman (2004) intervenes in this debate by figuring
the queer, and her acts of “non-generative sexual enjoyment … without
‘hope of posterity’” (12) as preventing political ideas from being trans-
mitted from generation to generation. By sidestepping this heterosexual-
ized transmission, the queer is “inherently destructive of meaning and
therefore … responsible for the undoing of social organization, collective
reality, and, inevitably, life itself” (13): she defies syntax (24), teleology
(31), normativity, and even the seeming omnipotence of the Lacanian
idea of the Symbolic (14). On the other hand, José Muñoz (2009) states
that queer subjects can participate in creating a better future, particularly
in the form of art: they move the historical and cultural debate forward—
albeit outside of the realm of heterosexual praxis—instead of stopping it.
Critiquing the “anti-relational” stance of Edelman and other critics like
Leo Bersani, Muñoz calls for an affective thinking in which that which is
“queer” is positioned not as an “ending” in itself, but rather as a political
ideal to be strived for: “an ideality that can be distilled from the past and
used to imagine a future” (1). For Muñoz, “a mode of utopian feeling”
is “integral” to much of art (queer and otherwise), through a “meth-
odology” of hope (5) and a “reparation”19 of the teleology that more
anti-relational readings deny. At stake in this debate is whether queer
188 C. FISCHER

subjects should reject the reproduction of political categories alongside

their evasion of heterosexual teleology, or whether there remains hope
in the future for the inclusion in political debate of a queer “legacy.” In
Chile, this debate can illuminate whether it is possible to find a balance
between zero embodiment, in the loca, of any political category whatso-
ever, and alliances between locas and those who represent political ideas
that critique official discourses of exceptionalism while taking not only
sexual differences into account but also those related to class (14) and
race (11),20 as Muñoz has proposed.21
One of the principal ways in which the loca’s body has been appropri-
ated by both the Left and the Right is in the form of the literary and artis-
tic canon. Exclusive by its very definition, a canon is made up of cultural
artifacts chosen for their ability to represent a certain time period (such as
the postdictatorship) most accurately. In this sense, these artifacts—and
their authors—are designated as exceptional: they become commodities,
valued more than others from the same time, that best represent a particu-
lar economic, political, aesthetic, or historical period. The canon created
by postdictatorship critics can thus end up being just as exclusive as the
exceptionalistic economic logic that they are trying to counter.22 What
happens if we imagine (or, as Muñoz would have it, “feel”) a “new” path
forward for Chile’s queer literary and artistic canon in which we do not
appropriate the body of the loca for the agenda of the postdictatorship?
Would doing so hobble the (important) political claims of postdictator-
ship cultural criticism? How would that change the artistic canon of the
period? Who would enter into the canon, and who would no longer be
there? What are the implications of the canon for the way the history of
the period is written?
These questions were sources of preoccupation for two anthologies of
Chilean writing by sexual minorities—both published in the same year,
2001. One, compiled by Juan Pablo Sutherland, is an entire book, includ-
ing excerpts from more than 25 writers, both men and women. The other,
compiled by Fernando Blanco, is a long journal article, and positions itself
as more focused on “marginal” sexualities, in response to currents of study
that have supposedly erased them:

Según nuestro parecer, en la última década, tanto en Chile como en otros

centros de discusión, esa textualización [tematizada de prácticas homo-
sexuales masculinas] ha desembocado en la instalación de una homonorma
teórica—blanca y eurocentrista—que, paradojalmente, ha contribuido a la
 POLITICIZING THE LOCA BODY AFTER THE DICTATORSHIP, 1990–2005 189

invisibilización (homosombra) de los propios discursos subalternos y de otras

maneras de vínculos culturales y contratos sociales, que incluyen subjetivi-
dades diversas (incluyendo, por ejemplo, a las minorías portadoras de VIH).
(Blanco 2001: 111)23

Both anthologies express a desire to intervene in “history” (Sutherland

2001: 10) or “historiography” (Blanco 2001: 112), either by opening up
“new spaces and readings” of gay discourse (in the case of the former)
or by rethinking categories of identity (in the case of the latter). In so
doing, both Sutherland and Blanco evidently sought to counter larger
discourses that they felt had glossed over their particular visions of Chilean
queer history: in Sutherland’s case, this meant simply making homosexu-
ality in Chilean literature more visible, while for Blanco, it meant a turn
away from overarching (and possibly homonormative) discourses of “gay
studies” (2001: 111) in favor of “minority” subjectivities. Although they
both include work by Lemebel, neither dwells much on the visual arts
(although Sutherland does reference Juan Dávila24). For both, however,
this canonicity has implications for how the history of sexually dissident
subjects in Chile is written.
However, is the creation of a “queer canon” a contradiction in terms?
This is evidently the concern of Judith (Jack) Halberstam (2011), who
asks whether “rescuing” some queer subjects out of obscurity and into the
canon will replicate the same exclusions (inherent to exceptionalism as well,
incidentally) that had been enacted before, but this time with different
subjects and cultural products. Critiquing the way critics of queer culture
“are so endlessly seduced by the idea that sexual expression is in and of
itself a revolutionary act” (150), Halberstam cautions against the cliché of
describing “gay and lesbian history as a repressed archive and the historian
as an intrepid archaeologist digging through homophobic erasure to find
the truth” (148). Halberstam questions the way critics often unproblemati-
cally employ models of sexual difference in order to “queer” certain histori-
cal periods and conceive of them as more politically radical than previously
thought, simply because of the previously unknown existence of those
models. In this sense, the idea of a “queer” canon for Chile’s postdictator-
ship is a contradiction in terms, because it inevitably creates a hierarchy
in which some locas are deemed more “palatable” (Contardo 2011) than
others for exemplifying one particular critic’s idea about the political spirit
of any particular period. Given that queerness is generally theorized as the
evasion of discursive labels that categorize sexual identities and praxis into
190 C. FISCHER

easily surveillable categories, some wariness about “locat[ing] the plucky

queer as a heroic freedom fighter in a world of puritans” (Halberstam
150)—precisely such a category—is appropriate. Halberstam’s solution to
this conundrum is to build up a corpus of queer figures whose stories are
not necessarily convenient for the aims of one critic or another, and this
is something that I am going to mirror in my reading of postdictatorship
Chilean history, so as not to risk the same instrumentalization of the body
of the loca that both the Left and the Right have enacted. Instead, I sub-
mit an artistic corpus here of locas who are occasionally unpalatable, for
different reasons, to those on Chile’s Left and Right, in order to examine
the evasive relationship that exists between those figures and the politi-
cal ideologies that constantly seek to place them under surveillance within
restrictive canons.
On the Right, the circumscription of the loca’s movement takes place
in the context of neoliberalism, in which the market operates to co-opt
all kinds of sexual difference and intertwine them with the logic of capital
promoted by Concertacionismo. While histories told from the perspective
of the loca have opened up some new spaces in public discourse, they are
often quickly subsumed back into the logic of the market. Indeed, Blanco
argues in the Foucauldian mode that the “perverse” subject “opera como
un constructor que posibilita el sostén de lo social” and “produc[e] las
fronteras necesarias para la mantención del lazo social” (2010: 18). By
guaranteeing a space of “acceptable difference,” he continues, the state
and the market have sought to contain (and privatize) sexual dissidence
within limits that then prevent queer subjects from movements that would
politically threaten Chile’s delicate, negotiated transition to democracy.
This is similar to an argument made by Masiello about sexual difference as
exceptional and thus worthy of attention in the market: “[a]s the market
becomes the new arena for the promotion and sale of ‘difference,’ alter-
native gendered identities lose their political thrust and are often consid-
ered commodities or tokens of exchange” (16). When art and literature
extol practices of sexual difference (as opposed to dissidence) even as they
welcome with open arms the neoliberal logic that Avelar and other post-
dictatorship critics abhor, this runs the risk of complicity with the politics
that erased the past of Chile’s “defeated.”
On the Left, during and shortly after the dictatorship, great impor-
tance was placed on the Left presenting a “united front” of opposition,
and it was thought that any exposure of divisions within it would weaken
its credibility, both in Chile and abroad. Queer people within the Left
 POLITICIZING THE LOCA BODY AFTER THE DICTATORSHIP, 1990–2005 191

who resisted the dictatorship were encouraged not to speak out about
their sexuality, so as not to distract from the larger resistance, and many
were expelled from the ranks of the Chilean Communist Party (Robles
2008: 39–42). This is likely why Lemebel, for one, has been such a
major proponent of “queering” Chilean cultural history. In this way, he
could use the artistic and literary archive to invert not only rightist nar-
ratives of the nation that focused primarily on its heterosexual subjects
but also the hegemonic leftist narratives of a “mourning” to recuperate
the memory solely of the politically oppressed. In a 2000 interview with
Andrea Jeftanovic, then, Lemebel insists on the importance of exposing
a “historia oculta” (Jeftanovic 78) of gay subjects on the periphery of
the country’s “master narrative,” as Diana Palaversich (2002) has called
it (102),25 so as to queer the Chilean nation and Chilean history; this
has also been the focus of multiple critical readings of Lemebel’s work.26
Lemebel decries leftist accounts of the dictatorship that elide those who
have died of AIDS in Chile, many of whom were queer,27 and in this
sense he “contaminates” the mourning of the thwarted, vaunted Left by
conflating it with the memory of those who died of AIDS.28 Lemebel’s
oeuvre is thus doubly exceptional, since the postdictatorship history that
he critiques for its heterosexism is itself a rewriting of the country’s cul-
tural history (Jeftanovic 2000).
Still, can Chilean history be queered without falling into the trap,
exposed by Halberstam, of repositioning locas as “the real winners”—thus
making them the tools of the neoliberal apparatus of the 1990s Chile,
which neatly divided (and divides) subjects into winners and losers? Can
there be practices of sexual dissidence that resist appropriation, and there-
fore neutralization, by the logic of market exitismo? Can locas be included
in a canon of sexual dissidence—leaving behind a legacy and pointing
towards a future of resistance—without risking being corralled into a
defined political agenda? Or is their own erasure and effacement their best
hope of maintaining their dissidence, even if it might end in “failure,” as
Halberstam suggests? These are similar to the questions asked by Masiello,
who anticipates Muñoz’s focus on utopian futurity in her work on the
“art of transition” to democracy in the Southern Cone.29 While Muñoz
acknowledges that a utopian mode of thinking cannot be corralled into a
programmatic series of recommendations,30 he does point the way toward
a critical stance that I will take up: the idea that queerness has not yet been
achieved, and that what we recognize now as “queer” is rather only an
“avatar” of what will come (22). Muñoz elaborates:
192 C. FISCHER

Such a hermeneutic would then be epistemologically and ontologically humble

in that it would not claim the epistemological certitude of a queerness that
we simply “know” but, instead … extend a glance toward that which is
forward dawning […]. The purpose of such temporal maneuvers is to wrest
ourselves from the present’s stultifying hold. (28, emphasis in original)

By focusing not on the present but rather on what has yet to be, Muñoz
posits that our lack of satisfaction with the present will cause us to stop
limiting our critical thinking to dull, pragmatic politicking and focus on
a greater picture: a glimpse of a moment when “one feels ecstasy … and
more importantly during moments of contemplation when one looks back
at a scene from one’s past, present, or future” (32). Muñoz’s analysis looks
ahead to these “potentialities” by returning to the archive: his objects of
study—the canon he constructs—are what he points to as support for
his argument. He knows queer utopia when he sees it, but he does not
describe it, since to do so would immediately limit its scope. Therefore,
in order to honor Muñoz’s argument while also working toward outlin-
ing a critical praxis that places the loca at its center and moves beyond
the postdictatorship, we can locate this effort in a specific moment of his-
tory: Chile, between 1990 and 2005. The locas under study here balance
between lending their queer experiences to a political and aesthetic politi-
cal legacy that can undo the exceptionalist rhetoric of official circles in
the postdictatorship, on one hand, and rejecting politicized attempts by
others to erase their particularities, on the other. I will thus focus, in what
follows, on locas who take exception to economic and political narratives
that corral them, limit their movement, and unduly categorize them, so
as to meditate on the implications of their contradictory roles—as both
exemplary and also dissident—for the ways in which we look to a future
beyond the postdictatorship.

SIMONETTI: THE LOCA AS HISTORICALLY, ECONOMICALLY,

AND SEXUALLY VULNERABLE

An engineer by profession, Pablo Simonetti came to literary notoriety

after publishing a short story titled “Santa Lucía,” for which he won first
prize in a contest tied to Paula magazine in 1997. Simonetti and his
work have been consistently identified with Chile’s highest social class
(Sutherland 2001: 13; Espinosa 54): the characters in his stories are usu-
ally very wealthy, and as such, Simonetti’s work has been described as
 POLITICIZING THE LOCA BODY AFTER THE DICTATORSHIP, 1990–2005 193

conservative (Espinosa 54) because of attitudes in it about gender that

are generally espoused by, and associated with, Chile’s most entrenched
economic interests. “Santa Lucía” and others of Simonetti’s early short
stories outlined what later came to be known as his political stance on gay
rights in democracy: a liberal discourse of “inclusion” and equality that
seeks to minimize the differences between the ways in which homosexuals
and heterosexuals are treated in Chile. Simonetti himself, meanwhile, has
exemplified the way he evidently feels that gays should comport them-
selves in Chile: projecting a conventionally masculine, homonormative
image, he is a regular presence on the lecture circuit of several of Chile’s
exclusive, private universities.31 In this sense, his writing offers a way of
thinking about the restriction of sexual dissidence—the body of the loca—
behind the barriers of normativity. He does this not only with the charac-
ters in his own stories, but also with other writers in Chile’s queer canon,
particularly José Donoso. For Simonetti, the only artistic legacy for sexual
difference lies, paradoxically, in normativity: by eschewing exceptional-
ism—by figuring homonormative men as “just like everyone else”—the
legacy of gay (but not queer) writing and subjectivity can be passed on to
future generations in a way that leaves Chile’s neoliberal power structures
safely in place (Espinosa 2009).
Vidas vulnerables is the title of an anthology of short stories that
was Simonetti’s first published volume in 1999. Here, homosexuality is
either normalized and thus politically (and economically) neutralized, or
becomes a matter so private as to be almost inaccessible politically; prac-
tices of sexual difference on the economic margins of society, meanwhile,
are viewed with disgust. “Santa Lucía,” its most well-known story, is
about the betrayal by homosexuality of the otherwise apparently peaceful
existence of a conventional heterosexual family. In it, the nameless pro-
tagonist is filled one winter evening with a “rara urgencia” (57) to go up
to the nearby Santa Lucía Hill, the iconic natural landmark in the center
of Santiago known as a cruising spot after dark. The protagonist’s “urge”
and “fascination” (57) with the hill on that particular day—the word
“desire” is never mentioned—comes from the fact that he has exchanged
suggestive glances with a man at the entrance to the hill on his way back
from work. First of all, it is a wonder that the family ever ended up liv-
ing in this part of the city. After all, the narrator-protagonist states, the
hill threatens to extend its prohibited status to the entire neighborhood:
“Tanto Camila como yo sabemos que durante la noche lo habitan rateros y
degenerados. […] Ella se opuso cuando tuvimos la oportunidad de arren-
194 C. FISCHER

dar [el departamento]; naturalmente imaginó que la falta de seguridad se

extendía al resto del barrio” (57). He has doubts about the area around
the hill because it is far from the areas of Santiago that the wealthy usually
inhabit, and his family is clearly marked as wealthy and conservative: his
wife, Camila, has blond hair (59) and is thus unambiguously racialized as
non-indigenous; a crucifix hangs above the couple’s marital bed (67); and
he himself is consumed by concerns about “la necesidad de guardar las
apariencias” (66) of upper-class respectability. Simonetti has been accused
of misogyny as an author (Espinosa 54), and this story is no exception:
when the protagonist tells his wife that he is planning on going to the hill
after dinner, her reaction is completely passive. At first, she protests about
the rain, as if it were completely unclear to her what his real reasons for
going out are: “Camila intuía de qué estábamos hablando, pero jamás se
atrevería a explicitar sus temores” (59); she eventually resorts to “resigned
frustration” (60), without ever asserting her objections to her husband’s
impending foray into infidelity or voicing her concerns—until now, only
“intuited”—about his sexual orientation. While Camila’s willful ignorance
(and the fact that this is something the protagonist takes advantage of)
may be interpreted as the story’s representation (and critique) of an ultra-
conservative upbringing and culture that refuses even to name such trans-
gressions, no effort is ever made to examine her perspective. Eventually,
the protagonist ventures up the hill, where he has a sexual encounter with
the man he had glimpsed earlier. When the encounter ends and the other
man leaves, all he wants is “que apareciera Camila con una manta y me
llevara abrazado hasta el departamento” (65); later, back at the house,
when she draws him a bath, “[e]ra como una madre socorriendo a su hijo”
(68). His evident concern for appearances belies his longing to be seen as
the patriarch of a conventional family, which to him clearly means having
a wife who will treat him exactly as his mother did, even after his sexual
encounters with men. Misogyny is perhaps the only way to explain how
Simonetti could try to realistically include a woman in his narration who
would knowingly marry—and stay married to—a closeted, pathological
liar. At the melodramatic end of the story, Camila sees the blood com-
ing from “beneath the legs” of the protagonist slowly changing the color
of the water in the bathtub: clear evidence of the anal sex her husband
has had. Still, she leaves him to sleep in their daughter’s room with noth-
ing more than an “hasta mañana”: the protagonist returns to his home
and—in sleeping near his daughter—allies himself once again with the
reproductive heterosexuality that affords him so much societal privilege
 POLITICIZING THE LOCA BODY AFTER THE DICTATORSHIP, 1990–2005 195

(and privacy). Moreover, by looking to the next day (“mañana”), he and

his wife tacitly ensure a “future,” at least in the short term, in which his
heterosexual identity will be passed down (at least publicly) to the next
generation. Repression, lies, and humiliation are, for Simonetti, the only
response the wealthy have to homosexuality, particularly when they have
firmly cast their lot with reproductive sexuality.
“Amor virtual,” another short story in the 1999 collection, portrays
a more open practice of homosexuality, but only because it appears in
the context of great wealth. The story’s characters move from New York
lofts, to exclusive areas of coastal Chile, to Paris, all in seemingly casual,
effortless ways—an experience only accessible to very, very few in a coun-
try whose monthly minimum wage is today just over US$400. Again, it
is narrated in the first-person by an unnamed protagonist, but this time
the protagonist’s words have a clear addressee: a friend named Benjamín.
Benjamín has recently died in an accident of some sort, and around him his
friends mourn the loss; but this is an apolitical, privatized mode of mourn-
ing that takes place less in Chile than it does in New York, where Benjamín
lived with his American boyfriend Bill. True, the first site of mourning
is at the cemetery in the wealthy coastal Chilean village of Zapallar, but
later, the protagonist heads to New York City to spend time with Bill, as
well as with Benjamín’s artist friend Lucrecia, an Italian marquise. In this
world, the characters are free to mourn openly for their dead friend, but
only in certain select and rich areas of Chile, or by taking a long, costly
plane ride to New York. Other than a brief reference to Benjamín’s escape
from Chile’s “convivencia hipócrita” (133), the reasons why he felt he
had to move to New York in the first place are left undiscussed, although
a mention of Benjamín’s grave in the Zapallar cemetery—with a better
view than José Donoso, “en una tumba más atrás, sin vista, envidiándote
para toda una eternidad” (130)—serves as a wink at another artist who
struggled with his homosexuality both in Chile and the USA. Benjamín
and his gay narrator friend may have ended up excluded from most spaces
in Chile—other than the cemetery, of course—but this is not a problem
for them, since New York and Paris are just a plane trip away, and they are
more interesting anyway.
In “El baile,” once again we find ourselves among Chile’s most wealthy,
this time at a New Year’s party at a beach house. The narrator, Esteban,
and his wife, Mariana, are greeted at the door by their host, Miguel, for a
seemingly routine evening of dinner and cocktails, but Esteban is quickly
jarred out of his comfort zone by the appearance of Cucho, the cook,
196 C. FISCHER

“un hombrecillo” (Simonetti 99) whose overt effeminacy suggests prac-

tices of sexual difference that threaten Esteban’s sense of the hierarchies
of the evening. The “authority” (100) and “informality” (99) with which
Cucho addresses Miguel (somehow simultaneously) is incomprehensible
to Esteban, who views Cucho with disgust. He describes the latter’s some-
what grotesque physical appearance in a way reminiscent of Donoso’s
emblematic character La Manuela, discussed at length in the second chap-
ter: “Profundas arrugas le cercaban los ojos negros como agujeros, una afi-
lada nariz de gancho parecía a punto de soltar una gota y en su calva oscura
florecía una multitud de pecas” (100). This evocation of La Manuela is
likely another attempt by Simonetti to insert himself in Chile’s literary
tradition of sexual difference—a curious affiliation in light of Donoso’s
ambiguous movement between queerness and normativity. Esteban seems
to be mostly worried that Cucho does not “know his place,” and that he
seems to be transgressing his boundaries through his excessively friendly
and close relationship with his employers: “Ser testigo de sus habilidades
no hizo para mí menos incomprensible el hecho de que un personaje como
él trabajara para nuestros amigos” (101). If Cucho is so dismissive of the
social distance between himself and Miguel, what else might he be capable
of transgressing?32 Esteban’s worst fears seem to be confirmed after din-
ner, as the guests begin to dance and count down to the New Year and
the champagne begins to flow more freely; suddenly, Esteban realizes that
Cucho is dancing with him:

Me volví y me vi enfrentado al cuidador. Se contoneaba a no más de un

metro de distancia. Aunque mantenía la vista baja, comprendí que yo era
el foco de su baile. […] Sin duda exteriorizaba mi desconcierto y de algún
modo pedía ayuda. Miguel me devolvió una mirada comprensiva. “Cuando
toma, le da por bailar,” me dijo risueño. “No te preocupes, es inofensivo”.
(102)

Despite Miguel’s paternalistic reassurances, Esteban is completely taken

aback by Cucho’s transgression of his “proper place.” And yet, by the
end of the story, Esteban realizes that Cucho’s motives are “innocent”
(104); that is, Cucho’s transgressions are “only” sexual, not economic.
Once Esteban realizes that Cucho’s sexual difference poses no threat to
the economic hierarchy of the invited guests at the party, he stops worry-
ing about him; Cucho can do what he wants as long as he does not disturb
Miguel’s paternalistic place as host, and his “talante de pretor romano”
 POLITICIZING THE LOCA BODY AFTER THE DICTATORSHIP, 1990–2005 197

(99). At the end of the night, Esteban “secretamente bailaba con él. […]
Debo haberme emocionado, porque me tomó un momento para recuperar
el aire para decirle a su oído con audífono: ‘Feliz Año Nuevo, Cucho’”
(104). Retrograde patriarchy is thus thinly disguised as progressivism: a
loca as grotesque and effeminate as Cucho can manage to win over even
the most homophobic and traditionalist of the party’s guests. Hope for a
decrease of homophobia among Chile’s wealthy ruling class remains, as
long as the locas they tolerate do not transgress certain economic bound-
aries and hierarchies policed by those who practice reproductive sexuality.
The ideas expressed about sexual difference in Simonetti’s writing are
mirrored in a foundation he established in 2011 known as “Iguales,”
which advocates for marriage equality and moderate anti-discrimination.
The foundation states that it “tiene como misión trabajar por la dignidad
igualitaria de todos y todas los y las chilenos y chilenas, mediante el recono-
cimiento civil y la integración política y social de la diversidad sexual”:
integration and assimilation above all, with no economic critique whatso-
ever. In this way, it sets itself apart from the Movimiento de Integración
y Liberación Homosexual (MOVILH), which included members of the
Communist Party among its founders.33 This foundation is so firmly rooted
in the logic of capital that it even created a project entitled “Todo Mejora,”
a Chilean version of the US project “It Gets Better,” in which gay and les-
bian adults upload videos onto a website to show LGBT youth that there
is a future beyond the bullying to which they may be subjected to in school
(and dissuade them from committing suicide).34 As the Todo Mejora web-
site states, LGBT youths “no pueden imaginar lo que será su vida como
adultos. No pueden imaginar un futuro para sí mismos. Por lo que les
mostraremos cómo son nuestras vidas” (emphasis added).35 The images,
both in the US and Chilean versions, show LGBT adults who have “made
it” in the economic sense: neutralizing political “militancy” and queerness,
and ensuring that the “futurity” they espouse is one in which the legacy
of capitalism remains alive. This has been a cause for anxiety among queer
Chilean artists and activists such as Sutherland, who expresses his qualms
with projects like Simonetti’s thusly: “… siempre habrá quienes intenten …
poner la bella palabra correcta de una diversidad sin rostros. Las estrategias
son muchas … pero siempre habrá por ahí un deseo precario y militante …
sin claudicar por las deudas históricas de la izquierda con las minorías” (39,
emphasis added). Sutherland’s emphasis on Simonetti’s faceless diversity is
telling: by allowing a larger narrative of Chilean economic exceptionalism
to take precedence over the possibility for the specificities inherent to dissi-
198 C. FISCHER

dent queer subjectivities, Simonetti promotes the same kind of normativity

that the neoliberal marketplace does.
For Simonetti, then, if one has to be openly gay, the best place to do it
is in New York; meanwhile, homosexuality within Chile is either subject
to the bindings of repression, or it breeds locas of inscrutable social stand-
ing and hideous appearance and comportment. The gay “rights” that he
imagines are in total compatibility with the market-driven, North Atlantic
images of gay masculinity that arrived in Chile from abroad, thanks to
neoliberalism. Simonetti poses homonormativity and repression as the
only solutions if one is to live in Chile, because being openly queer poses
a definite threat to existing structures of economic and familial privilege,
and needs to be neutralized. Mourning is apolitical; practices of sexual
difference that might be seen as economically threatening are defused;
gayness is compatible with reproductive sexuality and normative family
structures; and locas are kept safely on Chile’s geographic, familial, and
economic margins. The “future” of sexual difference that Simonetti imag-
ines, then—one of repression that is reproduced within heterosexual nor-
mativity—is complicit with the neoliberal exceptionalism critiqued not
only by dissident locas, but also by postdictatorship critics on the Left.

THE LOCO AFÁN FOR THE FUTURE

Whereas Simonetti would have the debate about homosexuality in Chile
take place under the sign of (neoliberal) equality,36 Pedro Lemebel felt that
sexual minorities should resist neoliberalism. This came out of his allegiance
to the Left, which—despite his exclusion from the Communist Party in the
1980s, due to his homosexuality—he maintained until his death in 2015.
Still, he defended the politically fluid position of the loca in Chile’s rigidly
divided society—geographically, ideologically, and economically speak-
ing—in his book of crónicas Loco afán (1996). A reading of Chile’s recent
past through the lens of a succession of locas, Loco afán brought a queer
perspective to a larger, more politicized memory process, and enriched
postdictatorship thinking by moving the reader’s frame of reference from a
retrospective mode (mourning) to a more utopian one (futurity). Indeed,
the first crónica in the collection, “La noche de los visones”—of which I
offer a close reading in Chap. 3—talks about a photograph of a group of
locas at a 1972 New Year’s Eve party, in which “la toma es apresurada por el
revoltijo de locas que rodean la mesa, casi todas nubladas por la pose rápida
y el ‘loco afán’ por saltar al futuro” (Lemebel 1996: 18). Here, Lemebel
 POLITICIZING THE LOCA BODY AFTER THE DICTATORSHIP, 1990–2005 199

portrays a group of locas careening toward a future of hope for their own
liberation under Allende, even as he writes retrospectively to make their
desire for the future clash with the looming dictatorship and AIDS epi-
demic.37 Like the rest of the collection, this crónica contrasts “the present’s
attention to everything that was left unaccomplished and mournful in the
past” (Avelar 2) to the dire state of the present—the photo is covered with
“[l]a suciedad de las moscas, [que] fue punteando de lunares las mejillas,
como adelanto maquillado del sarcoma” (Lemebel 1996: 21)—but it also
repeatedly insists on the “afán” to look forward. Lemebel balances thusly
between the loca’s affiliations with the Left—joining in the retrospective
mourning process of postdictatorship critique—and her (equally urgent
and even “loco”) escape to a future in which her own interests are fully
addressed. Lemebel’s locas thus take exception to larger narratives of the
Left, but they also contest—when they find it convenient—the narratives
of economic exceptionalism espoused by the Chilean Right.
Lemebel’s writing emerged from a series of performances that he and
the writer and artist Francisco Casas created as part of the duo Las Yeguas
del Apocalipsis.38 Continuing in the vein of a performance art movement
that began during the dictatorship, Las Yeguas were an important channel
of resistance and expression. In an era of harsh authoritarianism, Lemebel
and Casas called theirs “una propuesta de desacato” (Herralde 38): their
“art actions” included riding a horse together, naked, through the streets
of downtown Santiago de Chile as well as interrupting a Concertación con-
ference dressed in feathers typical of female burlesque performers. Writing
about this period, Lemebel recalls how “la gente creía que éramos miles.
Decían vienen las Yeguas del Apocalipsis, a esconderse. […] Éramos cronis-
tas visuales. La letra ya había pasado por el cuerpo” (Herralde 39). With the
restoration of Chilean democracy in 1990, the interventions of Las Yeguas
diminished over time, and eventually disappeared by the mid-1990s. Many
of the chronicles that Lemebel wrote later, however, are inextricably linked
to the visual and performing arts, which proved to be one of the few effec-
tive, non-violent modes of critiquing the regime (Herralde 2000).39
“El proyecto nombres,” another crónica in Loco afán, shows how
deaths from AIDS become interwoven with deaths wrought at the hands
of the dictatorship, indicating an affiliation between the loca and the Left.
Discussing the quilts made in Chile—for a local version of the program
that originated in the USA in the 1980s and 1990s—in honor of those
who died of AIDS, the crónica points out that not all who sympathized
with the Left and died prematurely under the dictatorship did so as a result
200 C. FISCHER

of political persecution. The Chilean quilts “tampoco tienen la espectacu-

laridad del primer mundo y nunca los autografiará Liz Taylor” (Lemebel
1996: 95), but they function as memorials to the Chileans who died of
AIDS while also placing them in the context of an international circula-
tion of both the disease and activism against it. The quilts also stitch the
“defeated”—some by dictatorship, others by AIDS—inexorably together:

En uno de estos tapices … se lee “Víctor por siempre,” bordado de lana roja
sobre saco de arpillera. Sin duda la primera lectura de este tapiz lo relaciona
con Víctor Jara40 y su memoria de mártir en dictadura. Otras connotaciones
proclaman estas expresiones locales, un cruce político inevitable, las suc-
ciona en una marea de nombres sidados o desaparecidos, que deletrean sin
ecos el mismo desamparo. (Lemebel 1996: 95)

The appropriation in the quilt of the iconographic singer Víctor Jara—an

almost sacred figure for the Chilean Left—represents a bond of solidar-
ity. Although it may be uncomfortable for the Left to have the politically
motivated deaths of “its own” be closely identified with those who suc-
cumbed to AIDS, Lemebel insists on linking them together within the
historical memory of the dictatorship.
Although Lemebel’s locas sometimes walk in step with the Left, other
times they must explicitly distance themselves from it to make themselves
heard. In his “Manifiesto (Hablo por mi diferencia),” another text included
in Loco afán but originally read by the author during a political protest in
Santiago in September 1986 (Lemebel 1996: 90), Lemebel openly con-
fronts the Left, proclaiming his specificity and refusing to be subsumed into
any larger discourse.41 Though addressing his speech to a collective compa-
ñero, Lemebel asserts a separation of the loca from the rest: “Y sospecho
de esta cueca42 democrática/ Pero no me hable del proletariado/ Porque
ser pobre y maricón es peor” (Lemebel 1996: 83). He presciently reminds
his audience that the dictatorship, against which the entire spectrum of
the Chilean Left had united in opposition, would not always be a suffi-
cient force for unification. Referring to the Chilean law that outlaws pub-
lic homosexual conduct as one of a number of so-called malas costumbres,
Lemebel warns that the leftist rhetoric of inclusion will likely be short-lived:

Malas costumbres/ Por mala suerte/ Como la dictadura/ Peor que la dicta-
dura/ Porque la dictadura pasa/ Y viene la democracia/ Y detrasito el social-
ismo/ ¿Y entonces?/ ¿Qué harán con nosotros, compañero?/ ¿Nos amarrarán
de las trenzas en fardos con destino a un sidario cubano? (1996: 84)
 POLITICIZING THE LOCA BODY AFTER THE DICTATORSHIP, 1990–2005 201

Lemebel voices his suspicion that the moment gays cease to be useful in the
struggle for democracy, the Left will abandon them to die of AIDS alone.
He goes on to mock the apparently fixed categories of heterosexuality in
leftist politics, referring to the ideas of Che Guevara43: “¿El futuro será en
blanco y negro?/ ¿El tiempo en noche y día laboral sin ambigüedades?/
¿No habrá un maricón en alguna esquina desequilibrando el futuro de su
hombre nuevo?” (Lemebel 1996: 85, emphasis added). Here, Lemebel
points out the extent to which the aspirations of the Left—so often “con-
ceived” in the terms of heterosexual family life, the optimal way of per-
petuating political ideas into the “future”—exclude sexual minorities. His
conclusion, then, is simultaneously a proclamation of the autonomy of all
practitioners of sexual dissidence, and also a request for new spaces to be
opened up by the Left for locas, present and future: “Y su utopía es para
las generaciones futuras/ Hay tantos niños que van a nacer/ Con una
alita rota/ Y yo quiero que vuelen, compañero/ Que su revolución/ Les
dé un pedazo de cielo rojo/ Para que puedan volar” (Lemebel 1996:
90). Invoking and problematizing Edelman’s idea of the future “Child” in
whose supposed interest political structures are perpetuated forward, the
“Manifesto” refers to queer children who also look for a place in society.
As such, it is a proclamation of the power and transformative potential
of the loca’s political autonomy in a more inclusive political situation, in
the way Muñoz theorizes. Lemebel shows how the loca can challenge the
dichotomous ideological and political categories that seek to recruit her
for their respective causes.
Although the volatile nature of the loca’s position can provide her with
a degree of political autonomy and power, this instability can also be a dis-
advantage. One instance of an overarching political ideology that poses a
threat to the body of the loca in Loco afán comes in the form of AIDS. In
a society in which the wealthy classes tend to look abroad for their cultural
and economic cues, new and especially imported goods bring status; it
would seem that AIDS, perversely, can be considered such a commodity.
Lemebel ironically writes about it as a status symbol from the USA: in “La
noche de los visones,” the loca known as Pilola Alessandri, the scion of
a well-known and wealthy family in Chile, was exposed to it on a trip to
New York, and “fue la primera que la trajo en exclusiva, la más auténtica,
la recién estrenada moda gay para morir” (Lemebel 1996: 16). The loca is
thus as vulnerable as any consumer to the seductions of status that much
of what comes from abroad—including AIDS—can bring her, thanks to
the neoliberal market-oriented regime that defeated Allende. Pilola pays
202 C. FISCHER

with her life for her wholehearted embrace of the benefits (for her) that
neoliberalism brings to Chile. For Lemebel, AIDS represents the dark side
of Chile’s idealization of, and orientation toward, the imported.
However, Lemebel refuses to completely discredit the participation of
the loca in the kind of mass culture often imported into Chile. The crónica
“La muerte de Madonna” is about a travesti known as La Madonna, who,
despite being a rather poor (in various senses of the word) imitator of the
famous singer, is a hero who defies the brutal repression of the Carabineros
police—known colloquially as pacos—during the dictatorship.

Nunca le tuvo miedo a los pacos. Se les paraba bien altanera la loca,
les gritaba que era una artista; y no una asesina como ellos. Entonces le
daban duro, la apaleaban hasta dejarla tirada en la vereda y la loca no se
callaba, seguía gritándoles hasta que desaparecía el furgón …. (Lemebel
1996: 34)

Later on, after the restoration of democracy, the crónica defends her right
to appropriate North American mass consumer culture—in this case, the
gestures and appearance of the singer Madonna:

Cerrando los ojos, era ella la Madonna, y no bastaba tener mucha imagi-
nación para ver el duplicado mapuche casi perfecto. Eran miles de recortes
de la estrella que empapelaban su pieza. Miles de pedazos de su cuerpo que
armaban el firmamento de la loca. (Lemebel 1996: 34)

La Madonna is portrayed as heroic not just because of her resistance to

dictatorial repression, but also because of her unique mimesis, and parody,
of a prominent product readily imported into Chile. La Madonna’s defi-
ance of the dictatorship does not preclude her participation in what it
brought to the country. Although the result of a loca’s participation in
the neoliberal marketplace is often little more than a slightly grotesque
simulacrum of the status she hopes to attain, Lemebel claims this simula-
crum as another tactic on the part of the loca to assert her individuality.
The participation of the loca in the logic of neoliberalism, then, is a form
of resistance against the normative schematic of the Left. Even after AIDS
has taken its toll on her body, La Madonna continues to prostitute herself
in a dogged embrace of capitalism:

Desde ese momento, su escaso pelo albino, fue pelechando en una nevada
de plumas que esparcía por la vereda cuando patinaba sin ganas, cuando se
 POLITICIZING THE LOCA BODY AFTER THE DICTATORSHIP, 1990–2005 203

paraba en los tacoagujas toda desabrida, a medio pintar, sujetándose con

la lengua los dientes sueltos cuando preguntaba en la ventana de un auto
¿Mister, yu lovmi? (Lemebel 1996: 39)44

Moving between revulsion and admiration of her attempts to stay faithful

to the “blond ambition” of her idol, the crónica refuses to pin La Madonna
down: it oscillates between admiration for her against-all-odds come-
dic pluck and a sickened fascination with her grotesque end. Although
Lemebel’s descriptions of this phenomenon can be read as an unmasking
of the falsity of neoliberalism—when the loca falls for the seductions of
neoliberalism, the result will likely be her death—it is important to high-
light how it also allows the loca to appropriate neoliberalism for her own
use.
Through queer resistance to the strict binaries of gender difference as
well as to both the Right and the Left, the loca is able to defy categories of
genre (through the crónica45) and temporality itself. She looks back with
nostalgia to the past, even when that past was a time of looking ahead to
the future. True, the loca’s politicized mourning process for the defeated,
leftist past examines “ruins” (Avelar 3) such as the AIDS quilts as artifacts
that allow for memory work to continue, since the “mourner is by defini-
tion engaged in a task that s/he does not want to conclude” (Avelar 5);
this means that the loca’s mourning even stretches into melancholia, a
never-ending process of mourning. However, the loca also embraces the
future in Lemebel’s writing, and thus stands apart from the larger, leftist
agenda of mourning the past. In keeping with Freud’s emphasis on the
critical agency of the melancholic subject in his discussion of mourning
and melancholia,46 the insubordination of Lemebel’s locas allows them to
combat Chile’s neoliberal exceptionalism—as well as the exclusions of the
Left—with their own sort of exceptionalism: one so liminal that it even
problematizes mourning itself.

LORENZA (OR, CAN LOCAS BE CANONICAL?)

When critics have taken on the exclusions at the heart of Chile’s seem-
ingly model transition to democracy—whether by queering the transition,
by highlighting the agenda of the political Left over that of the Right, or
both—many have practiced their own brand of exceptionalism. Narratives
of this period that do not orbit Chile’s dictatorial past have been excluded
from debate. One such queer but not explicitly dictatorship-oriented nar-
204 C. FISCHER

rative—that of Lorenza Böttner, a Chilean-born transgender performance

artist who has never before been the focus of any academic study—is the
subject of this section. It is my hope that the story of Lorenza will draw
attention to, and critique, the exceptionalism common in the rhetoric
of the country’s economic boosters and many of its cultural critics alike.
Lorenza’s story can itself serve as a model, but only for how queer artists
and their work can avoid exceptionalism by defying their appropriation by
critics as models for clearly defined, sometimes even circumscribed, narra-
tives of the postdictatorship. Lorenza’s life and work, which obliquely par-
allel Chile’s recent history and politics without directly addressing them,
suggest a way for a narrative of the period to be constructed in such a way
that the regime’s past violence no longer has to be the central focus, and art
can function joyously despite the scars left behind. Lorenza, who lost both
arms in a childhood accident, was intimately acquainted with scars, but still
managed to live ingeniously. In what follows, I discuss Lorenza’s life in the
context of the exceptionalisms so common in Chile at present, to argue for
the incorporation into postdictatorship Chilean cultural history of expres-
sions of queerness with no immediately evident political agenda. This way,
the exclusions made by postdictatorship critique—as well as the pervasive-
ness of the rhetoric of Chilean exceptionalism—can be de-centered.
The process of inclusion and exclusion that makes up canon forma-
tion is analogous to the sorts of treatment that Lorenza’s unconventional,
disfigured body certainly received. This process of encouraging inclusion
in all senses—a key element of disability theory—is a helpful way to coun-
ter the exclusions of exceptionalism. As Tobin Siebers (2010) asks, “[s]
ince aesthetic feelings of pleasure and disgust are difficult to separate from
political feelings of acceptance and rejection, what do objects representing
disability tell us about the ideals of political community underlying works
of art?” (2). Will recovering Lorenza’s story for the canon of postdicta-
torship cultural production, though, be tantamount to an authoritarian
discourse of “moving on” and “forgetting” the violence that took place,
since her art makes little or no reference to the dictatorship in her country
of origin at the time she lived and worked? Or can she offer insight about
ways to avoid perpetuating the exceptionalism of Chile’s economic boost-
ers and provide a blueprint for ways to take into account all the subjectivi-
ties struggling to make themselves heard in Chile during the dictatorship
and postdictatorship?
Few details of Lorenza Böttner’s life are definitive. Born in Punta Arenas,
Chile, as a boy named Ernst in 1959, he lost his arms to amputation after
 POLITICIZING THE LOCA BODY AFTER THE DICTATORSHIP, 1990–2005 205

an electrocution accident. In 1973, at the age of 14, Ernst—whose parents

were of German origin—left Chile for West Germany. She, because soon
after arriving there Ernst began dressing as a female, became a painter and
performance artist, and produced a large archive of drawings, sculptures,
and paintings across three continents. She received a degree in classical art
from Kassel, Germany, and studied at New York University. In Munich
in the late 1980s and early 1990s, she was a fixture in the underground
Negerhalle circuit,47 doing performances that bridged painting and danc-
ing. She spent time in San Francisco and New Mexico, collaborating with
several avant-garde artists and photographers. She appeared in at least two
films, and Lemebel and Roberto Bolaño—Chilean authors whose works
have circulated widely abroad, the latter because he lived outside Chile for
many years—both dedicated several pages to her in their literary writings.
According to Lemebel, as well as Lorenza’s cousin the artist Mario Soro,
she spent a brief amount of time in Chile in 1989. She also played the part
of Petra, the mascot of the 1992 Barcelona Special Olympics, before dying
of AIDS in 1994. Other than these facts, however, myth, hearsay, and
rumor have characterized Lorenza’s legacy; this lack of definition has both
facilitated and frustrated attempts by others to appropriate her body and
legacy into defined national canons, let alone defined “political commu-
nities” (to use Siebers’ term). While alive, however, Lorenza was acutely
aware of how her body was represented and viewed by others, and her art
played with those expectations and prejudices, defying the exclusions to
which many disabled people are subjected to on both a quotidian and an
artistic basis. Her art often functions as a response to, and a negotiation
with, attempts by others to make her body signify in definitive ways as a
model exemplifying their own ideas. Her disability is key to this negotia-
tion; Siebers states that modern art’s genius lies precisely in its ability to
debunk assumptions about beauty. It “continues to move us because of its
refusal of harmony, bodily integrity, and perfect health” (5–9). Lorenza’s
resistance to identification and identity is a recurring motif in her work.
That Lorenza was associated with exceptionalism even as a child named
Ernst is further evidence of the prevalence of exceptionalist discourse in
Chile. In a November 1973 article in the children’s magazine Mampato—
edited at the time, interestingly, by the author Isabel Allende—Ernst,
visiting Santiago on his way from Punta Arenas to West Germany for
rehabilitation, is presented as an inspirational “example” for children. The
article, titled “Ernst Böttner: Un muchacho ejemplar,” focuses on Ernst’s
“empeño, su voluntad, su optimismo, la valentía para afrontar las dificul-
206 C. FISCHER

tades, su alegría, y su tenacidad” (42). In a two-page spread with several

photos, including one of him drawing with a pencil in his mouth, he is
presented using Christian rhetoric as an example to young Chileans of
how to overcome adversity: “pese al sufrimiento no [perdió] su fe en Dios
ni en los hombres” (43). Even at this early age, Lorenza was positioned
as an example of perseverance to anyone experiencing setbacks. However,
this takes place in an ambiguous way that mirrors the extent to which
disabled subjects can question “the suppositions underlying definitions of
aesthetic”—and, I would add, political—“production and appreciation” of
bodies (Siebers 3). The article’s muted, self-censored tone could also be
read as an inspiration to those “suffering” from political repression—the
coup had taken place just two months prior. At the same time, however,
it could also be read as a more conservative call for hard work and self-
reliance as the optimum path toward self-sufficiency, both economic and
otherwise—a key element of the dictatorship’s neoliberal economic pro-
gram. Another example of this ambivalent approach to Ernst’s story can be
found at the end of the article when he is described as “la comprobación
real de que cualquier cosa, cualquier problema o dificultad, cualquier des-
gracia por dolorosa que sea, puede ser enfrentada con optimismo y super-
ada, ciertamente nos trajo la paz” (43). The “misfortunes” can be taken
here to mean Ernst’s injuries, but there were certainly many other misfor-
tunes to be found in Chile at the time, with dissidents being kidnapped,
imprisoned, and murdered daily. The “peace” that Ernst’s story has the
ability to bring about could refer to a consolation for those who have lost
loved ones, or it could be a validation for those buying into the dictator-
ship’s narrative of the pacification of dissidents. The young Ernst is thus
positioned as a model, set apart as uniquely able to overcome the hard-
ships of dictatorship-era Chile. His body is presented as exemplary, but
the article’s appropriation of it can be read politically in different ways—an
elusiveness of signification that would become common currency for her.
One of Lorenza’s main means of expression was through the public
performance of everyday routine tasks, such as shopping, dressing her-
self, and making coffee; these performances are key to understanding
Lorenza’s artistic oscillation between exhibitionism and self-effacement,
and between the exceptional position others place her in and her own
hesitation to be a model. One example is a segment about Lorenza in Wall
of Ashes, a 2009 film by Frank Garvey, with a pair of sequence shots in
which Lorenza uses her toes to rinse and fill a teapot at the sink with great
ease and relish (Fig. 5.1). The fluid movements of her body, despite her
 POLITICIZING THE LOCA BODY AFTER THE DICTATORSHIP, 1990–2005 207

Fig. 5.1 Lorenza Böttner in Wall of Ashes (Dir. Frank Garvey 2009)

obvious limitations, portray a total lack of suffering or constraint caused

by her disability. Her main art form was everyday life, as she states in
Michael Stahlberg’s 1991 documentary Lorenza, which was exhibited at
the International Short Film Festival in Oberhausen, Germany: “In some
ways I am an exhibitionist, and I like it. I benefit from it. But I was not
always an exhibitionist. It came as a result of my handicap, because people
stare at me whether I dress conservatively or very flamboyantly. But it is
fun for me. I like to open people’s eyes and show them how stupid it is to
hide behind a bourgeois façade” (Stahlberg). The key phrase of this short
speech is “in some ways.” Lorenza’s relentless exhibition of her body is
an interesting counterpoint to what she manages not to exhibit. In the
scene that opens with this monologue, she enters a German open-air mar-
ket, where she orders cheeses from a woman behind the counter at one
of the stalls. Without batting an eye, the woman rings up the order at
the cash register, but then the scene cuts out before the woman can give
Lorenza the cheeses, leaving the viewer to wonder exactly how the woman
actually passed them to Lorenza. Even in an act explicitly positioned as
208 C. FISCHER

exhibitionistic—the viewer is shown a detailed account of even Lorenza’s

quotidian movements while listening to the quote above, in voice-over—
not all details of the act are shown. Whether Lorenza participated in the
film’s artistic process and asked that the actual exchange of money for
cheese be edited out (perhaps it was not sufficiently graceful) or whether
the director made this choice is unknown. However, this scene is typical
of Lorenza’s cultivation of ambiguous spaces for her body—in this case,
what exists between exhibitionism and privacy. This complex positionality
is one major aspect of Lorenza’s persistent—yet seemingly effortless, easy,
accidental—resistance to categorizations of her art, and herself, as models
of larger narratives.
Some of Lorenza’s public performances were more consciously signi-
fied in the realm of performance art. Though consistent with her aesthetic
of undefinability, a 1989 performance during a brief visit to Santiago de
Chile obliquely gestured toward dictatorship-era performance artistic
groups like CADA. There, Lorenza painted two figures reminiscent of
the exaggerated bodies that dominated Nazi-era art—one masculine and
one feminine—and then stood between them. The performance, held in
the since-closed Bucci Gallery on Huérfanos Street, was literally open to
the public, who could watch from the street: the gallery’s entire façade
was folded away so that the line between gallery and street was left unde-
fined. Lorenza’s performance thus constituted an open declaration of her
transgender identity: a daring move in a still-repressed country and there-
fore eminently political. Despite the fact that any declaration of sexual
alterity in dictatorship-era Chile was subject to repression by the state and
suspicion by spectators, Lorenza made no pronouncement that day about
the state of her native country’s political affairs, possibly preferring (in
this performance, as in other cases) to let her work speak for itself. Her
work also did not make reference to the same codes that CADA had used
in its performance art, which would have been eminently recognizable
among the spectators that day. Still, the clear references to fascist ico-
nography in the figures she painted, and the contrast of her body next to
them, could be as an attempt to defuse the authoritarianism those bodies
evoked. Siebers says as much in his discussion of “statuary such as Arno
Breker’s Readiness,” which “displays bulked-up and gigantesque bodies
that intimidate rather than appeal” (5). By performing a contrast to the
“stultifying perfection of the human figure” (Siebers 5) with her own dis-
ability, Lorenza—like Zurita and Eltit before her, who also performed
disfigurations of their bodies to draw attention to Chile’s broken “body
 POLITICIZING THE LOCA BODY AFTER THE DICTATORSHIP, 1990–2005 209

politic”—showed that her own radical manifestation of human variety

could both support and also problematize the kinds of politically dissident
performance art that was taking place at the time in Chile.
The fact that Lorenza moved between national borders has also ren-
dered her work outside nation-based classifications of art, both Chilean
and European. She makes very few references to her Latin American ori-
gins: in a section of Garvey’s film, she uses her foot to write a short syn-
opsis of her biography, including her birth in Chile. Later, in Stahlberg’s
film, her eyebrows are painted in a way that nods to the distinctive look
of Frida Kahlo, another queer, disabled Latin American artist (Fig. 5.2).
Other than these gestures and the one-off performance she held in Chile,
however, there are no other ways in which her work is intelligible as part
of any canon of Chilean art. Meanwhile, Lorenza was clearly interested in
complicating conventionally Western, European art forms; her Botticelli
pose is evidence enough of that. In Stahlberg’s film, she describes a perfor-
mance in which she dressed as the Venus de Milo in public, in New York:
“I wanted to show the beauty of a crippled human body. And then I saw
how many statues were admired for their beauty, and through an accident
or something, they too have lost their arms, but they have lost nothing of

Fig. 5.2 Lorenza Böttner in Lorenza (Dir. Michael Stahlberg 1991)

210 C. FISCHER

their beauty or their aesthetic appeal” (Stahlberg). By drawing attention

to the beauty of her own body and to the disability of the statue—still
unquestionably beautiful despite the damage to it over the centuries48—
she was able to question preconceptions not only about her own body but
about all disabled bodies. Highlighting the extent to which “‘there is no
exquisite beauty, without some strangeness in the proportion,’” as Edgar
Allan Poe has written, as quoted by Siebers (4), Lorenza’s reference to
European and American art not only offered new, unexpected interpreta-
tions of these forms but also drew attention to the presence of disability
that is often already in them.
Lorenza’s remarkable ingenuity and complex, opaque relationship with
national, aesthetic, and political canons have been factors in the appropria-
tion of her story for the national, aesthetic, and political agendas of certain
Chilean authors. Lemebel and Bolaño figure her body as exemplary of
their particular canonical aspirations and political agendas. Lorenza’s story
appears in Loco afán as one of several crónicas about forgotten gay folk
memory in dictatorship-era Chile, and the subsection of the collection
headed up by her story also includes others with titles such as “La loca del
pino” and “Berenice (La resucitada).” The four-page crónica “Lorenza
(Las alas de la manca)” starts out by focusing on a comparison of Lorenza’s
“desdoblamiento” of European artistic forms with her manipulation of
the boundaries between masculinity and femininity. For Lemebel, “[c]
ierto glamour transfigurado amortigua el hachazo de los hombros. La
pose coliza [homosexual] suaviza el bisturí revirtiendo la compasión. Se
transforma en un fulgor que traviste doblemente esta cirugía helénica.
Lorenza en performance es una valkiria trunca y orgullosa” (1996: 153).
To his credit, Lemebel recognizes Lorenza’s ingenious ability to evade
and transform a gaze that would classify her as someone to pity while also
questioning assumptions about European classical forms. However, the
chronicle goes on to portray Lorenza as nothing less than a hero of politi-
cal resistance, when describing her performance at the Bucci Gallery:

La acción [de arte] de Lorenza en Chile se realizó una calurosa tarde … ante
un escaso público y la mirada ociosa de las parejas que salen a vitrinear los
días festivos. Alguien preguntó si era parte de la Teletón, y lo hicieron callar.
… Después, todos se fueron a bailar a una disco gay donde Lorenza batió
sus alas hasta la amanecida. A la salida, al pasar por un regimiento, los milicos
de guardia le tiraron besos y algo le gritaron. Y ella sin incomodarse, abrió
de par en par su capa y les contestó que bueno, pero de a uno. (Lemebel
1996: 153–154)
 POLITICIZING THE LOCA BODY AFTER THE DICTATORSHIP, 1990–2005 211

Lorenza herself was clearly conscious of her status as a model of gen-

der non-conformity, as well as of the power of her performances, and
her life itself (often the line between the two was very blurry), to resist
people’s preconceptions of gender. Lemebel’s appropriation of Lorenza’s
story as a way to resist the military—and by extension, other heterosex-
ist assumptions about the country’s cultural and political sphere—is a bit
more tenuous, however. Lemebel tries to convert her, discursively, into a
model of bravery in the face of military heteropatriarchy and into an avatar
of a lost tradition of gay identity there. But as Lemebel himself describes,
these attempts were half-hearted at best: Lorenza herself never explicitly
denounced the dictatorship, and her comments in Stahlberg’s film about
exhibitionism and bourgeois preconceptions (quoted above) are, to my
knowledge, the most politicized thing she has ever said on record.
Bolaño’s description of Lorenza—whom he calls “Lorenzo”49—is
another attempt to figure Lorenza’s story as exemplary of a certain politi-
cal narrative and thus make it conform to a certain canon. Bolaño’s story,
like Lemebel’s, also begins with wonder at Lorenza’s ingenious ways to
manage her disability, although Bolaño’s comments are somewhat more
pedestrian: “cómo se limpiaba el culo después de hacer caca, cómo pagaba
en la tienda de fruta, cómo guardaba el dinero, cómo cocinaba. Cómo,
por dios, podía vivir sola” (1996: 83). Bolaño narrates Lorenza’s life story
as if it were a child’s tale, beginning with the words “Érase una vez un niño
pobre de Chile” (1996: 81). The story portrays her as a hopeless romantic
and tortured artist, complete with a suicide attempt that never took place
and descriptions of her futile attempts to save money to leave Chile by
offering street performances—even though, as we know from Mampato
magazine, she left Chile at the age of 14. Bolaño recasts Lorenza as an
itinerant street musician and dancer, as well as a “poeta secreto” (1996:
83). He writes about how she was known as “la acróbata ermitaña” (1996:
83) and describes her artistic exploits as culminating with her time as the
mascot of the Barcelona Special Olympics, throughout which she wore a
mask; a photograph from this period appeared in the Barcelona newspaper
La Vanguardia.50 For Bolaño, Lorenza’s artistic and narrative merit lay
less in what she revealed than in what she failed at and hid, as evidenced by
his descriptions of her apparently frustrated artistic career and by his ques-
tions about how she paid, defecated, and cooked. He portrays Lorenza as
exemplary of a diaspora of Chilean artists forgotten by the Chilean literary
establishment. Just as Lemebel invokes Lorenza in response to what he
considers dictatorship-era Chile’s heterosexist rhetoric of exceptionalism,
212 C. FISCHER

Bolaño invokes Lorenza in Estrella distante to counter previous, more

exclusive postdictatorship Chilean literary canons developed by an estab-
lishment in Chile that he considered vindictive and overly exclusive.51 By
including Lorenza in a canon of exiled Chilean artists—some fictional,
some real—Bolaño seeks to counter the exceptionalism of that establish-
ment, which, he felt, excluded from the canon those artists who did not
stay in Chile to fight the dictatorship from within. Bolaño’s and Lemebel’s
treatments of Lorenza are evidence of how her life and work seem to
invite, yet also contest, such interpretations.
Although Lorenza’s own work, despite having been produced during
Chile’s postdictatorship, complicates the aesthetic and national catego-
ries that have led to exclusivities in the definition and formation of the
canon of this period, the term postdictatorship continues to define many
debates in contemporary debates about Chile. This is primarily because
of the powerful logic in which it is conceived: to challenge it is to betray
the memory of the disappeared, as if the perpetuation of its rhetoric were
the only way to recuperate and mourn the past. Subjects whose politi-
cal agendas do not neatly fit into this political narrative, or who gesture
beyond it, are excluded. Can Lorenza’s work signal a way to rethink these
exclusions, to use Siebers’ term, and provide a basis for instituting a new
canon of criticism of this period that is more inclusive? Her work can
ideally forge a path for a canon of postdictatorship cultural artifacts that
combines the admittedly important singularities inherent to exceptional-
ism with the inclusiveness that differentially abled bodies require to safe-
guard their mobility and ingeniousness. This can potentially undo other
sorts of exclusions so prevalent in Chile’s exceptionalist discourse while
also providing for the inclusion of a more optimistic view of this period
of Southern Cone history—one that admits to the atrocities committed
without contributing to the stigmatization of Latin America as a site of
violence.52
Perlongher’s examination of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of
“becoming” shows how a dogged utopian resistance to the set catego-
ries of identity can provide for elusive, fleeting, passionate alliances, both
sexual and activist: “Un ‘devenir homosexual,’ por ejemplo, tomará esa
práctica corporal (la marginación, la segregación, y sobre todo la diferen-
ciación que ella acarrea) como un modo de salida del ‘deber ser’ imper-
ante; estará referida a cierta axiomática de las conexiones entre los cuerpos”
(Perlongher 69). By “becoming,” rather than “being,” Perlongher posits,
queer subjects can stay forever on the margins of institutions that seek to
 POLITICIZING THE LOCA BODY AFTER THE DICTATORSHIP, 1990–2005 213

corral them into more hygienic, controlled categories—such as canons.

The idea of “becoming” is, in essence, an insistence on potential, on the
future, on the relationship between the past with what is yet to come. In
this sense, Lorenza’s work stands at the nexus between Anglo thinking
about queer futurity in the Chilean (and Latin American) “postdictator-
ship” because she simultaneously points to a utopian (and, by definition,
impracticable) future for Chile, while also offering a concrete, corpo-
real performance that defies the exclusions of postdictatorship critique.53
Lorenza’s insistence on evading categories, on the radical singularity of
“becoming” rather than on “being,” is her “line of flight” (in Deleuzian
terms): a utopian gesture through which concrete alliances can be forged
among other such excluded, singular figures across the boundaries of abil-
ity, class, and race.
Following Halberstam’s logic, my positioning Lorenza to critique the
inordinate exclusivity of the exceptionalist rhetoric of Chilean postdicta-
torship thought risks creating a clichéd or skewed account of her story.
The political risk at hand, then, would be to say that Lorenza’s presence
at the same time the dictatorship was going on—her exceptionality to
the “rule” of postdictatorship literary criticism—undermines the entire
critical apparatus of postdictatorship itself. Lorenza could become a tool
that would end up supporting the agendas of those on the right who
would rather the dictatorship never again be discussed. But I would like
to rescue Halberstam’s insistence on the radical possibilities of “failing”:
the surprising, ecstatic shock of encountering manifestations of queerness
that signal new possibilities for collaboration, inclusiveness, and beauty
that undermine hegemonic power. Signaling the interrelatedness of queer
theory, memory theory, and disability theory, such inclusiveness is analo-
gous to the aesthetic experience that Siebers highlights when he writes
that the disclosure of “new forms of beauty” (10) that call into question
conventional models of beauty and ability around which some idealized
narratives—such as the rhetoric of Chile’s economic exceptionalism—are
based. Therefore, despite the risks posed when Lorenza’s body enters
the postdictatorship canon, its decentering of some of the exceptional-
isms performed there constitutes a gesture powerful enough to warrant an
attempt to reexamine this cultural history.
Lorenza’s life and work show how one person, rendered as “excep-
tional” for her persistence in the face of adversity and for her refusal to
neatly fit into any historical, artistic, political, national, and economic nar-
rative, can exemplify how exceptionalism can be used against itself. Rather
214 C. FISCHER

than undermine the important resistance work conducted by those who

struggled against the dictatorship, she forecasts the potential of defying
the exceptionalism inherent to Chile’s conception of itself as a model of
economic affluence to the rest of Latin America and beyond. Lorenza’s
uniqueness—exemplified by her joyful defiance of expectations, her eva-
sions of critical attempts to harden dissident subjectivities into set catego-
ries, her mobility across national borders and against nationalisms, and
her frustration of heteronormative economic structures—shows how the
individual liberation of a subject from the constricting categories of iden-
tity, politics, and artistic appropriation is the first step to the very same
liberation toward which postdictatorship critics were also harkening. By
embodying an ingenious way to combine singularity with a defiance of
exceptionalism and a radical call for inclusion, Lorenza offers a glimpse
of what both Anglo futurity and Latin American postdictatorship cultural
criticism can “become.”

CONCLUSION: PAST AND FUTURE, SINKING AND FLYING

Being exceptionally memorable is a prerequisite for being included in a
canon, just as being remembered, as an individual, is the result of memory
work that intertwines itself with exceptionalism. As far as “postdictator-
ship” thought goes, exceptionalism is thus as much a key to queer futurity
as it has been to critical frameworks of mourning in postauthoritarian situ-
ations such as Chile’s in the 1990s and early 2000s. Bolaño himself relates
one of the many myths of Lorenza’s life—a supposed attempt to drown
herself that ended up reinforcing her will to come to terms with her queer-
ness and live as an artist54—to the exceptional essence of Chile: “… en
esto quizás resida el encanto del país, su fuerza: en la voluntad de hundirse
cuando puede volar y de volar cuando está irremisiblemente hundido. En
el gusto por las paradojas de sangre” (Bolaño 2004: 73). This motif of
sinking and flying is an optimal way of concluding, particularly since the
end of Stahlberg’s film of Lorenza’s life makes a similar reference to sink-
ing and flying. Here, Lorenza jumps into water—a pool, in this case—and
like Bolaño, Stahlberg resignifies this breathtaking jump into a sensual,
life-affirming gesture (Fig. 5.3).55 The scene encapsulates the ability of
the loca to evade, or transcend, historical and political visions of mourning
(pace Avelar), memory, and forgetting, economic discourses of success
and failure (Halberstam), and even conventional notions of life and death
that dictate notions of “presentism” (Edelman) or “futurity” (Muñoz).
 POLITICIZING THE LOCA BODY AFTER THE DICTATORSHIP, 1990–2005 215

Fig. 5.3 Lorenza Böttner in Lorenza (Dir. Michael Stahlberg 1991)

This act of effacement is a resistance to any “arrest of the sign,” as Lazzara

puts it, as well as a resistance to any liberal discourses of “inclusion” or
“equality” espoused by Simonetti. The politicization of the loca’s sexual
exceptionalism comes with a number of contradictions that are performed
in the construction of the cultural history of Chile’s postdictatorship—
contradictions that make it imperative to think about how exceptionalism
can look beyond the lexicon of the “post” and ahead to the future.

NOTES
1. The first stage of this was a plebiscite, held on October 5, 1988, in
which Chileans (many of whom had never voted before in their
lives) were given a simple choice: if they wanted Pinochet to con-
tinue in office for eight more years, they were to vote SÍ; if not,
then they were to vote NO. The NO vote won, and despite some
speculation that Pinochet would disqualify the results, the military
regime ended up admitting its defeat. Aylwin’s administration
sought to “build a new convivencia—a living together in peace
[…]. Convivencia meant seeing the political adversary as interlocu-
tor, not as enemy to be liquidated. It would yield a certain recon-
ciliation” (Stern 2010: 16). Pinochet continued on as commander-
216 C. FISCHER

in-chief of the army and then as a “designated” (i.e., unelected)

senator. Over time, however, Pinochet gradually began to lose
prestige as a political figurehead, and the favorable historical legacy
that the dictatorship had fought so hard to cultivate (or simulate,
as argued in the previous chapter) declined concomitantly. In
October of 1998, he was arrested at a London hospital for the
crimes of genocide, international terrorism, torture, and disappear-
ance related to Spanish citizens who were victims of the dictator-
ship in Chile (more information about this arrest can be found in
Patricio Guzmán’s documentary El caso Pinochet (2001)). Though
Pinochet was eventually allowed to return to Chile, where he never
faced trial, he was no longer seen as invincible or above suspicion
and he renounced all of his official political appointments. This,
coupled with revelations in 2004 that Pinochet had held “up to $8
million dollars in disguised accounts” at the Riggs Bank in
Washington, DC (Stern 2010: 299), meant that “Pinochetismo
had fallen hard from the two-fifths social base at the advent of
democratic transition [by 2006]. Four of five Chileans (82 per-
cent) now saw ‘a dictator’ instead of a great ruler, and they included
a solid majority (60 percent) on the Right” (Stern 2010: 302).
Pinochet’s waning credibility affected Right-wing politicians too,
who now either toned down their rhetoric or risked losing their
voter base.
2. Stern is quick to add, however, that Argentina has also made many
valuable contributions in this sense as well (2010: 379).
3. Although Concertación policies did succeed in reducing the num-
ber of Chileans living in poverty from approximately 40 % to 13.6
% of the population between 1990 and 2006 (Lagos 197), Chile
remains one of the most unequal countries in the world: former
President Lagos admits that “[i]nequality has more than doubled
just in the past 40 years” (2012: 251).
4. The Filiation Law, which eliminated legal distinctions between
children born in and outside of wedlock, was passed in 2000;
divorce was legalized in 2004; and full coverage of antiretroviral
medications for HIV and AIDS came to be guaranteed by the gov-
ernment in 2005.
5. “Mourning” is the psychological process first outlined by Freud in
the article “Mourning and Melancholia” (1914–1916) as “the
reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstrac-
 POLITICIZING THE LOCA BODY AFTER THE DICTATORSHIP, 1990–2005 217

tion which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, lib-
erty, an ideal, and so on” (242). In parallel with Avelar, a number
of theorists such as Jacques Derrida (1994) and Judith Butler
(2002) have expanded upon this notion in a number of different
ways outside of the Latin American context (Freud 1953–1974).
6. Since Chile’s return to democracy, there have been a number of
attempts to “mourn” for Allende and “remember” and perpetuate
the legacy of the “defeated” in the country’s cultural production,
including multiple documentaries (some directed by Chilean
filmmaker Patricio Guzmán, including Salvador Allende and
Nostalgia de la luz (2004 and 2010 respectively) and others such
as Sebastián Moreno’s La ciudad de los fotógrafos (2006) and
Carmen Castillo’s Calle Santa Fe (2007)). The work of Ariel
Dorfman, Diamela Eltit, and other writers and artists can arguably
be placed into this category as well.
7. Francine Masiello’s The Art of Transition (2001), for example,
examines “cultural practices [that] constantly subvert that discur-
sive order, deregulating the seemingly fixed relationship between
the real and its simulacra … testing the so-called authentic repre-
sentations of ‘truth’ against creative recastings” (7) that “reconsti-
tute” the power of the market and the state throughout the region.
The role of culture in complicating market and state discourses was
an issue all over Latin America.
8. Similar concerns about circumscribing the possibility for further
discussion and debate about the atrocities committed during the
dictatorship were expressed by many after the passage of the “Ley
de punto final,” the so-called Full Stop Law, was passed by the
Argentine Congress in 1986 to prohibit further investigation and
prosecution of those complicit in such crimes. Many felt that fur-
ther, long-term reckoning was more appropriate, to bring about
justice for both victims and victimizers.
9. Fernando Blanco (2010) has referred to a “posttransition,” when
“la esfera pública chilena pareció ceder la hegemonía de su conduc-
ción del régimen … entre los años 1997 y 1998, [cuando] las nar-
rativas imaginarias y los discursos públicos … van a comenzar a
circular en diferentes formatos” (2010: 65–66), such that the so-
called postdictatorship takes a backseat to the powerful forces of
the market in the context of neoliberalism. Still, the logic of the
“post,” which hinges on that which is past (rather than present or
218 C. FISCHER

future), remains. Others have said that the postdictatorship would

end when all the “authoritarian enclaves” of the 1980 Constitution
were removed (most were in 2005, except for the provisions related
to the infamous binomial electoral system); others said that it
would be when a woman (Michelle Bachelet, who was tortured
and exiled during the dictatorship) was elected president in early
2006; still others said that it would be when a Right-wing presi-
dent was elected (this occurred in 2010).
10. Freud, who early on outlined the concept of mourning as a form
of understanding memory (and history), distinguished between
mourning and melancholia by pointing out that unlike mourning,
in melancholia the subject’s sense of self-regard is distressed: “the
disturbance of self-regard is absent in mourning; but otherwise,
the features [of mourning and melancholia] are the same” (243).
Freud’s hypothesis was that the ego could be freed at the end of
the mourning process: “when the work of mourning is completed
the ego becomes free and uninhibited again” (244). But this does
not happen in the case of melancholia, in which the ego itself is
damaged. This resistance to conclusion that characterizes postdic-
tatorship “mourning” here makes it appear to blend into melan-
cholia, and therefore never come to an end. Avelar would seem to
agree: “postdictatorial literature finds itself … perennially on the
brink of melancholia. […] Melancholia thus emerges from a spe-
cific variety of mourning, one that has looped back around to
engulf the mournful subject” (232).
11. Masiello shows how “the gender issue”—by which she means one
of the (multiple) sites “where different sets of expectations emerge,
tracking the changing imperatives that determine a politics of rep-
resentation against any ‘universal truth,’”—“instills a crisis in all
epistemological certainties that stand on the global stage” (49,
emphasis in original), including, I would imagine, discourses of
“mourning.” In this sense, his work echoes that of Richard, who
also wrote about the possibility for the sexual dissident subject to
“deceiv[e] the phallocratic discourse of Homo (homosexual/
homological) self-representation by playing with couplings and
uncouplings of meaning in a theater of uncertainty that is also a
comedy of substitutions, starting with sexual markers that are as
ambivalent as hypothetical” (2004: 51). Wielding a parodic cri-
tique of both the neoliberal regime and the equally militarized/
 POLITICIZING THE LOCA BODY AFTER THE DICTATORSHIP, 1990–2005 219

disciplined opposition to it, Richard points out, this subject can

find innovative, unforeseen ways to highlight the persistent remains
of the past that recur in the present. The key to this complex spa-
tiotemporal position, she states, is a transient identity: “By ignor-
ing the traditional hierarchy between appearance and essence,
interior and exterior, reality and simulation … they acquire an
unknown mobility” (2004: 52). Also, Blanco and Juan Pablo
Sutherland (2009) have written extensively about the important,
groundbreaking use of queerness to complicate seemingly fixed
market, state, memory, and aesthetic discourses during that time.
12. The fact that I put the terms “queer” and “loca” side-by-side here
does not mean that I necessarily think that they are interchange-
able, and Juan Pablo Sutherland (2009) offers an important dis-
cussion of the complicated (if not impossible) translatability of the
term “queer” from English to Spanish (13–29). Edelman, working
exclusively within the North Atlantic tradition of queer studies,
defines the term queer as anyone “stigmatized for failing to comply
with heteronormative mandates” (17), however, and this “failure”
(or refusal) to comply with those mandates is something enacted
by the loca as well. For a useful English-language discussion of the
term loca, see Melissa González’s short article (2014).
13. Lemebel was certainly conscious of the way theory works, profess-
ing familiarity with Lacan, Foucault, Kristeva, Deleuze and
Guattari, and Perlongher (Jeftanovic 75–76).
14. See, for example, my discussion, in the second chapter, of the loca
La Manuela in Donoso’s novel El lugar sin límites (1966).
15. Perlongher translates Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “becom-
ing,” which first appeared in A Thousand Plateaus (1987), to the
queer Latin American context as the “devenir”: “Un ‘devenir
homosexual,’ por ejemplo, tomará esa práctica corporal (la margin-
alización, la segregación, y sobre todo la diferenciación que ella
misma acarrea) como un modo de salida del ‘deber ser’ imperante;
estará referida a cierta axiomática de las conexiones entre los cuer-
pos. En otro sentido, puede pensarse que ella … mina o perturba
la ‘organización jerárquica del organismo,’ que asigna funciones
determinadas a los órganos” (69). Masiello explains this process as
the “minor(ity)” disrupting the logic of power of the majority:
“the ‘minor’ both alters and gives strength to collective alternatives
to power … becoming woman in opposition to the masculinity
220 C. FISCHER

claimed by the authoritarian state, a feminine presence that is not

necessarily fixed by one’s biological identity or sexual preference,
but which constantly asserts itself in terms of staging alternatives
and, therefore, never forecloses possibilities of meanings that erupt
in politics or discourse” (39–40, emphasis in original).
16. As was the case in Carlos Leppe’s 1981 work Prueba de artista,
discussed in the previous chapter, “activo” is the word used in
Spanish for the man who takes the penetrative position in gay
sex—in English, the “top.” For Richard (and others), the loca
manages to confound this sexual dichotomy as well.
17. Herein lies the paradox of Avelar’s thought: he refuses to embrace a
programmatic future course for his critical program, but he states that
the only ethical (and critical) option is to create a record (for the
future) of the “ruins” of the past. If you refuse to mourn, you “elude
the defeat … [which would be] for [Walter] Benjamin the most hor-
rifying crime you could commit against the memory of the dead”
(Avelar 21); but if you do mourn, you join a monolithic political
agenda for the Left that sometimes leaves little room for dissident
political agendas—particularly those of sexual minorities such as Pedro
Lemebel—who were burned by the homophobia of the Chilean Left.
18. In this sense, the more clinical etymology of the word loca—an
insane person, outside of the boundaries of reason—is also apropos
here: her queer evasion of disciplinary categories is analogous to
her remaining outside of the real of the “rational.”
19. Muñoz proposes a “reparative hermeneutics” (12) in the mode of
what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick outlined in her volume Touching
Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (2003).
20. This is possibly the most powerful critique that Muñoz makes of
Edelman’s work: it is “a distancing of queerness from what some
theorists seem to think of as the contamination of race, gender, or
other particularities that taint the purity of sexuality as a singular
trope of difference. In other words, antirelational approaches to
queer theory are romances of the negative, wishful thinking, and
investments in deferring various dreams of difference” (11).
21. Masiello’s work on the postdictatorship seeks a happy medium
between the two by showing how actors (including locas) on the
periphery of global economic and political concerns (including the
politics of mourning) can question and “rearticulate” them; her
 POLITICIZING THE LOCA BODY AFTER THE DICTATORSHIP, 1990–2005 221

important work, though somewhat geographically and thematically

diffuse, is hugely important to my analysis of the situation in Chile.
22. In the aftermath of the dictatorship, many critics and writers sought
to construct canons of “dictatorship” writers and artists that con-
tested economic and political precepts which—despite new, demo-
cratically elected leadership—seemed to persist into the 1990s.
Eugenia Brito’s volume Campos minados: Literatura postgolpe en
Chile (1990) is one such text. Brito put together a critical volume
in which she sought to show how the literature of the dictatorship
offered resistance to the “unidad falsamente construida por el pro-
ceso dictatorial” (15), and yet her text explicitly excludes those
writers and artists who spent the dictatorship outside of Chile,
since “simplemente … ellos vivieron otro proceso” (Brito 14).
Differences among those who stayed and those who left must be
preserved, Brito insists, and yet the group of writers she herself
offers is fairly uniform. Her reasoning is that to group together all
the Chilean writers who produced literature during the dictator-
ship, whether from within Chile or from outside it, would be to
replicate the rhetoric of the regime itself, which placed value on
“un sujeto ‘chileno,’ monolítico, plano, sin estratificaciones socia-
les o psíquicas” (14) above all else. Brito’s “canon” includes writers
such as Raúl Zurita, Diamela Eltit, Carmen Berenguer, and six
others. Still, to her credit, she does leave the possibility open for
future critics to create a broader, more inclusive theoretical frame-
work (21). Sure enough, other conceptions of the cultural history
and canon of dictatorship-era Chilean writers and artists came
along in time. In fact, the postdictatorship, in general, was a time
in which many sought to establish canons that could permanently
consecrate their particular literary or artistic vision of history.
Lazzara (2002) offers a more nuanced such “canon”: a collection
of interviews with eight different writers from the dictatorship
period. He includes one who stayed in Chile because he was in
favor of Pinochet; he profiles some who wrote from exile; and he
spends time on those who stayed in Chile but wrote in a state of
what he calls insilio (“insile”), creating “literatura que se refiere a
la contingencia del país, recurriendo con frecuencia a la metáfora y
la alegoría como formas de esquivar la pluma roja de la censura o
de aproximarse a una realidad nacional compleja y violenta”
222 C. FISCHER

(Lazzara 2002: 12). The only writer profiled by both Lazzara and
Brito is Eltit.
23. It is unclear whether Blanco would include Sutherland in this
group of those contributing to privileging a “homonormative”
view of homosexuality, but it is telling that Sutherland antholo-
gizes Simonetti’s work (“Santa Lucía”), while Blanco does not.
Meanwhile, Blanco includes Gabriela Mistral and Eltit, while
Sutherland does not. Other than these divergences, the prose
writers that Blanco includes—while smaller—all appear in
Sutherland’s anthology: Donoso, Marta Brunet, Augusto
D’Halmar, Lemebel, Mauricio Wacquez, and Alfredo Gómez
Morel. Sutherland states that he wanted to include three poems by
Mistral, but that the rights to reprint them in the anthology were
not granted by what he calls “vigilantes” at the Gabriela Mistral
Foundation, who reasoned that “dicho trabajo antológico puede
contribuir a interpretaciones tendenciosas … contrarias a la siem-
pre significativa y relevante obra de nuestra autora” (Sutherland
2001: 22).
24. In 1994, Juan Dávila’s painting The Liberator Simón Bolívar, which
portrayed a mestizo Simón Bolívar in drag, caused controversy
when it was exhibited in a Chilean Embassy in Europe, with the
support of public funds. Masiello calls it a “suggestion to viewers
that even marginal citizens have the right to interpret their national
hero, thereby reversing the common symbolic legacies that have
included considerations of gender” (54). Lemebel includes a short
chronicle about the painting in Loco afán (1996: 135–137).
25. This is clearly also one of Lemebel’s reasons for writing “La noche
de los visones” (the first chronicle in Loco afán, discussed at length
in Chap. 3) in particular, whose concluding paragraph begins as
follows: “Quizás, las pequeñas historias y las grandes epopeyas
nunca son paralelas, los destinos minoritarios siguen escaldados
por las políticas de un mercado siempre al acecho de cualquier
escape” (Lemebel 23).
26. Lucía Guerra Cunningham (2000), Masiello, Palaversich, Blanco
(2004, 2010), Bernardita Llanos (2004), and Angeles Mateo del
Pino (2010) have all focused on Lemebel’s work to “queer” the
nation.
27. Cases of AIDS first began to appear in Chile in the early- to mid-
1980s, not long after they began to appear in the USA, toward the
 POLITICIZING THE LOCA BODY AFTER THE DICTATORSHIP, 1990–2005 223

end of the Pinochet years. Lemebel locates AIDS as an aspect of

the neoliberal market logic that the dictatorship imposed. As such,
it is only natural that the loca’s mourning would take on different
dimensions than the mourning of others who were “defeated”
when the dictatorship took over.
28. In this sense, Lemebel’s attempts to “queer” Chilean history can
serve as an important corrective to the work of Avelar, whose study
does not take into account the way this mourning for a defeated
political struggle can change through the introduction of queer
subjectivities and the experience of AIDS.
29. To quote Masiello: “More than the ‘in-between’ advantage that
Perlongher suggests, gender considerations are ‘en route’ toward
change, in transit to sites of anticipated, future practice; with this,
they open to the theoretical possibilities that can link an analysis of
normative sexuality with democratic performance” (40).
30. One such series of recommendations that Muñoz opposes, in his
second chapter, is that of “pragmatism” in LGBT activism in the
USA, which, he says, is limited to “assimilationist” (20) calls for
marriage equality that is, in practice, only for “queers with enough
access to capital to imagine a life integrated within North American
capitalist culture” (20). This timely example of how great aspira-
tions, when headed off into a concrete policy agenda, lose their
utopian fervor, is a “recent symptom of the erosion of the gay and
lesbian political imagination” (Muñoz 21). This phenomenon is
present in Chile as well—particularly, as we shall see, in the writ-
ings of Simonetti—and stands in stark contrast to greater possibili-
ties for gay liberation.
31. The legal status of several of these universities vis-à-vis whether or
not they are for-profit continues to be disputed at present, but few
would argue that their costs are prohibitive for the majority of
Chileans without going into massive amounts of debt, the burden
of which is one of the subjects of persistent student protests.
Simonetti’s presence as a lecturer at some of them reinforces his
image as aligned with the powerful economic interests that attend
(and, indeed, own) these institutions. See, for example, this link
from the website of the Universidad Finis Terrae: http://www.
finisterrae.cl/carrera_teatro/noticias_detalle.php?idNoticia=2253
&PHPSESSID=b123a938e71fec7c9bc3526e953e49d4.
224 C. FISCHER

32. In an aside, another one of the guests at the party, Tomás, reveals
that Cucho maintains a secret, abusive sexual relationship with a
Carabinero (a military police officer)—yet more evidence of
Cucho’s transgressiveness, for both refusing a homonormative
relationship model and also doing so in a prohibited way (Simonetti
101).
33. MOVILH was founded in 1991. For more information, see
http://www.movilh.cl/quienes-somos/historia/.
34. See http://www.todomejora.org/sobre.html. It is impossible to
think about the “It Gets Better” project outside the logic of capi-
tal: it has spawned a bestselling book, and its creator, Dan Savage,
who was catapulted to national visibility when a spate of young
LGBT suicides became big news in the USA, has since come to star
on his own television show for MTV. More information can be
found at www.todomejora.org and www.itgetsbetter.org.
35. Despite their polemical disagreements about futurity, both Muñoz
and Edelman critique this stance as an appropriation of queer bod-
ies, part of a sanitizing tendency in the US LGBT movement: for
Muñoz, it is an “assimilationist gay politics [that] posits an ‘all’
that is in fact a few” (20). For Edelman, queer theory undoes all
possible political uses of queer bodies, such that “queer theory …
marks the ‘other’ side of politics: the ‘side’ where narrative realiza-
tion and derealization overlap … the ‘side’ outside all political
sides, committed as they are, on every side, futurism’s unques-
tioned good” (7).
36. Robles (2011) writes about the responses to the Iguales
Foundation’s request to call the customary march of sexual minor-
ities in Chile a “March for Diversity” in 2011: “columnas de opin-
ión y ardua controversia en las redes sociales [que] dieron cuenta
de la inquietud que produjo en diversos activistas homos y lesbis la
denominada ‘higienización’ del nombre y contenido de la histórica
marcha que, año tras año, tuvo un carácter político y contestatario”
(131).
37. Lemebel often positioned AIDS as metonymic for the dangers of
the neoliberalism, as Lina Meruane (2012) has pointed out, par-
ticularly in Loco afán, whose subtitle is Crónicas de sidario: “El
régimen militar, acusa Lemebel, desprotegió voluntariamente a la
nación toda, cedió las barreras protectoras de la patria, celebró la
 POLITICIZING THE LOCA BODY AFTER THE DICTATORSHIP, 1990–2005 225

entrada de toda clase de inversionistas que se beneficiarían de las

riquezas naturales del país (la dulce sangre de la patria es la metá-
fora) y de sus ganancias tras la liberación económica y la privati-
zación de las empresas nacionales” (Meruane 176). The sale and
consumption of AIDS, as Lemebel says in the chronicle “Y ahora
las luces,” “… da para instalar un súper mall, donde las produc-
ciones sidáticas se vendan como pan caliente. […] En un stand
especial, a todo neón, el negocio SIDARTE de Benetton; donde
no se sabe si el gringo previene asustando con el famoso póster de
la Pietá cadavérica, o carnavaliza el uso del condón […]. Quizás
este supermarket acentúa su perversa prevención cuando está
dirigido a los homosexuales. Pareciera incentivar la enfermedad
con su pornografía visual […]. Nadie se fija entonces en la precau-
ción escrita” (Lemebel 1996: 67–68).
38. In Chilean slang, a yegua not only refers to a female horse, but also
a loud, dramatic, hysterical woman—a stark contrast to the
jackboot-wearing soldiers so prominent on the streets of Santiago
at the time. Images of Las Yeguas’ performances can be found on
the website http://www.yeguasdelapocalipsis.cl/.
39. When the narrator of one of the crónicas in Loco afán, entitled “La
muerte de Madonna,” looks back on a Las Yeguas intervention, for
example, the spirit of corporeality in which the text was created
becomes clear. A loca named La Madonna is introduced by a
description of the impact she made at a Las Yeguas performance
entitled Lo que el SIDA se llevó, whose spectators were fascinated
with “la picardía tramposa de sus gestos” (Lemebel 1996: 36).
Here, the chronicle serves a double function: first, it memorializes
the valiant efforts of Las Yeguas and others to resist the Pinochet
dictatorship, and second, Lemebel places himself within a tradition
of performance art. The title Lo que el SIDA se llevó is a play on
words: the Spanish language title of Victor Fleming’s 1939 movie
Gone with the Wind is Lo que el viento se llevó (literally, “What the
wind carried away”), and in the performance by Las Yeguas, the
word in Spanish for wind, viento, is replaced by the Spanish word
for AIDS, SIDA. The title of Las Yeguas’ performance does not
translate very easily into English, but its closest approximation
would be “What AIDS Carried Away”: a queer appropriation of
the film starring transvestite prostitutes in Santiago’s “red-light
226 C. FISCHER

district” (a denomination which must also be read with some

degree of irony).
40. Víctor Jara was an activist, teacher, theater director, and folk singer
who reached artistic prominence during Salvador Allende’s presi-
dency. He played a key role in the Nueva canción chilena (New
Chilean Song) movement, writing and performing songs of protest
that often strongly condemned the Chilean oligarchy while glorify-
ing workers’ movements. Because of his leftist sympathies, the
Armed Forces arrested him not long after the coup d’état, and
then tortured and murdered him. He later gained iconic status for
the global Left, as well as in Chile, thanks to the efforts of his
British wife Joan Jara to preserve his legacy.
41. The controversial nature of this speech, in light of its historical
context, cannot be overstated. That year, a weakening in the mili-
tary regime led to an increase in its opposition, but the predomi-
nant feeling on the Left at that time was that various leftist factions
had to show a united front against the dictatorship in order to
strengthen their own cause. Leftist partisans thought that any devi-
ation from unity would weaken their efforts. Lemebel certainly
understood the implications of a public critique of the Left at this
time, which makes his speech all the more radical.
42. The cueca is the Chilean national dance.
43. For further information on the writings of Che Guevara from a
gendered perspective, see Josefina Saldaña-Portillo’s The
Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas and the Age of
Development (2003).
44. La Madonna’s interlocutor here, presumably a foreigner, is an arche-
type examined by Meruane: “un turista gay que aterriza en Chile
portando dólares y virus (y un simbólico visado neoliberal, una con-
tagiosa ideología que arrasaría con los valores solidarios, ya muy
deteriorados, del socialismo chileno)” (175, emphasis in original).
45. The crónica is by definition a hybrid genre, moving between jour-
nalism, literature, and the short story. For more information about
the form, see Susana Rotker’s brilliant volume La invención de la
crónica (1992).
46. Freud discussed how productive melancholia could be for individ-
ual subjects, and this is an ambiguity that is appropriate for the loca
to inhabit: “… let us dwell for a moment on the view which the
melancholic’s disorder affords of the constitution of the human
 POLITICIZING THE LOCA BODY AFTER THE DICTATORSHIP, 1990–2005 227

ego. We see how in him one part of the ego sets itself over against
the other, judges it critically, and, as it were, takes it as its object.
Our suspicion [is] that the critical agency which is here split off
from the ego might also show its independence in other circum-
stances” (Freud 246).
47. The Negerhalle is a now-defunct underground performance space
in Munich, and there is footage of one of Lorenza’s performances
there in Michael Stahlberg’s 1991 documentary film Lorenza. For
more information about the Negerhalle “scene,” see Mirko Hecktor,
Mjunik Disco: Von 1949 bis heute (Munich: Blumenbar, 2008).
48. Siebers, in fact, asks whether the Venus de Milo “would still be
considered one of the great examples of both aesthetic and human
beauty if she still had both her arms” (5).
49. Bolaño’s account is most likely not trying to elide the femininity of
Lorenza by naming her “Lorenzo,” since he is fairly unflinching
when it comes to his other descriptions of her variegated gender
persona. His misnomer is one of many factual inaccuracies in his
story of Lorenza, all of which are probably due to a lack of defini-
tive information. In fact, he admits to this himself when introduc-
ing the story: “El niño se llamaba Lorenzo, creo, no estoy seguro,
y he olvidado su apellido” (Bolaño 1996: 81). This only contrib-
utes to the construction of the myth surrounding Lorenza, as
Bolaño likely felt.
50. The photograph, by David Airob, appears in the September 9,
1992, edition of the paper, as part of the article “La doble vida de
Petra” by David Requena (49).
51. Bolaño’s infamous chronicle of his return to Chile and his encoun-
ter with what he considered its elitist cultural circles can be read in
his collection of essays Entre paréntesis (2004).
52. Masiello’s reading shows how subjects who are deployed to
deconstruct historical, artistic, economic, and political narratives
often deemed overly narrow and heterosexist—such as queer fig-
ures—can form “points of conjuncture” on their own terms (13).
As I have suggested earlier here, the logic of Masiello’s argument
can be extended beyond the “transition” out of dictatorship to
which the title of her text refers, to think about how subjects like
Lorenza would have the agency to signify their places within cul-
tural history in a way that avoids revolving around the violence of
Chile’s past.
228 C. FISCHER

53. Jameson (2004) discusses the disconnection between utopian ges-

tures and concrete guidelines for political praxis at length: the
instant that utopian ideas are converted into practical policy, they
lose their utopian nature. In this sense, Lorenza’s loca performance
is all the more exceptional.
54. Bolaño’s description of this suicide attempt deserves to be quoted
at length: “Pero es difícil ser artista en el Tercer Mundo si uno es
pobre, no tiene brazos y encima es marica. […] Sus desilusiones
(para no hablar de humillaciones, desprecios, ninguneos) fueron
terribles y un día … decidió suicidarse. Una tarde de verano par-
ticularmente triste, cuando el sol se ocultaba en el océano Pacífico,
Lorenza saltó al mar desde una roca usada exclusivamente por sui-
cidas (y que no falta en cada trozo de litoral chileno que se precie).
Se hundió como una piedra […]. Con repentino valor decidió que
no iba a morir. Dice que dijo ahora o nunca y volvió a la superficie.
El ascenso le pareció interminable; mantenerse a flote, casi inso-
portable, pero lo consiguió. […] Matarse, dijo, en esta coyuntura
sociopolítica, es absurdo y redundante. Mejor convertirse en poeta
secreto” (Bolaño 1996: 81–83). This probably did not happen—as
we know, Lorenza left Chile just after the dictatorship started, and
also, if she had jumped into the Pacific near Punta Arenas she
would have frozen to death in a matter of seconds, even in the
summer.
55. Indeed, the motif of water as a metaphor of both life and death is
present in a number of Southern Cone artistic works that aim to
come to grips with the legacy of dictatorships, including Marco
Bechis’ 1999 film Garaje Olimpo and Patricio Guzmán’s El botón
de nácar (2015). Masiello discusses this trope a propos of Un espa-
cio al olvido, a 1997 film by Marcelo Brodsky and Sabrina Farji.
The film, which is about the life of a young man who was disap-
peared as part of the Argentine dictatorship, superimposes “turbu-
lent ocean waters, presumably the tomb of the disappeared child”
over “clips of super-8 film that show the boy, as a youngster, bath-
ing at the sea”: “Saturating the viewers with reminders of redemp-
tion and death, the water commands dual orders of reflection: the
super-8 film returns us to a nostalgia for childhood, the leisure-
time activities of seaside fun, while the larger frame focuses on the
silent ocean and points to the final resting place for victims of the
dirty war” (Masiello 8).
 POLITICIZING THE LOCA BODY AFTER THE DICTATORSHIP, 1990–2005 229

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 CHAPTER 6

Exceptionalism, the Female Body,

and the Public Sphere in the Bachelet Era,
2006–2015

INTRODUCTION: THE BACHELET ERA

In March 2006, the very same month that Michelle Bachelet took office
as the first female president of Chile, construction began on the Torre
Costanera, which—when it opened in 2012—was the highest skyscraper
in Latin America. Towering high over Santiago as to be visible from almost
everywhere in the city, the building, which also holds one of the largest
malls in South America, is in many ways the architectural manifestation
of the heterosexual, masculine, and capitalist nature of Chile’s economic
exceptionalism today. Its monumental, phallic singularity stands against
both the resistance that “becoming” represents for Gilles Deleuze and
Félix Guattari (1987), as well as more multiple, diversified forms of bodily
pleasure and mobility imagined by feminist thinkers such as Luce Irigaray
(1985). Given that Bachelet, an avowed feminist, ran on a socialist plat-
form, she raised the possibility of undoing the intractable imbrication of
the country’s discourse of economic exceptionalism in male, heterosexual
praxis. The question was whether this gendered change would involve
actual economic change; the Costanera’s looming tower serves as an
enduring testimony to the challenges Bachelet faced in putting the prom-
ises of her platform into practice.
Bachelet’s victory was proof of the vertiginous social changes that Chile
had undergone in a very short time. Bachelet, after all, was a single mother,
a doctor, a head of household, and a victim of the dictatorship—having

© The Author(s) 2016 233

C. Fischer, Queering the Chilean Way,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-56248-7_6
234 C. FISCHER

been tortured and exiled in the 1970s—and many women who had never
felt so identified with someone in power fiercely supported her (Eltit 2008:
131; Politzer 76). She was also the first woman president in the Americas
who had not previously been first lady. Following Bachelet’s election, two
other female presidents were elected in South America on similarly leftist
platforms—Cristina Fernández in 2007, and Dilma Rousseff in 2011—in
yet another manifestation of Chile’s status as a “model.” Bachelet’s elec-
tion signified the promise that women could be more included in Chile’s
public sphere, as Nancy Fraser (1990)—following Jürgen Habermas—has
theorized it. “A theatre in modern societies in which political participation
is enacted through the medium of talk,” the public sphere is neither a mar-
ket- nor a state-dominated space, but rather an “institutionalized arena of
discursive interaction” (57). Bachelet’s election also suggested that Chile
could be viewed as politically exceptional in a different way. In fact, as
Diamela Eltit (2008) has pointed out, it was taken as a gesture of Chile’s
exemplary ability, within Latin America, to reconcile itself with its dictato-
rial past: “ha sido destacada su experiencia concreta—su historia biográ-
fica—en relación con la memoria traumática de parte de Latinoamérica”
(131). Since Bachelet’s father was an Air Force general taken prisoner
following the 1973 coup due to his loyalty to Allende and the constitu-
tion (and who later died in captivity), her own election was taken as a sign
of her ability to reconcile with Chile, and of Chile’s ability to reconcile
with itself. After her first presidential term, Bachelet went to New York
to be the first head of the UN Women organization, and her reelection
in 2014 (with more than 62 % of the vote) was proof of her enduring
popularity in Chile. The creation, in her relatively successful1 first term
in office, of a so-called red de protección social2—a reform of Chile’s pen-
sion system; the construction of free daycare centers for all Chilean chil-
dren three months and over; an expansion of the public healthcare system;
subsidies for students, young people entering the workforce, and seniors;
and other integrated policies designed to offer low-income Chileans social
benefits at all stages of their lives—proved so popular that it remained even
when she was out of office. Right-winger Sebastián Piñera was elected
president in 2010 only after he promised not to undo any of it, as Patricia
Politzer (2010) points out (301). Bachelet’s focus on policymaking that
favored women and other vulnerable members of society—children, the
infirm, the elderly people—was an indicator of a more humane, egalitarian
approach to governing Chile, inflected with a feminist bent.
 EXCEPTIONALISM, THE FEMALE BODY, AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE... 235

Despite all these changes, however, the argument could be made that
the official rhetoric of Chilean exceptionalism went unchanged with
Bachelet at the helm of the country; that rather than changing the under-
lying structures of exclusion inherent to the Chilean economy, she simply
became the new face of neoliberal Chile. Though her election promised
some changes, Bachelet had been elected to continue the policies of her
predecessor, Ricardo Lagos, and far from contesting the country’s official
political power, her job was to work in its very innermost sanctum: La
Moneda. She was faced with having to negotiate with Chile’s poderes fác-
ticos—entrenched, family-based, Right-wing economic conglomerates—
who expressed resistance to changes she made, and some of the changes
she made failed. For example, Bachelet’s first and most visible gesture of
political change in the service of feminism—a cabinet with equal num-
bers of men and women, for the first time in Chilean history—lasted just
over a year. Moreover, she received a number of challenges from those on
the Left who felt that the changes she had promised were not going far
enough: protests by militant indigenous movements, high school and uni-
versity students, and other constituencies demanding broader rights have
wracked Chile since she took office.3 Her presidency was thus marked by
a complex negotiation between embodying more utopian, radical politi-
cal challenges to the heterosexual, masculine structure of Chile’s neolib-
eral economic exceptionalism, on one hand, and remaining within certain
strictures of normativity, on the other, in order to placate sexist critiques
of her status as a woman, political critiques of her ability to govern, and
critiques from the Left and the Right of her economic stewardship.
Many negative comments on Bachelet’s capacity to govern have taken
the form of references to her figure and her personal life, meaning that
questions about Chile’s ability to remain exceptional are still figured in
the explicit terms of gender. These have included veiled accusations that
she “no tenía ‘capacidad de mando’” because she “no había sido capaz de
conservar una familia tradicional” (Eltit 2008: 135); intimations that her
emphasis on policies of social protection—a traditionally “feminized” area
of governance4—was undermining the neoliberal success of Chile’s excep-
tional economy; and, in one particularly notorious case, a reference to
her physique, when Lagos’ Finance Minister, Nicolás Eyzaguirre, referred
to her with the term of endearment mi gordi.5 Politzer, too, shows how
the idea of a female candidate seemed like a distant, absurd dream in
Chile less than four years before Bachelet’s election, pointing to a news
report published in El Mercurio in June 2002 and entitled “Miss Moneda
236 C. FISCHER

2006,” which “consultaba a publicistas, analistas políticos, y, sobre todo,

a modistos y peluqueros” about the possibility of a female president (63).
Bachelet’s actual opinions about managing these delicate issues have
always been very secretive; because she is something of a cipher as a public
figure,6 she constitutes a surface onto which aspirations and fears about
Chile by multiple constituencies are easily projected. Although this is a
common phenomenon for national leaders (Salvador Allende’s figure, for
one, has served a similar purpose), with Bachelet these aspirations and
fears were projected onto a female body for the first time in Chile. The
female body—Bachelet’s and others’—has thus been a particularly conten-
tious site of political and cultural debates in Chile in recent years, and as
such, the intersections between it and Chile’s overall body politic merit
discussion (Salvador Allende 2006).
Given that the most recent years in Chile have been so politically marked
by Bachelet, it is worth asking whether Bachelet has effectively broadened
Chile’s public sphere to include women—with greater gender equality
leading to (at least the promise of) greater inclusion in society at large—or
whether its public sphere, and its economically exceptional image abroad,
remain as exclusive and unegalitarian as ever, despite Bachelet. Has
Bachelet allowed for Chile’s official discourse to no longer be embodied,
ideally and exclusively, in a heterosexual man, or do the difficulties she has
experienced while in office indicate that changing the terms of the public
sphere, and undoing Chilean exceptionalism altogether, are better strate-
gies? These questions point not only to the long history of feminist think-
ing in Chile—as Alejandra Castillo (2005, 2011a, b) has stated; they are
also asked by a number of cultural artifacts produced during the last ten
years that take up the place of women in the public sphere, Bachelet and
others, as their central concern. These questions are also at the heart of
debates that have taken place in the public spheres of other liberal democ-
racies that, like Chile, emerged “from Soviet-style state socialism, Latin
American military dictatorships, and southern African regimes of racial
domination” (Fraser 57): between the possibility (never fully realized in
practice, according to Habermas (Fraser 59)) of expanding the public
sphere to enact greater inclusion of previously marginalized citizens there,
and the possibility that the public sphere is so inherently masculinist and
bourgeois that inclusion needs to be struggled for outside of the existing
structures of power (Fraser 62).
This chapter will, accordingly, focus on three such cultural artifacts that
engage, specifically, with the politics of the female body in order to ask
 EXCEPTIONALISM, THE FEMALE BODY, AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE... 237

about its role in the country’s exceptionalistic discourse abroad, and the
country’s public sphere, at home. In the novel Impuesto a la carne (2010)
by Diamela Eltit, two women in physical pain cry out for inclusion in
the political and historical narratives of Chile’s bicentennial, and against
the opiate of exceptionalistic nationalism. In the short play Discurso by
Guillermo Calderón (2012), audiences are faced with three actresses who,
together, act out a hypothetical valedictory speech by Bachelet, vacillating
between offering a frank account of her term and giving another of the
bland, disciplined7 sound bites that have characterized her time in office.
The novel/manifesto La cerda punk by Constanzx Álvarez (2014), finally,
calls for a radical break with narratives of feminist inclusion in circles of
power, so as to open up new spaces for groups vociferously protesting
for inclusion, including students, indigenous people, and LGBT groups.
Though Bachelet’s discourse remains fairly moderate, these texts explore
the possibilities for more radically inclusive ideas about women and gender
in Chile’s public sphere, as well as less exceptionalistic ways of thinking
about Chile’s place in the world—explorations enabled, I argue, by the
utopian promises embodied (albeit not always intentionally) by Bachelet
herself.

FEMINIZING VERSUS QUEERING CHILE’S OFFICIAL

DISCOURSE UNDER BACHELET
Since independence, Chile’s dominant discourse was espoused by men
who imagined themselves as the exclusive protagonists of the coun-
try’s economic and political spheres; in response, Chilean women have
deployed their bodies to undo that domination. When, in the late nine-
teenth century, a group of jurists and women “creyeron ver en la abstracta
y neutral fórmula ‘chilenos’ la natural inclusión de las mujeres a la esfera
de lo político” in the country’s 1833 constitution, they were met with
active resistance by men seeking to maintain their hegemony (Castillo
2005: 18).8 Still, the promise that women could be included in republican
discourse was always present (Castillo 2005: 40), and in the twentieth
century, women worked in Chile (as they did throughout the world) to
undo the exclusive dominance of men in the public sphere. The struggle
for women’s rights and visibility in Chile has been amply discussed,9 and
as such I will not rehearse it in detail, except to note that the dynamic—
identified by Castillo—of their exclusion combined with the promise of
238 C. FISCHER

their inclusion can still be observed today in the Bachelet era. As Eltit has
pointed out, this is an economic as well as a political issue: since women
continue to do the same amount of work for less money (2008: 276),
female bodies have always had to carry a disproportionate share of the
weight of maintaining Chile’s appearance of economic exceptionalism,
whether they want to or not.
Whether women should respond to this unfair burden on their bodies by
working to redistribute it more equitably within existing societal structures,
or by throwing it off their shoulders completely, is a debate—focusing on
both the female body and the body politic as a whole—opened up in new
ways, thanks to Bachelet’s election. Indeed, the production of culture and
knowledge that theorize different ways for the female body to undo male
discursive dominance finds its root in post-1968 feminist theory, which
heavily informs the work of Chile’s foremost cultural theorist of sexual dif-
ference, Nelly Richard.10 Chile’s official discourse—both the way it presents
itself as exceptional abroad, and that of its public sphere at home—oper-
ates under the masculinist, phallocentric signs critiqued by Susan Rubin
Suleiman (1985), for whom “it is the erection—if one may put it that
way—of the phallus to the status of transcendental signifier that enabled
Lacan to theorize the exclusion of women from the symbolic, that is, from
the Law of the father and from language” (48). Instead of the “linear-
ity, self-possession, the affirmation of mastery, authority, and … unity” of
Western, masculine discourse (Suleiman 49), feminist thinkers have called
for appropriating the visibility of the female body to reduce the exclusions
inherent to Chilean neoliberal discourse. It is in this sense that Richard
(2008) talks about the gesture by so many Chilean women of wearing the
presidential sash to celebrate Bachelet’s election on the streets as a way of
resignifying and undoing masculine dominance in the public sphere:

Poder y ciudadanía fueron … los emblemas de lo masculino que reesceni-

ficaron las mujeres … en un acto de apropiación multitudinaria [del] estado
y la democracia […]. Lo sabemos, la connotación masculina del poder se
asocia a la exterioridad y la exteriorización, a la visibilidad y la visibilización.
[…] La exhibición de lo femenino en las tribunas del poder … contribuye
a redelinear contornos que ayudan a la individuación, al reconocimiento y
la identificación de las mujeres como sujetos (desde siempre negados) de la
visualidad pública. (Richard 2008: 78–79)

The ultimate goal, for Richard, is for women to control their own bodies
and have their own voice to talk about it, on equal terms with men—
 EXCEPTIONALISM, THE FEMALE BODY, AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE... 239

which is something Castillo (2005: 16, citing Rancière) and Eltit (2008:
136) have also called for in explicit terms. Bachelet’s presence in Chile’s
public sphere allowed for debates about how to achieve this goal to take
place more visibly.
However, Richard’s example of women wearing Bachelet’s presidential
sash is still a gesture that supports Chile’s existing political system, even
if it seeks to broaden that system to include women. Moreover, Bachelet
continues to be the face of Chile’s exceptionalism abroad—an exception-
alism that largely continues to exist because of its exclusionary neolib-
eral economy—evidenced by the fact that her first inauguration made the
front page of the New York Times (Politzer 267), and that Condoleezza
Rice, hardly an apologist for economic equality, voiced her admiration
of Chile’s place as globally exceptional because of Bachelet’s election
(Politzer 34). Just as Fraser has called for the importance of “subaltern
counterpublics”—particularly in societies as “stratified” as Chile’s (Fraser
70)—“where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate
counterdiscourses, which in turn permit them to formulate oppositional
interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs” within the public
sphere (Fraser 67), radical thinkers and activists in Chile have posited that
the country’s official discourse is inherently sexist and exclusive, even with
a woman working under the sign of feminism to modestly expand it.
Members of the Colectivo Universitario de la Disidencia Sexual
(CUDS), a loosely affiliated activist group with more radical beliefs about
gender, have thus called for “sexual dissidence” by dialoguing with (and,
often, against) metropolitan ideas of queer theory11 in an often-fraught
alliance with academia,12 pointing out that feminisms that posit essential-
ized forms of femininity prop up the exclusive aspects of exceptionalism
and the public sphere. As Felipe Rivas (2011) has stated, Richard’s ideas
about feminism propose “elementos naturalizantes en cuanto a las estruc-
turas inamovibles del cuerpo como realidad biológica primaria. […] El
travestismo entonces, se valorizará como instancia de crítica estética sólo
por su supuesta cercanía de lenguajes y modos con ‘lo femenino’” (73).13
For Rivas, the essentialization of femininity inherent to Richard’s thinking
(and to Bachelet’s place in the public sphere) relegates the travesti figure
to being a “feminized” man, when the travesti, or loca, could break down
gender binaries altogether to deconstruct Chile’s masculinized rhetoric.
CUDS has thus held a number of events, in which Rivas, Jorge Díaz,
Castillo, Eltit, Álvarez, and even Richard, among others, have discussed
these issues. Since the organization’s beginnings in 2005, the same year as
240 C. FISCHER

the Bachelet’s first campaign, CUDS members have thus called for “femi-
nism without women”: a way of thinking about a public sphere that is
at its heart contestatory, not just of all power structures (masculinist by
implication), but of essentialized femininity as well. Castillo explains this
concept further by pointing out that

el feminismo es por sobre todo una práctica deslocalizadora, por lo mismo

no puede ser sólo localizada en un movimiento, en la identidad. Lejos de
las corrientes utilitarias, que señalan que el feminismo siempre ha sido una
forma política para la consecución de ciertos fines prácticos que calzan ple-
namente con la idea de ‘individuo’ de la tradición liberal, me parece que el
feminismo busca la transformación de la política moderna y no su adecu-
ación. […] No se es feminista por reificar la identidad ‘mujer’ en una socie-
dad pospatriarcal. El feminismo es negativo o no es. (2011a: 21)

By rejecting the supposition that feminism has to be related to feminin-

ity—politics related to the inclusion of women as such into the inherently
masculine constructs of the public sphere or exceptionalism, or politics
explicitly figured as “maternal”—CUDS members instead focus on “sub-
versions,” not just of heteronormativity but also of what Rivas calls “la
homosexualidad de estado” (63–64), an idea partially encompassed by
the concept of homonormativity.14 In practice, this has meant postporno,
drag king, queer theory, and BDSM workshops, performances, and politi-
cal activism, all outside of any political position that would place them
(unlike other sexual liberation movements in the country like MOVILH
or Iguales15) in dialogue with the government. In this way, they have pos-
ited that a focus on the essentialized female body in official discourse “no
haría sino reiterar … una política de cuidado” (Castillo 2011b: 21), cir-
cumscribing feminist politics to areas where “motherhood” is the primary
focus; Bachelet’s red de protección social would be an important example of
this. Castillo and other members of CUDS have responded to the exclu-
sions they see as inherent to Bachelet’s approach to governing by forming
a “subaltern counterpublic.”
Whether thinkers have imagined a more essentialized form of femi-
nine corporeality or a more dissident, queer body (or bodies) as most apt
to critique Chile’s discourse of sexualized exceptionalism, the body has
been a major focus of Chilean political discussions in recent years. In some
areas, such as in the struggle for abortion rights, the goals of Bachelet
and those “feminists without women” to her left have even converged.16
 EXCEPTIONALISM, THE FEMALE BODY, AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE... 241

Bachelet was democratically elected to represent all Chileans, so focus-

ing on her in the post-2005 era is a way of addressing the tensions in the
debates about the body (politic) in Chile at present. Although Bachelet
has largely advocated for inclusion within preexisting, masculinist politi-
cal structures—an idea that the members of CUDS critique—her time in
office has held the “promise” (Castillo 2005) that, thanks to her inclu-
sion, new spaces will open up in Chile for other excluded groups with
leftist political aims, including students, indigenous people, and LGBT
citizens who have protested vociferously since her first election.17 After all,
Bachelet’s presidential administrations have called into question at least
some of the masculinist, heterosexual, and exclusively Right-wing (neolib-
eral) concepts of Chilean official discourse. Bachelet’s body—alternately
figured discursively as connected to state power, tortured, Western, racial-
ized white, and overweight—is what much of the cultural production in
this period explicitly and implicitly dialogues with. The cultural artifacts I
will discuss in what follows are the ones that, I argue, most powerfully cri-
tique Chilean official discourse during the Bachelet era by focusing on the
corporeal embodiment of exceptionalism abroad, and the public sphere at
home. They do so by following a tradition of feminist thinking that defies
the exclusions of the public sphere using bodies—both those that embrace
an essentialized femininity to assert their place as such in the country’s
public and cultural spheres, and those that are “dissident” (breaking with
femininity and the gender binaries that it implies).

IMPUESTO A LA CARNE: FLESHING OUT 200 YEARS

OF CHILEAN EXCEPTIONALISM

As with Pedro Lemebel, the body has always been a key element of Diamela
Eltit’s cultural production, as J. Agustín Pastén (2012) has pointed out
(97): before they were known as writers, each made corporeally based
performance art during the dictatorship. In a 1980 performance entitled
Maipú, Eltit read portions of her writing inside a brothel, and also burned
and cut her own body as a way to achieve “la autocorrección del ‘yo’ en
lo fusional de un ‘nosotros’ redimido y redentor. El dolor es el umbral
que autoriza el ingreso del sujeto mutilado a zonas de identificación colec-
tiva donde comparte con los marginados los mismos signos de desmedro
social que evidencia en carne propia” (Richard 1986: 83). The body in
pain, as Elaine Scarry (1985) has also written, is a site in which truths are
242 C. FISCHER

both repressed and revealed through torture, other forms of coercion, and
subsequent scarring (45–51)18; for Eltit, the experience of physical pain
has always been a way of denouncing the suffering of others and forming
bonds of solidarity with them, particularly under the dictatorship and in
its neoliberal aftermath. Moreover, as evidenced not only in Eltit’s per-
formances but also in short films such as Pedro Chaskel and Pablo Salas’
Somos + (1985), in which women formed human chains to stand up to
the water canons of the dictatorship’s apparatus of repression, the body is
also the ultimate site of resistance to power. Describing how several of the
country’s feminist icons, including Gabriela Mistral and Elena Caffarena,
wrote constantly about their own physical pain, Eltit writes that they

escribían sus dolores pero también su deseo imperioso de participar en el

circuito emancipatorio del feminismo memchista19 que las iba a llevar a un
espacio donde el dolor que les provocaba su cuerpo iba a cesar … por la
emancipación de la mujer chilena, pero no de todas, sino la específica eman-
cipación de ese grupo de mujeres chilenas proletarias que querían abandonar
el dolor de los cuerpos obreros que tenían. (2011: 26)

The female body in pain has been, for Eltit, a source of commonality in
oppression and resistance: plaguing both women who do manual labor
and those who do not, this solidarity in bodily pain, resistance, and libera-
tion is at the foundation of the feminist struggle in Chile, as Eltit conceives
it, because it crosses the boundaries of class.
Eltit’s novel Impuesto a la carne (2010), written on the occasion of
Chile’s bicentennial, continues her focus on the body. It was published
during a time of great uncertainty in Chile: Bachelet had left office to
be replaced by Piñera, a member of the opposition; an earthquake and
subsequent tsunami had shaken the country early in the year, leaving
death and damage in their wake; and the country had reached a time
of reckoning with its trajectory in history. For Eltit, the female body in
pain, vulnerable to medicalized surveillance and intervention but also a
locus of great resistance, was an apposite site for thinking metaphorically
about this uncertainty. The novel has two main characters, a nameless
mother and daughter—perhaps the most vulnerable dyad in culture, as
Eltit has pointed out (Niebylski 118, quoting an interview with Eltit by
Patricio Zunini)—who have inhabited the waiting rooms of a hospital for
200 years. The doctor–patient relationship is one of the main ways for
the Foucauldian surveillance and control wrought by official discourses
 EXCEPTIONALISM, THE FEMALE BODY, AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE... 243

to imprint themselves onto (and control) bodies, particularly those of

women, when doctors convert “the nearly infinite … interplay of innu-
merable pleasures, sensations, and thoughts” (Foucault 1990: 20) that
emanate from their patients’ bodies into the official, disciplined, intel-
ligible language of pathology. The two protagonists, subject to succes-
sive “surgeries,” are not only subject to this bodily “discipline”; they also
serve as evidence that Chile is a “sick nation,” to use Pastén’s term (109),
rather than a site of neoliberal success and mastery. Given Chile’s history
of female anarchists, such as Caffarena and de Sárraga, who resisted male
attempts to keep them disenfranchised, it stands to reason that authori-
tarian (male) doctors and the “barras futboleras” of “fans” who buy into
Chilean exceptionalism like automatons (reminiscent of the mostly male
“barras bravas” who cheer for Chile’s soccer teams (Eltit 2010: 125))
would struggle throughout the novel to ensure the bodily subjugation of
the two protagonists. They quash any dissent to Chile’s long discourse of
masculinized economic exceptionalism: “Estamos cautivas por nuestros
órganos que nos necesitan para hablar de la historia” (Eltit 2010: 113).
Still, the protagonists resist: “incitamos a nuestros órganos hacia una
posición anarquista y así conseguimos imprimirle una dirección más radi-
cal a nuestros cuerpos” (Eltit 2010: 15). In fact, when the daughter’s first-
person narration alludes to the doctors’ “hábitos más defectuosos … su
inquina, su deseo y su terror” (Eltit 2010: 38–39), she is shouted down
by the group of fans, who, “comprometido en lo que iba a ser un lucra-
tivo afán corporativista, me trató de una forma más que vengativa” (Eltit
2010: 38). The novel, then, figures the female body as the principal site of
struggle between anarchist, feminist ideals, on one hand, and masculinist,
authoritarian discourse of neoliberal exceptionalism—with “sus deseos de
copia … [y] sus costumbres por la admiración y la envidia soterrada ante el
triunfo inmerecido de sus ídolos” (Eltit 2010: 152)—on the other.
Using highly figurative language, the novel places the aspirations and
fears of 200 years of Chilean history into almost entirely medical terms.
The “doctors” are Chile’s business leaders, politicians, and forefathers,
who exercise their authoritarian power to perform (or refuse to perform)
“surgeries” on women’s bodies. These surgical interventions can be read
as torture, the exploitation of raw materials (“blood” and “organs”) for
export, or abortions. The authority of the hospital’s head doctor, for
example, extends beyond the medical facility to the entire country, and, in
particular, to the bodies of the two protagonists:
244 C. FISCHER

el médico fundador (del territorio), como prefiere identificarlo de manera

burocrática y grandilocuente mi mamá, quiso que naciéramos … para
favorecerse a sí mismo […]. Quería mostrarnos o más bien exhibirnos […].
Que era dueño de dos mujeres y nosotras estábamos allí para demostrar que
no cejaba en el ejercicio maníaco de su medicina. (Eltit 2010: 25–26)

The clinical setting both illustrates the privatization that has swept Chile
(and from which its medical system—one of the sites to which boosters of
the country’s supposed “modernization” have pointed in order to make
their case—has hardly been immune), and denounces the poor conditions
of its public health system that is supposedly there to protect.20 The two
women have been there for 200 years in order to be registrars of a long
national history of exploitation: history literally inscribes itself on their
bodies in the form of wounds that “nunca van a cicatrizar en la patria”
(Eltit 2010: 187), taking the shape of “una crónica urgente y desesperada”
(Eltit 2010: 129) in their “mentes de archiveras anarquistas” (Eltit 2010:
63). Their explicit mission is to witness and interpret Chilean history from
their posts in the hospital: social protest movements (including the succes-
sion of labor uprisings in the northern mining region21); femicides (there
were 49 of them in Chile in 2010 alone22); a rash of suicides among young
people, “ataviados con una confusa moda internacional” and “dispersando
los síntomas de un enigmático desprecio nacional” (Eltit 2010: 135); the
arrival of migrants from poorer countries, inundating the country with
abject bodies (Eltit 2010: 141)23; torture under dictatorship, repression,
and “la costumbre histórica por adormecer y matar” (Eltit 2010: 72);
and, in an equation of the exploitation of the female body with that of the
earth, the harvest of raw materials so that the country solves “sus graves
problemas a costa del cuerpo” (Eltit 2010: 121) and the “polvo cobre del
último estadio de nuestros huesos terminará fertilizando el subsuelo de un
remoto cementerio chino” (Eltit 2010: 187). The two women are thus
able to illustrate, time and again, the ways in which women’s bodies pay
an inordinately high price for national modernization projects and mas-
culinist posturing, which eventually become intertwined in the country’s
longstanding rhetoric of exceptionalism. As Dianna Niebylski (2011) has
written, “the nation’s vampirism feeds on the blood of its marginal bod-
ies, while global capitalism cannibalizes the destitute bodies of nations that
are themselves the victims of a mechanism in which they cannot hope to
compete from a position of strength” (115). Using medical and corporeal
metaphors, the protagonists are able to rewrite and critique the history of
Chile from an anarchistic, feminist perspective.
 EXCEPTIONALISM, THE FEMALE BODY, AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE... 245

The two women sit in a waiting room, a site that was also productive
for Carlos Leppe’s24 thinking about the body; here, the waiting to which
their bodies are subjected implies the possibility for resistance, in a poten-
tiality that takes a number of forms. The mother inhabits the body of her
daughter, who in turn once inhabited the body of her mother (Eltit 2010:
32), and yet their multiple surgeries mean that they have been left without
many organs. The two protagonists are thus simultaneously pregnant and
empty,25 just as Deleuze and Guattari posited the idea of the “body with-
out organs,” in which different bodily configurations, emotions, inter-
actions, and gestures all remain within the realm of possibility but not
action. In fact, the two women are in a perpetual state of “becoming” in
relation to one another: none of their interactions imply that either one
has any sort of mastery over the other, but rather, the two are in a con-
tinuous process of flows, signification, and de-centering, in which neither
one ever has a singular identity.26 In this sense, they defy the phallocen-
tric “oneness” postulated by the unified male subject—and exemplified
in the Costanera Tower, which the “fans” in the novel certainly would
have cheered. Since only the head doctor can “permitir la vida y decidir
la muerte” and “imponer antes que nada su presencia médica en noso-
tras” (Eltit 2010: 25), the two women’s resistance to phallocratic author-
ity also stands against the structures that Foucault, in Security, Territory,
Population (2007), calls biopolitical power: “techniques that ensure that
living … coexisting, and communicating can in fact be converted into
forces of the state” (422).27 Deciding who gets to live is out of the pro-
tagonists’ hands—they are forced to wait, a position of submission and
weakness. Moreover, the women, “extremas, bajas, demasiado morenas”
(Eltit 2010: 33) and “monstrous” (Eltit 2010: 22), are figured as dia-
metrical opposites even in racial terms to the doctors, who stand out for
their whiteness and tall stature (Eltit 2010: 27). Yet at the same time,
their potential for resistance to the biopower of the doctors is constantly
latent, throughout the novel, in the form of proposals for a “mutual,” or
“commune,” of blood, which here represents not only their life itself, but
also their labor. Instead of letting the doctors and nurses profit from their
blood, “que se va a vender en la trastienda de un mercado desconocido
pero seguramente devaluado y transitorio” (Eltit 2010: 65), they propose
an anarchist commune to ensure a more equitable circulation of life and
labor: “podríamos empezar la comuna del cuerpo y poner en marcha la
primera sede anarquista para contener la sangre del país o de la nación.
De la patria” (Eltit 2010: 186). The aspirations of the two protagonists
246 C. FISCHER

to appropriate biopolitical power outside of the (medical) rule of law

using the potential of their “bodies without organs”—an aspiration always
already made concrete in their “mutual” motherhood—is their way of
countering the exceptionalistic rhetoric of the doctors and their “fans.”28
In this sense, the hospital waiting room functions as a way to turn the
“medicalized nation” allegory against itself: the nationalist, economic
exceptionalism practiced by the doctors and enforced by the fans always
has the potential for resistance embedded within it.
The female body in pain is so central to the novelized struggle between
(masculinist, nationalist, and economic) exceptionalism and feminism (in
both its anarchist and its more system-friendly varieties), that one char-
acter in particular, the narrator’s cousin Patricia—who bears a striking
resemblance to Michelle Bachelet—ends up being the site in which this
struggle takes its primary toll. Patricia has bought into the medicalized
state’s rhetoric of exceptionalism, and works diligently to keep herself
within its strictures:

Se llamaba Patricia mi prima y tuvo un cúmulo de enfermedades benignas,

insustanciales, que nunca evolucionaron porque se entregó a los médicos
para conseguir los mejores tratamientos. Siempre sonriente con ellos a pesar
de las horas de espera o de los fríos modales profesionales o de las sucesivas
cancelaciones de las consultas. De los engaños, de las injurias, de las penurias
que le causaron. Pero nunca se lamentó de la ingratitud médica, no, mi
prima Patricia conservó su inteligente y, por qué no decirlo, atractiva sonrisa,
dispuesta a tomar otra hora, la que fuera […]. Estoy preparada o educada
para soportar, les decía. La actitud patriótica, la voluntad lineal de mi prima
Patricia me deslumbró: su presencia, su disponibilidad, la manera en que
se inclinaba para saludar a los médicos con un encanto y una sumisión que
nunca he visto en ningún otro paciente. (Eltit 2010: 42)

Like Bachelet, Patricia’s body has been submitted to numerous instances of

harm from the state: the “injurias” mentioned above could refer not only
to the torture Bachelet experienced at Villa Grimaldi, but also to her gov-
ernment’s submission to the neoliberal constraints of Chile’s economy.29
Also like Bachelet, Patricia’s captivating smile is evidence of an astonishing
degree of self-discipline (a trait of Bachelet’s that Eltit has commented
extensively on), keeping a stiff upper lip even in the face of tremendous
adversity. That the narrator views Patricia as “la fan por excelencia” (2010:
43), and that Patricia “tenía una altura aceptable” (2010: 44), are also
points of interesting comparison, given that Bachelet herself is a doctor and
 EXCEPTIONALISM, THE FEMALE BODY, AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE... 247

was positioned globally as an avatar of Chilean exceptionalism. In one of

the many disputes throughout the novel between the two protagonists—
anarchism is not for those who value easy agreeability30—the mother and
daughter fight over their admiration for Patricia. The mother prohibits the
daughter from acting like Patricia, whom the latter secretly admires, and
the daughter thinks that the mother, meanwhile, “quería, con más deses-
peración que yo, ser como mi prima Patricia y [yo] comprendía que por
eso lloraba y me ofendía y me gritaba” (Eltit 2010: 43). The clash between
the two protagonists about Patricia—whether to admire and emulate her
accession to official “fandom” and hegemony, or to reject official circles
altogether—is similar to that between the different currents of Chilean
feminism, in Castillo’s retelling, and between hegemonic and subaltern
figures in the public sphere, as described by Fraser. In any case, the clash
becomes moot when Patricia hangs herself (Eltit 2010: 44), which func-
tions to illustrate the toll that struggles with both state and anarchist forms
of biopower take on women overall. Patricia, once exceptional as a woman
able to both accommodate herself to the whims of the “doctors” and
also be admired by (at least some) women, is disavowed in death by the
protagonists: “Qué se habrá creído ahora,” comments the mother; “capaz
que nos relacionen con ella … y si lo hacen, ellos, los médicos, van a per-
judicar varios de nuestros órganos” (Eltit 2010: 45). For the mother and
daughter, and evidently for Patricia as well, there is no way for a woman to
serve as the ideal figure of state projects of exceptionalism without being
devastated by the complicity that ensues.
When Bachelet, as health minister in 2000, was given the (impossible)
task of eliminating the long lines to see doctors at Chile’s public hospitals
in three months, it was another case in which the country’s develop-
ment goals were figured in the terms of medicalized, vulnerable bodies
waiting for state authorities to make pronouncements about their prog-
nosis. In this case, however, a woman was primarily responsible for how
long these bodies would be waiting, and although Bachelet was unable
to completely eliminate the lines to see doctors, she did reduce them
notably (Politzer 37–40). In Impuesto a la carne, this waiting has been
going on for 200 years, and encompasses all women in pain over Chilean
history, including Caffarena and Mistral, as Eltit points out. This wait-
ing is a painful process, but one whose unfinished nature points to the
potentiality of what will happen when it ends: confrontation, and then
death, or liberation (recovery), and the end of subjection to masculinist
discourses that control bodies. Bachelet’s work to end the lines, albeit
248 C. FISCHER

not entirely successful, still stood out: she gained the exceptional stature
that eventually propelled her to the presidency. In Impuesto a la carne,
however, the suicide of cousin Patricia, Bachelet’s fictional counterpart,
signals Eltit's pessimism regarding the possibility for women to resolve
the painfully nagging issues of Chile’s inequality by allying themselves
with the doctors/forefathers that have long defended the country’s male,
economically “stable” discourse of exceptionalism. For Eltit, anarchist
feminism—another current of Chilean history, long relegated to the
background but engaged in a “pregnant” wait of potentiality—is the only
way for women to combat the exclusions of Chile’s exceptionalism, both
in the country’s public sphere and also (given Eltit’s extensive global
readership31) abroad.

DISCURSO: BACHELET’S BODY, DISAVOWED?

The playwright Guillermo Calderón premiered the play Discurso in tandem
with another play, Villa, in January 2011. In Villa, three women debate
different proposals to turn Villa Grimaldi, a site where many Chileans
(including Michelle Bachelet and her mother, Ángela Jeria) were tortured,
into a memory site. Discurso, meanwhile, takes the form of a hypothetical
speech given by Bachelet at the end of her first term: a meditation on her
role in re-signifying Chile’s dictatorial past—she had inaugurated Chile’s
Museum of Memory and Human Rights in 2010, which complements the
memory work practiced at Villa Grimaldi—as well as on her figure overall.
In keeping with the issue of monumentality and memory, Villa+Discurso,
as the two works were called together, premiered at Calle Londres no.
38 in Santiago, a house used for torture under the dictatorship and since
then turned into a cultural center and memory site. From there, the two
plays were performed at a number of memory sites in Chile and around
the world, in a sort of Deleuzian nomadism.32 Resisting fixity—not only
that of institutionally conventional “historical” discourse, but also of
exclusively subjective, affective approaches to the past—is a key aspect of
memory studies as a field, and Villa+Discurso, like Calderón’s other plays,
have been read primarily as interventions in Chile’s complex, ongoing
debate about historical memory. It is no coincidence that Elizabeth Jelin
(2003) refers to memory debates in terms that indicate the multi-layered
imbrication of the subjective and the collective. These debates, for Jelin,
deal with “the construction of social identities in the context of meaning-
ful action, and the active and productive role of individual and collective
 EXCEPTIONALISM, THE FEMALE BODY, AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE... 249

subjects” (48), as well as “the search for objectivity combined with ethi-
cal and affective commitments” (50) and the ways in which bodies “are
actively involved in the processes of symbolic transformation and elabora-
tion of meanings of the past” (5).33 The convergences, in memory studies,
of discourse and the body, of the “discipline” of history and more rebel-
lious subjectivities, and of the collective and the individual, are performed
throughout both Villa and Discurso. The slogan “Lo que sucedió en esta
casa sucedió también fuera de ella. El terrorismo de estado operó sobre
el conjunto del país” written above where the play’s three actresses on
stage, inside Londres 38, reminded all present of the stakes for the entire
nation of what had happened in that space; the three actresses themselves
brought about an important focus on the individual and collective bodies
that had witnessed the horrors of Chile’s dictatorship. Accordingly, many
critics of the two plays, such as Paola Hernández (2013), Joanne Pottlitzer
(2013), and Flávia Resende (2013), have, perhaps not surprisingly, placed
Villa+Discurso at the intersection of institutionally sanctioned discourses
and individual mourning inherent to memory studies.
Here, however, I will focus on Discurso, to argue that Bachelet’s claims
to exceptionalism in her “speech” are what open up new possibilities for
examining the crossroads, in memory studies, of individual and collec-
tive “discourses.”34 Over the course of Villa, each of the three actresses
puts on, at different moments, a sash like the one traditionally worn by
Bachelet and other Chilean presidents—and by the many women celebrat-
ing Bachelet’s election, as Richard pointed out—so that they have taken
on aspects of Bachelet’s persona by the time Discurso begins. When giv-
ing Bachelet’s speech, which Pottlitzer calls a “poem” (57), the actresses
stand and face the audience throughout, and in speaking the lines, they
alternate amongst themselves seemingly at random, since there are no
stage directions indicating which actress speaks which section. The play
focuses many debates about Chilean memory onto one exceptional figure,
Michelle Bachelet’s, even as it simultaneously disavows the presence of her
actual body. In fact, the three actresses speaking her lines, as well as the
centrality of the playwright’s words in the action,35 give a new dimension
to what she means (they mean) when talking as if someone were taking
over her body: “Siento que tengo que decir ciertas verdades. Y dejar mi
tono compasivo. […] No sé. Pero sí sé que estoy fuera de carácter. Es
como si otra persona me estuviera suplantando. Como si alguien estuviera
poniendo palabras en mi boca. Como que un oportunista se aprovechara
de mi cuerpo” (Calderón 74). Not only does Calderón follow through
250 C. FISCHER

with his professed interest in going beyond Bachelet’s legendarily disci-

plined, controlled public façade to get at the truths of her person and
her government36; he does so in such a way as to point out the extent
to which Bachelet is not her own person, and is in fact inseparable from,
and beholden to, the people she represents (Hernández 78). In the play,
Bachelet is an individual, but when multiple actresses speak her words, we
are reminded that what she says is always also taken to represent larger
institutions, constituencies, and movements—the Concertación, Chile’s
institutional apparatus of history and memory, Chilean people, Chilean
women, and/or the Left. Discurso performs the complexities of what hap-
pens when so many of Chile’s collective discourses are projected onto the
exceptional figure (and body) of Bachelet, who is an exemplary vessel in
which the hopes and dreams of those discourses are deposited, even as she
also evades and stands apart from them by guarding her persona so much.
In the apocryphal frankness of the text, she is able to parse over, in a way
she was never able to actually do as president, the contradictions inherent
not only to her own exceptionalism, but also to her political party’s para-
doxical brand of neoliberal socialism, and to the idea of feminists seeking
power within Chile’s patriarchal mainstream.
In Discurso, Bachelet is aware that others see her as exceptional, and
indeed the rhetoric of exceptionalism pervades the text throughout.37
Toward the end of the play, she talks about her own response to the pain
of the dictatorship: one can bear grudges, exact revenge, “[o] una puede
hacer lo que hice yo misma. Convertirme en Presidenta de la República.
En la primera mujer. En la primera de papá asesinado. En la primera presi-
denta comprensiva. En la primera presidenta torturada. O no torturada. Sí
sé. Esta historia es como para escribir una tragedia. Pero los dramaturgos
no están a la altura de esta historia” (Calderón 107). This passage makes a
number of interesting discursive moves: it refers to the fact that Bachelet
never revealed, during her first presidency, whether or not she had actu-
ally been tortured while at Villa Grimaldi38; it talks about the exceptional
status of Bachelet, who broke ground for women in so many ways; and it
makes a backhanded reference to the playwright, who “deftly” (Pottlitzer
62) deprecates himself as he criticizes the president. I contend that her
vacillation here—and the fact that she withheld the details about her tor-
ture for so long—is evidence of the ways in which Bachelet had to navigate
between her own individual experience and the experiences of so many
others who suffered, directly or by association, the repression of the dic-
tatorship. The fact that this vacillation comes at the heels of a recitation of
 EXCEPTIONALISM, THE FEMALE BODY, AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE... 251

the different dimensions of her exceptionalism (as the first woman presi-
dent, the first “empathetic” president, etc.) is telling. Revealing her exact
experiences would have meant that fewer people would identify with her,
so she paradoxically kept her own experiences a secret in order to sustain
her position as exemplary of as many individual experiences (and represen-
tative of as many constituencies) as possible. In fact, she mentions multiple
times her awareness of the extent to which people project so many of their
(often undefined) aspirations onto her: “Me eligieron para … darse un
gusto. Para ser felices por un rato. Para que les amasara un pan con sabor
a justicia. Para ver mi foto sonriendo en oficinas públicas” (Calderón 76).
Standing apart from her constituents in order to serve as a model to as
many of them as possible, Bachelet’s exceptionalism depended on certain
things remaining vague and unrevealed.
The contradictory position that Bachelet maintained to retain her sta-
tus as exceptional—remaining hermetic about her own memories, aspira-
tions, and political stances while simultaneously serving as the repository
for the memories, aspirations, and political stances of millions—meant
that there were a number of ambiguities that plagued her first presidency.
In an attempt to appeal to as many people as possible, Bachelet had to
be cryptic about what she believed, who she was, and what her experi-
ences had been, and Calderón’s text calls attention to much of this vague-
ness. To what extent does Bachelet embody the hopes of the righteous,
unyielding leftism represented by the “immortal” figure of Allende, and
to what extent is she beholden to (or even thankful for) the limits that
Chile’s capitalist institutional structure imposed onto her? In Discurso, she
insists multiple times on the self-righteousness of the Left, which has “otra
ética” (Calderón 92) and is so figuratively willing to turn the other cheek
that it has “como cuarenta mejillas. En mil años vamos a ser religión”
(Calderón 105). At the same time, however, she resists the unproblematic
identification of herself with leftism, pointing out the privilege of her own
upbringing (Calderón 83) and refusing to call her interlocutors “traba-
jadores de mi patria” (Calderón 75), the way Allende would have. When
is she being frank, and when is she censuring herself? For example, does
she consider the USA “insufferable in Latin America” and “violent,” or
does she prefer to “tenerlos como amigos” (Calderón 91)? After men-
tioning both her sympathies with anti-capitalist anarchists (Calderón
101) and her insistence that Mapuche separatists (whose anarchism is just
as anti-capitalist) deserve nothing less than police repression (Calderón
103–104), she admits: “Soy un poco inconsistente con mi discurso justici-
252 C. FISCHER

ero. Espera. Espera. No. Lo que acabo de decir … Son cosas que creo y
no creo. Que pienso y no pienso. Quizás en el futuro cambie de discurso.
Pero ahora que lo pienso, estas cosas no las pienso” (Calderón 104). How
much of what people want to see in her, or think they see in her, does she
actually believe, and how much of it is projection? She refuses to say, and
the fact that there is no one actress onstage who says all of these contradic-
tory things is an incisive way to illustrate this simultaneous evasiveness and
universality. The apocryphal Bachelet resists being pinned down, so as to
continue to be figured as representative of all.
These ambiguities are related to overall debates in Chile about wom-
en’s participation in (or dissidence from) the public sphere. When Chile’s
exceptionalistic economic “model” is exclusively embodied and adminis-
tered by men, there is less awareness of the fact that women are dispro-
portionately affected by efforts to sustain that model; ideally, women like
Bachelet enter the country’s public sphere to remedy that. Work to resolve
this issue often takes the form of a greater awareness of the neglected and
often overworked bodies, particularly those of women, involved in prop-
ping up the country’s macroeconomic indicators. In Discurso, Bachelet
expresses some awareness of how often the country’s image of exceptional
economic success depends on violence against the bodies of the poor, the
vulnerable, and particularly women, both during and after the dictatorship:

Me preocupan más los crímenes en contra del cuerpo. […] El silencio de

las víctimas. La vulgaridad a gritos. Las malas palabras. La incultura de los
hombres. Los insultos de patrones. […] Las mujeres con ojos negros. Las
mujeres con lentes oscuros. Las mujeres violadas en el bosque. Las mujeres
violadas entre la cocina y el baño. Todos esos son crímenes en contra de mi
cuerpo. O no. (Calderón 98–99)

If this could be unambiguously read as Bachelet connecting her own expe-

riences of torture to those of other vulnerable Chileans, it could allow
for more inclusiveness in the country’s public policies: Bachelet would
be acknowledging and empathizing with the corporeal nature of the eco-
nomic and physical violence that sustains Chile’s model economy in a way
that the heterosexual, cisgender men who had run the country before her
simply could not. On the other hand, however, Bachelet’s oblique, vague
way of referring to her own bodily experiences, both here and elsewhere
in Discurso, can also be read as deference to, and willingness to negoti-
ate with, the bourgeois, neoliberal structures that ensured economic and
 EXCEPTIONALISM, THE FEMALE BODY, AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE... 253

political exclusions in Chile. Interpreted in this way, Bachelet is simply

putting a female face on the same masculinist exceptionalism Chile has
always had, and opens up a power vacuum for other social movements to
the left of her—student movements, the Mapuches, more radical feminists
from CUDS, and others—to remedy the country’s exclusions. She states,
toward the end of the play, that “[e]l cuerpo resiste cualquier cosa. Y
convierte violaciones en experiencia. Y la experiencia en enseñanza. Y la
enseñanza en dolor moral. Y el dolor moral se convierte, con el tiempo,
en suspiro relajado en la playa junto al lago” (Calderón 109). Remarking
upon her own resilience in the face of tremendous adversity—one of the
main characteristics that have distinguished her as such an exceptional fig-
ure in Chile—Bachelet points out how bodily trauma can be transcended
(for her, at least) into some degree of inner peace. Whether or not the
trauma she herself experienced was shattering enough for her to truly be
able to understand the traumas that some of her constituents experienced,
however, remains unknown, even as (or, so that) those constituents con-
tinue to identify with her. In the end, then, whether her body is truly able
to reflect the trauma of so many Chileans becomes the question upon
which the continuity, or rupture, of Chile’s exclusive brand of exception-
alism—as well as the extent of the exclusions practiced by Chile’s public
sphere—balances.
To date, Bachelet has never attended a performance of Villa+Discurso,
but her mother, who did, stated that her daughter “‘would like it because
it has humor’” (Pottlitzer 62): a typically restrained, guarded answer that
skirts having to actually engage with the complex issues treated in the play.
This refusal, by Bachelet’s mother, to address (let alone answer) the ques-
tions asked about her in the play forms a neat parallel with both the play’s
disavowal of Bachelet’s exceptional figure (by designating three actresses
to represent her) and also the refusal, in the speech itself, to definitively
affirm the experience of torture under dictatorship. The play concludes
that her tightly controlled public persona—which forms the bedrock of
her ability to be seen as an exceptional leader both in Chile’s public sphere
and abroad, as I have argued—can disintegrate in the face of events out-
side of her control. Discurso thus ends just as Bachelet’s first term ended:
with an earthquake, in which the lights go out, glasses break onto the
floor, and all the audience can see is the “tintinear” of the red lights inside
the windows of the model of Villa Grimaldi that has remained onstage
since Villa (Calderón 110). The 8.8-magnitude quake, and subsequent
tsunami, that rocked Chile on February 27, 2010—when Bachelet had
254 C. FISCHER

just 12 days remaining in office—was one final way in which she had to
face tremendous adversity amidst state and military authorities, mostly
men, whom Politzer figures as paralyzed “en sus asientos como si fueran
los principales víctimas, [mirando] estupefactos a la mandataria sin ser de
ninguna utilidad” (Politzer 290). Once again, Bachelet was exceptional in
that she was one of the few authorities not to be immobilized in her chair
by the sheer scope of the damage, but rather to respond quickly (con-
sidering the circumstances) to the disaster. In her second term in office,
she has been faced with further impediments: corruption charges against
many of her close political collaborators, including her son; another huge
earthquake in 2015; and a global economic slowdown that has limited
her budgetary ability to institute further social protections. The question
remains as to whether her ability to respond to these issues—some uncon-
trollable, some not—is helped, or hindered, by her own self-discipline.
This question, rooted in her body, is one that will have implications for
years to come in the debate about whether the best way for women to
effect change in the spheres of Chilean power is to join them or to dis-
mantle them.

LA CERDA PUNK: FEMINIST PUNK WILL NEVER DIE(T)

Constanzx Álvarez’s treatise La cerda punk: Ensayos desde un feminismo
gordo, lésbiko, antikapitalista & antiespecista (2014)—part theory, part
personal essay, part citational compilation of a transnational network of
like-minded queer thinkers—is written from the perspective of a radically
dissident, anarchist counterpublic within Chile. In it, Álvarez shifts the con-
versation about feminism currently underway in Chile: instead of focusing
on Michelle Bachelet as a way of discussing the place of the female body in
Chile’s official discourse, Álvarez’s version of feminism questions essential-
ized notions of femininity, rejects the idea of moderate inclusion of women
in the public sphere as complicit with neoliberalism, and critiques Chile’s
exceptionalist image in the world as an inherently colonialist ideal. Without
ever mentioning Bachelet by name, La cerda punk condemns the normativ-
ity required of women seeking to be either included in the public sphere
at home or as the avatars of Chilean exceptionalism abroad. As opposed to
Calderón’s Bachelet in Discurso, whose confounding opaqueness is figured
as key to her ability to represent as many people as she did, Álvarez imposes
her own singular specificity as overweight, anti-capitalist, anti-speciesist,39
and queer. Indeed, she takes exception to almost every possible “public”
 EXCEPTIONALISM, THE FEMALE BODY, AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE... 255

in the public sphere, as the title of her text suggests: she practically dares
her readership not to identify with her. Álvarez asks about the possibility
of a feminism marked by negative affects: a feminism not only “without
women” (as CUDS members have proposed), but without any democratic
or university institutions whatsoever, or even “liberation.”40 At the same
time, however, in a more positive move, the text repeatedly calls for the cre-
ation of a community of similarly excluded bodies. In fact, Álvarez imag-
ines this community to be structured around gender theory: “Empecé a
notar que existía teoría de las tortas, de las maricas, de lo queer y empecé a
dejar de sentirme sola, a encontrar un espacio tanto de enunciación como
de pertenencia, reuniones de lecturas en cafés, talleres … conversatorios,
movimientos, redes” (Álvarez 163). Indeed, Álvarez figures theory as
the very thing that alleviates her feelings of exclusion in Chile. Her text
reflects thusly an internal tension similar to the one surrounding feminism
in Bachelet’s Chile: the question of whether or not to work within the
terms of official discourse to include women (even if it means some degree
of accommodation to the exclusive terms of exceptionalism and the public
sphere) is analogous to the debate in Álvarez’s text between a suspicion of
any identitarian affiliations whatsoever and an embrace of what we might
call the transnational subaltern counterpublic of theory.
Throughout La cerda punk, Álvarez positions her fatness—overexposed,
inherently public, “ungovernable,” and thus anarchic (12)—as a position
from which to critique other exclusionary disciplinary modes in Chile.
These disciplinary modes—an important part of exceptionalism, as we have
seen, as well as of the public sphere, as Fraser has shown41—order and
repress bodies deemed sexually dissident, non-compliant with capital, out-
side of the binary grammatical auspices of gender provided by the Spanish
language (thus the use of the x in her first name, and later, calling her body
a cuerpa42), or too indigenous-looking. In response, Álvarez’s text inaugu-
rates its defiant rhetoric with a “Manifesto Gordx,” in which she and the
manifesto’s co-author Samuel Hidalgo/Salmuera stake out their position
at the intersection of bodily, economic, sexual, and linguistic difference:

Nosotrxs proclamamos;/Que ante todo reconstruiremos nuestras vidas

desde lo que somos,/lo que molesta,/el desborde del(a) chanchx que si
desea vivir./Somos golosxs y tentadxs,/puro eros vuelto placer por la buena
mesa y las bacanadas./Nos gusta el calor que brinda la grasa en esos días de
invierno./Y ante una cultura del recato,/la buena presencia y el ser ubica-
ditx,/nosotrxs somos las trincheras del fascismo/dictadura de la piel. (29)
256 C. FISCHER

Fatness (gordura) is the uniting thread throughout the entire text: a

visual manifestation of sexual and culinary appetites that pose a political,
aesthetic, and economic challenge to the ordered public sphere. Fatness
causes mala presencia, the opposite of “good presence,” a quality often
listed as a prerequisite for applicants in Chilean employment postings that
often has racial, ethnic, and class undertones. Álvarez figures fatness as
what sets her apart from the public sphere (literally “dislocating” herself,
by refusing to be ubicada), leading her down a path of resistance. Even
the materiality of the text—published outside of Santiago, traditionally the
center of Chile’s editorial and cultural world, and auto-gestionado—resists
institutionality, calling instead, on the copyright page, for its own “libre
circulación, distribución, copia, hackeo, pirateo, distribución de la obra
por cualquier medio físico, visual, verbal, gráfico, tecnológico” and repu-
diating “cualquier intento de lucro y apropiación del conocimiento” (2).
As Eltit points out, in one of the only critical texts written about La cerda
punk so far, it is a text “producido desde ‘lo local’, muy valioso, que tran-
sita entre lo experiencial, el manifiesto y el acopio teórico” (2014: 2). In
this sense, La cerda punk practices queerness both in form and in content:
it critiques the underlying presumptions of heterosexuality at the base of
Chile’s public sphere and its exceptionalism abroad, and it evades attempts
by official discourse—governments, capital, universities who would profit
from knowledge43—to “discipline” either Álvarez or the text itself into any
facile sexual or academic category. La cerda punk implies that the feminism
of the contemporary, liberal democratic Chilean public sphere—calculated
to appeal to as many people as possible—is useless to those like Álvarez,
whose beliefs (and bodies) are too dissident to be represented in official
discourse. She insists on her own exclusion from the “sistema de vigorosi-
dad, fortaleza, fecundación y fuerza (de trabajo y militar)” (30) of Chile’s
public sphere and discourse of exceptionalism, as they stand, despite the
moderate feminism to which they subscribe under Bachelet.
Álvarez’s text falls short of taking exception to the idea of a public
sphere, however; her rhetoric cries out over and over for the creation of
counterpublics along feminist, queer, and transnational lines, based on her
own visibility as an overweight, sexually dissident woman. Like the motif
of women putting on Bachelet’s presidential sash—figured by Richard as
a gesture of visibility, as we have seen—Álvarez insists on the visibility of
her own body to both defy standards of female beauty allied with capital
and generate alliances with others who experience similar exclusions. She
describes public displays of her overweight body—using “faldas muy cor-
 EXCEPTIONALISM, THE FEMALE BODY, AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE... 257

tas o shorcitos, con panties de red, tacones enormes, vestidos apretados

y brillantes, guantes estilos Michael Jackson, leggings metálicos, poleras
fluor” (95)—to attract attention for political purposes. In this way, her
“[e]xhibición como ejercicio político, desarticulación de lo cotidiano”
(95) creates alliances with gay men, who “quedaban deslumbradas con mis
trajes y brillos” (96), and with “la movida trans*,” since her self-display
made her feel “más travesti que mujer. Mi cuerpa monstruosa adornada
no era bonita, era un chiste, objeto de burla, de ridiculización, como las
travestis. No era travesti, claro está, no tengo las mismas opresiones ni la
misma historia, pero mi afinidad comenzó a construirse desde ahí” (101).
Álvarez imagines her place in the public sphere as one of visibility—on her
own terms, and on those of others whose physical appearances and politi-
cal beliefs render them excluded from Chile’s official discourse—without
the fear of being physically endangered.44
Álvarez’s ideal counterpublic extends beyond Chile, as well: La cerda
punk energetically mediates the reception in Chile of radical queer and
feminist thinking from all over the world, discussing an archive of thinking
from Europe, the USA, and throughout Latin America. By citing thinkers
such as bell hooks, Itziar Ziga, Deleuze and Guattari, Yuderkys Espinosa,
Audre Lorde, Bikini Kill, Beatriz (Paul) Preciado, Aníbal Quijano, and
Néstor Perlongher, Álvarez places Chile within this transnational network
in a way that is not complicit with exceptionalism. Álvarez’s affiliations
with the anti-colonial discourse of many of these thinkers is a way of mak-
ing her own work more intelligible (“cosmopolitan,” pace Jacqueline Loss
(2005), or visible, pace Richard) to new audiences, without having to talk
about the comparative advantage of Chile to sell its wares, or itself, on
the world stage. La cerda punk does have some similarities to the previ-
ous works examined in this chapter, then, since it employs tactics aimed
at broadening the public sphere like the ones employed by more moder-
ate feminists like Bachelet—including that of critiquing Chilean society
as exclusively structured around certain normative bodies. But it differs
from the others by turning its back on the idea of Chilean exceptionalism,
which Álvarez considers an inherently colonialist enterprise, equating the
imposition of European standards of beauty on the people “chosen” to
embody that exceptionalism with the Conquest, which obligated “a lxs
colonizadxs a formar parte de la cultura dominante” (185).
This tension, in La cerda punk, between critiquing and expanding
Chile’s public sphere, is characteristic of the tension inherent to subal-
tern counterpublics, as outlined by Fraser. Indeed, Álvarez moves between
258 C. FISCHER

broadening the discursive space of Chile’s public sphere and retreating

from it in the way that Fraser describes:

On the one hand, they function as spaces of withdrawal and regroupment;

on the other hand, they also function as bases and training grounds for agi-
tational activities directed toward wider publics. It is precisely in the dialectic
between these two functions that their emancipatory potential resides. This
dialectic enables subaltern counterpublics to partially offset, not although
wholly to eradicate, the unjust participatory privileges enjoyed by members
of dominant social groups in stratified societies. (Fraser 68)

For Álvarez, the space within this dialectic is key to the place of her text,
and her own identity, in Chile’s democratic debate. Can she be a feminist
without being complicit in the normative sorts of feminism most visible
in Chile’s public sphere? If she instead defines herself as “queer,” will this
truly turn her away from that sort of normativity, or will she end up affiliat-
ing herself with a category whose political cachet is less charged when used
locally in Chile,45 such that those who subscribe to it find no contradic-
tion in “ser queer y apoyar a una candidata presidencial” at the same time
(168)? In the end, she leaves this tension unresolved: on one hand, she
defines herself in the public space as “lesbiana y feminista … y fui capaz de
percibir lo que esto provocaba en la gente, [lo que] me pareció mucho más
potente que decirme ‘queer’” (178). On the other, however, she insists
on some lack of definition, in the form of “lxs cuerpxs en lucha, inteli-
gentes, pensantes, mutantes” (164): bodies in the process of Deleuzian
“becomings,” as Perlongher (1997) outlined in one of the earliest texts in
Latin American gender theory. In the end, for Álvarez, the female body
is figured at the center of larger debates about the inclusivity of subaltern
subjects, both in Chile’s public sphere and in its international discourse.
Bachelet, never mentioned by name in La cerda punk, nonetheless can be
partially credited with opening up the public sphere in a moderate enough
way to create space for new protests—not just by Álvarez and other queer
people, but also by indigenous, student, and labor constituencies.

CONCLUSION: THE FEMALE BODY

Michelle Bachelet has several more years left in office, and if her previous
record of governing is any indication, she will continue to enact moder-
ate, piecemeal changes to make Chile’s public sphere a more humane,
 EXCEPTIONALISM, THE FEMALE BODY, AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE... 259

inclusive place. The fine line she has walked, between appeasing Chile’s
Right-wing poderes fácticos and introducing measures of equality, has so far
left the neoliberal underpinnings that justify the country’s economically
exceptional image of itself in the world largely unchallenged. The phallic
Costanera Tower remains standing (albeit mostly empty46), projecting the
appearance of neoliberal stability. Yet the middling form of feminism that
Bachelet has legitimated in Chile’s public sphere—such as the short-lived
gender parity of her cabinet—has led to more radical cries for economic
equality in a country where, as Eltit has pointed out, “el protagonismo
de las operaciones político-financieras caen y recaen sobre el cuerpo de
las mujeres,” since “el cuerpo es, entre otros imperativos, una sede de
negocios … mediante modelos que resultan rentables y que se fundan en
el ámbito de una deseada, estereotipada perfección” (2014: 2). The fact
that protests by disenfranchised groups have proliferated since Bachelet’s
first election, including those of CUDS activists like Álvarez, indicates that
the floodgates have opened for new ways to think about how sexually
dissident bodies can question the exceptionalism (the “desired, stereo-
typed perfection” that Eltit mentions) of the Chilean economy on equally
transnational terms, while also broadening its public sphere at home.
The ongoing struggle between official discourses and the dissident bod-
ies excluded by them—the overall focus of this book—has lately taken
place in a way that places the female body at its center. In this sense,
when Álvarez quotes the Chilean travesti Claudia Rodríguez’s identifica-
tion with the cinematic death of King Kong after his climb up the Empire
State Building (incidentally, another piece of phallic architecture)—“supe
que era a mí a quien la industria estaba matando, [porque] no se puede ser
tan grande, tan fea y vivir en el centro de la ciudad” (7)—it is possible to
imagine, albeit in a surreal mode, new ways in which queer female bodies
can battle with the oppressive structures represented literally by the neo-
liberal Costanera.

NOTES
1. A poll conducted by the Centro de Opinión Pública (CEP) named
Bachelet as the principal leader of the Chilean political system in
June 2010, an indicator (for Politzer, at least (301)) of the success
of her government. For more information, see http://www.cep-
chile.cl/dms/archivo_4640_2791/EncuestaCEP_Jun-Jul2010.
pdf.
260 C. FISCHER

2. For more information, see Politzer’s chapter on this topic, entitled

“Gobernar es proteger,” as well as http://www.chilesolidario.gob.
cl/red/red1.php.
3. For more information about some of these protests and the ideas
behind them, see, for example, Podemos cambiar el mundo (2012),
written by student leader Camila Vallejo Dowling, and Esa ruca
llamada Chile (2014), by Pedro Cayuqueo.
4. See, for example, Alejandra Castillo’s meditation (2011b) on the
“politics of care” (políticas de cuidado), which she posits as being
“al servicio de un esquema patriarcal de la familia que modela y
organiza los roles, las maneras, y hasta las transgresiones del ‘ser
mujer’. Destaquemos que estas políticas confían en la certeza de un
cuerpo, en la marca definitoria del cuerpo femenino que es incor-
porado como diferencia al espacio público/político. Como sabe-
mos, esta incorporación ocurre bajo la forma de la maternidad y el
cuidado, reintroduciendo así nuevamente argumentos ‘privados’
para hablar de la mujer en lo ‘publico’” (13). Fraser, too, notes
that “even after women and workers have been formally licensed to
participate [in the public sphere], their participation may be
hedged by conceptions of economic privacy and domestic privacy
that delimit the scope of debate. These notions, therefore, are
vehicles through which gender and class continue to and even dis-
advantages may operate subtextually and informally, after explicit,
formal restrictions have been rescinded” (73–74).
5. This took place in an August 2005 interview with the newspaper
La Tercera during Bachelet’s first campaign. Eyzaguirre later apol-
ogized profusely in response to Bachelet’s expressions of public
annoyance with what he said: http://www.emol.com/noticias/
nacional/2005/08/22/192982/eyzaguirre-le-pide-disculpas-a--
bachelet-por-llamarla-mi-gordi.html. It is worth pointing out that
he remains, to date, one of Bachelet’s closest collaborators and
oldest friends; in her second administration he served as Education
Minister and Minister of the Presidency (Secretaría General de la
Presidencia).
6. Politzer has commented on Bachelet’s “mysterious” style (301):
she gives few interviews, her strict demands for loyalty among her
collaborators mean few leaks to the press about her interior life and
the mechanisms of her decision-making processes, and despite a
reputation early on for being “spontaneous” and “transparent” as
 EXCEPTIONALISM, THE FEMALE BODY, AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE... 261

a citizen, friend, and colleague (43), she has proven over time to be
quite the opposite as a public figure. This may be due to her train-
ing in militant leftist techniques of information management,
secrecy, and hierarchy while in exile in East Germany, or the fact
that she is the daughter of an Air Force general—a proximity to
this military ethos continued after her return to Chile, where she
studied military strategy first at Chile’s Academia Nacional de
Estudios Políticos y Estratégicos and then at the US Inter-American
Defense College, whereupon she was named Defense Minister.
7. Politzer has commented on how “la disciplina y la obediencia al
mando forman parte de su esencia” (63), and Eltit states that
“Bachelet es una mujer disciplinada según lo entiende Foucault,
modelada por el racionalismo y capaz de transitar el sobresalto de
los poderes, conservando estratégicamente el más absoluto respeto
por las jerarquías” (2008: 131).
8. The lawyer Jorge Huneeus, for example, held the contrarian view
that women had “una serie de deberes verdaderamente incompat-
ibles con el ejercicio activo de la ciudadanía” (quoted in Castillo
2005: 19), and as such, they were excluded from active citizen-
ship—not just the vote, but also the workplace protections and
other democratic rights that men were guaranteed under the
constitution.
9. Luis Emilio Recabarren, whose newspaper El Despertar de los
Trabajadores published a number of editorials in favor of women’s
rights in the early twentieth century, stimulated women to orga-
nize and fight for their emancipation (Caffarena 112); he was aided
in this work by the Spanish-born activist Belén de Sárraga, who
visited Chile in 1913 and 1915. In 1917, the educator Amanda
Labarca advocated for schooling in Chile without regard to gen-
der, “alejada de los designios maternalistas que confinarían a las
mujeres al calor demasiado abrasador del hogar” (Castillo 2005:
26), and she later advocated for the female vote, as did Elena
Caffarena, whose suffragist battle was finally won in 1949. Gabriela
Mistral’s contributions to the Chilean public sphere also warrant
mention, though Licia Fiol-Matta (2002, 2014) has pointed out
the extent to which the Chilean state sought to police and regulate
Mistral’s public role, particularly since the country’s image abroad
was gendered in a way that divided sex roles into neat binaries that
Mistral problematized. Julieta Kirkwood’s book Ser política en
262 C. FISCHER

Chile (1986), written under the dictatorship, is also a seminal text

in Chilean feminist thought, positing the idea of feminism as an
oppositional tactic to authoritarianism. Stating that resistance can
only take place when the rigid distinctions between masculine and
feminine can be broken down, Kirkwood also affirms the need for
women to participate in the public sphere.
10. Although I am wary of the risk of erasing the cultural specificities
of Chilean and North Atlantic feminism(s) when placing them into
dialogue with one another, the strategic alliance here of shared
histories of oppression—one already long constructed by Richard—
will allow me to theorize and critique Chile’s phallocentrism in the
global context of its exceptionalist thought. For more information
about the tensions, and promises, inherent to global feminist
thinking, see Chandra Mohanty’s work (2003). Mohanty recog-
nizes that the “very notion of addressing what are often internally
conflictual histories of Third World women’s feminisms under a
single rubric … may seem ludicrous” (46), due to the vast class
divides among women in the global south. She addresses this issue
by drawing lines among women with common struggles against
patriarchy and class domination: “imagined communities of
women with divergent histories and social locations, woven
together by the political threads of opposition to forms of domina-
tion” (46–47).
11. See, for example, Rivas’ article “Diga ‘queer’ con la lengua afuera:
Sobre las confusiones del debate latinoamericano” (2011), in
which he debates between lo queer as a neocolonial (and linguistic)
imposition onto Latin America from the metropolitan, Euro–
American debate about sexual difference, but also as a potentially
liberating theoretical tool if used judiciously. His article is a com-
panion piece to a March 2010 performance with the same title, in
which he repeatedly sticks out his tongue while pronouncing the
word queer, in order to illustrate the linguistic difficulties of trans-
lating an Anglo word into a foreign-language context. For a visual
registry of this performance, see http://www.feliperivas.
com/#!performance/vstc18=page-5/vstc13=performance-2010.
12. Rivas expresses his suspicion as much with the Chilean academy as
with the linguistic and ideological impositions onto Chile by the
North American and European academies. He cites Juan Pablo
Sutherland, who chose to call his introductory course on queer
 EXCEPTIONALISM, THE FEMALE BODY, AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE... 263

theory at the University of Chile “queer,” rather than “‘estudios

gay-lésbicos o estudios maricas,’” because this “‘ayudó a no sos-
pechar del curso … ya que todas esas denominaciones habrían pro-
vocado tensiones de animosa distracción, preguntas acerca de lo
academizable … y de las repercusiones institucionales de aquellos
saberes algo bastardos.’” Rivas questions why Sutherland would
choose to gloss over these tensions, questions, and repercussions,
“cuando son justamente esas … las que han vuelto a la ‘Queer
Theory’ un asunto tan fascinante y políticamente productivo”
(Rivas 68–69).
13. In this sense, Rivas cites the work of Judith Butler as a way to cri-
tique Richard: “la línea posfeminista de Butler lanzará duras críti-
cas al feminismo de la diferencia, acusado de esencializar el cuerpo
y lo femenino como si se encontraran antes o fuera de cualquier
acto de significación cultural” (73, emphasis in original). Richard,
however, has admitted to the need for some degree of “differences
that employ ambiguity to internally fissure” gender binaries, work-
ing in an eternal tension with the need for feminism to maintain an
idea of femininity as a “practical (relational and situational)” iden-
tity (2008: 8; see my discussion of this in the introduction), and in
this sense, Rivas’ assertion that Richard is entirely invested in
essentializing femininity seems somewhat exaggerated. Eltit dis-
cusses this very same tension: “La noción polar en que se organiza
el concepto de género parece obsoleta debido al actual desborde
de las identidades. En cambio, los dispositivos contenidos en ese
primer feminismo igualitario … me parece más intenso, más pro-
ductivo y más político que la noción de género o más bien del
rumbo comercial y vacuo en que se ha cursado ese dispositivo”
(2008: 276). For Eltit, early feminism in Chile offers a non-
commercialized antidote to thinking about sexual dissidence when
“gender studies” have been colonized by oppressive power.
14. Jasbir Puar (2007) defines homonormativity as generally complicit
with exceptionalism in the sense that it sets apart a certain praxis of
homosexuality—often white, wealthy, and sanctioned within
nationalist discourse—as more desirable, market-friendly, and pub-
licly palatable. She then offers a number of examples of how homo-
normativity manifests itself, including in the forms of “normative
gay and lesbian human rights frames, which produce (in tandem
with gay tourism) gay-friendly and not-gay-friendly nations; the
264 C. FISCHER

queer ‘market virility’ that can simulate heteronormative paternity

through the purchase of reproductive technology; […] and market
accommodation that has fostered multibillion-dollar industries in
gay tourism, weddings, investment opportunities, and retirement”
(Puar xiv).
15. See Chap. 5 for more information about these organizations.
16. Since abortion has been illegal under all circumstances in Chile
since 1989, the issue of abortion rights has also been taken up by
the Bachelet administration to protect women’s autonomy. A law
decriminalizing abortion under three specific circumstances (rape,
to save a woman’s life, and fetal unviability) is, as of late 2016, still
under legislative discussion; see http://3causales.gob.cl/. CUDS
members have also made abortion rights a focus of their art actions
not only as a way to protect women, but also as a way of making
queer, non-reproductive sexual praxis the center of their “sexual
dissidence”: in one performance, they followed a longstanding
practice in Chile of soliciting donations from car passengers
stopped at red lights, the way firefighters do, but this time asking
people to donate and support women’s “illegal abortions”; in
another, they unfolded a banner in public proclaiming “el derecho
a no nacer” (see http://hysteria.mx/el-artivismo-de-la-cuds-y-su-
campana-dona-por-un-aborto-ilegal/ and http://disidenciasex-
ual.tumblr.com/post/43572200550/el-derecho-a-no-nacer).
17. This also has to do with Bachelet’s particular experience as a victim
of dictatorship: these other emergent citizen and identity-based
groups, and their cultural production, have affiliated their strug-
gles with the struggle against the dictatorship, in a way reminiscent
of Marianne Hirsch’s idea of “postmemory” (2012): a “connection
to the past … mediated not by recall but by imaginative invest-
ment, projection, and creation” (5).
18. Scarry writes primarily about torture, which is not the focus of my
analysis here, but her focus on “recovering voice” can be extended
beyond being “a key in the battle to deprive torture of its political
legitimacy and to make its horror visible,” as Idelber Avelar (2004)
has explained (30–31), such that it serves as a way for women to
recover their voices in other contexts in which pain is inflicted
upon their bodies.
19. This word refers to MEMCH, the Movimiento Pro-Emancipación
de las Mujeres de Chile, an organization that lasted from 1935 to
 EXCEPTIONALISM, THE FEMALE BODY, AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE... 265

1953, and advocated for equal access for women and men to legal
rights and the labor market. Caffarena, Olga Poblete, Marta
Vergara, and Graciela Mandujano were all leaders of this
organization.
20. It is also a way to trace the recent history of Chile, so marked by
emblematic physicians like Allende and Bachelet, particularly when
the narrator describes a hospital “que ya demolieron hace muchos
años … lavando así la integridad médica que se vio severamente
horadada sobre la camilla donde mi madre casi se desangra por la
patología viciosa de ese médico incapaz” (Eltit 2010: 21). This is
likely a reference to the Ochagavía Hospital, which began con-
struction under the UP and was never finished, standing half-built
as a monument to Allende’s government’s dreams for social assis-
tance, later dashed by Pinochet.
21. Another social protest in Chilean history possibly gave the novel its
title, according to Niebylski: in October 1905, “as many as 40,000
disaffected working and middle class bodies demonstrated in front
of the Palacio de la Moneda … voicing their opposition to the
artificially inflated price of meat” (116).
22. See https://portal.sernam.cl/img/upoloads/FEMICIDIOS%20
2010.pdf. In a scene toward the end of the novel, a number of
women lie dying in a large hospital room, and the narrator asks:
“Tantas mujeres que nos morimos, ¿no? ¿Por qué será?” (Eltit
2010: 161).
23. Chile has experienced an important surge in immigration in recent
years, from countries that include Haiti, the Dominican Republic,
Colombia, and Peru.
24. See my discussion of Leppe’s work, including his performance
entitled Sala de espera, in Chap. 4.
25. This interwovenness, or lack of detachment, between the mother
and daughter can also be read as Freudian melancholia: a perma-
nent state of mourning, in this case, for the unfinished birth (and
death) of a nation whose project of modernity, in Eltit’s retelling,
is inherently repressive.
26. Eltit is an assiduous reader of Deleuze and Guattari. Here, the “body
without organs” is “causing asignifying particles or pure intensities
to pass or circulate, and attributing to itself subjects that it leaves
with nothing more than a name as the trace of an intensity.” Deleuze
and Guattari also explain “becoming” by postulating the “rhizome”
266 C. FISCHER

as an “acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system without a

General and without an organizing memory or central automaton,
defined solely by a circulation of states” (1987: 21). Eltit takes up
the rhizome metaphor in explaining how the supremacy of Chile’s
discourse of neoliberal exceptionalism depends on the phantom of
crime—often trumped up in the mass media—to maintain a culture
of fear and submission in the populace and divide up the poor to
prevent any kind of uprising: “me interesa formular cómo la delin-
cuencia y su forma de extensión rizomática—sin principio ni fin—
mantiene … una relación ‘necesaria’ con el proyecto globalizador del
ultra capitalismo. […] Y, aún más, la delincuencia se encarga de
sobrefragmentar la pobreza al dividir … a sus habitantes pobres entre
honestos consumidores y simples maleantes” (2008: 108–110).
27. Eltit is also an assiduous reader of Foucault, as evidenced in her
application of his ideas from Discipline and Punish to the Chilean
context of “model” (exceptional) economic progress wrought by
the state of exception: “De esa manera, según Foucault, la ciudad
apestada, controlada por los cuatro costados … iba a transformarse
en el espacio social modélico, en la gran utopía política de los que
ostentaban el poder. La ciudad … se presentaba como el antino-
madismo, como el espacio que se autoverificaba a sí mismo, ese
particular lugar donde lo privado y lo público carecían de límites y
de limitaciones. Aquí, en la segunda mitad del siglo XX, Augusto
Pinochet quiso ejercer ese sueño político de control totalitario …
ese ojo de tradición soberana que emergía amparado en el extenso
Estado de Excepción” (2008: 180).
28. For Niebylski, Julia Kristeva’s ideas about abjection are key to
thinking about this bodily potential for resistance: “Kristeva’s
notions of the potential subversiveness of the abject body” (117)
figure that body as the site “on which history is mercilessly inscribed
and, simultaneously, as the organism in which the cells of resis-
tance, impervious to discipline and punishment, are metastasized”
(107).
29. Indeed, as Politzer and others have pointed out in their analysis of
Bachelet’s first administration, many of her aspirations to broaden
the government’s social welfare net were reined in by her Finance
Minister, Andrés Velasco, whose tight grip on the government’s
purse strings helped her maintain an image of discipline and
responsibility: “Prefirió seguir apostando a Velasco y demostrar
 EXCEPTIONALISM, THE FEMALE BODY, AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE... 267

que—siendo socialista—era capaz de compatibilizar un manejo fis-

cal responsable y promover políticas sociales verdaderamente gen-
erosas” (Politzer 237).
30. In fact, the mother’s most repeated insult to the daughter is “¿eres
tonta o te haces?” (Eltit 2010: 160, for example).
31. Jacqueline Loss (2005) has written about Eltit’s cosmopolitan
presence in literature, and the volume Diamela Eltit: redes locales,
redes globales, edited by Rubí Carreño (2009a, b), is also evidence
of the cosmopolitan networks in which Eltit moves.
32. After Londres 38, the two plays were performed at “another for-
mer torture center, José Domingo Cañas, and then to Villa
Grimaldi. After the performances at the villa, it was performed at
El Museo de la Memoria and then in a former torture center of the
port of Valparaíso” (Pottlitzer 60–61). They were then staged at
memory sites and former concentration camps around the world,
including in “Buenos Aires, Montevideo, São Paulo, Brasilia,
Guadalajara, Madrid, and Sarajevo” (Hernández 65).
33. In order to highlight the connection between performance and
bodily trauma in Calderón’s play, Paola Hernández quotes Diana
Taylor, who writes about “how performance and protest resemble
trauma in their nature of ‘repeats,’ and that both trauma and per-
formance are felt in the present. Thus they take ‘place in real time,
in the presence of a listener.’ Performance, then, ‘helps survivors
cope with individual and collective trauma by using it to animate
political denunciation’” (77). Jelin connects this phenomenon to
psychoanalysis: “the attachment of the person to that past,
especially in cases of trauma, can involve a fixation or a constant
return: the compulsion to repeat or to act out, the inability to
detach oneself from the lost object” (5).
34. Both Hernández (63) and Pottlitzer (57) have commented on the
double meaning, in Spanish, of the word discurso, as both speech
and discourse; it is my contention that this play on words is key to
the complex positions of memory studies as a discipline, Bachelet
as a figure, and the staging of the play, as both individualized/
subjective and also collective/objective modes of discourse.
35. Because Calderón’s plays are known as very text-driven (Hernández
64), Juan Andrés Piña (2015) reads his work as “la revitalización
de la figura del dramaturgo como protagonista indiscutible del
acontecimiento teatral” (166).
268 C. FISCHER

36. Pottlitzer quotes an interview with Calderón about this: “I wanted

to write about Michelle Bachelet, who she is and who she was. […]
I wanted her to defend herself against the many political attacks
she received while in office. In reality she never did so, but in my
play she does. She never mentioned that she was tortured or spoke
of her father, but in my play she does” (57).
37. It may be for this very reason that the title of La Tercera theater
critic Juan Andrés Piña’s review of Villa+Discurso, in January 2011,
was “Excepcional mirada al Chile pendiente.” El Mercurio theater
critic Pedro Labra titled his (positive) review of the two plays, mean-
while, simply “Exceptional” in April 2011 (Piña 2011; Labra 2011).
38. Later, in a 2014 interview with the Chilevisión TV station, Bachelet
did reveal in more exact terms what the nature of her torture had
been: “Recibí tortura psicológica esencialmente, y algunos golpes,
pero no me ‘parrillaron,’” she said, referring to the metal bedframe
where prisoners were electrocuted, known colloquially as a “par-
rilla,” or barbecue. “Tuve suerte comparada con tantos otros,
muchos de ellos murieron.” See http://www.24horas.cl/nacio-
nal/michelle-bachelet-habla-de-su-detencion-y-tortura-en-
dictadura-de-pinochet-1496112. Several critics have focused on
Bachelet’s self-contradiction here as evidence of the subjective,
ambiguous nature of individual memory (Resende 7, Hernández
77–78).
39. Although Álvarez’s critique of speciesism falls outside the scope of
my work here, the burgeoning field of “critical animal studies” has
disrupted the exceptionalisms and vectors of power that oppress
and discriminate against animals. See, for example, Gabriel Giorgi’s
work (2014) for a critique of how, in the Latin American context,
the experiences of animals are often discursively used to simply
accentuate human experience, not to enter into continuity with it.
40. Álvarez defines “liberation” in the following way, and discounts it
fairly quickly due to its total omission of bodily pain and shame:
“Esta movida de la liberación sexual, muy vinculada a un nuevo
trato con nuestra cuerpa, no nos dejó espacio para el dolor.
Aparentemente, todas seríamos seres superadas en lo sexual, en el
dejarse llevar, en el devenir del cuerpx, en mostrarse, besarse con
todo el mundo, burlarse de la monogamia, tener relaciones sexu-
ales grupales, andar en tetas, etc. […] Fue, y es, muy doloroso
darse cuenta de cuántas veces nos han pasado a llevar y nosotras
 EXCEPTIONALISM, THE FEMALE BODY, AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE... 269

mismas hemos sobrepasado los límites de las otras sin darnos

cuenta, por asumir ciertas cosas dentro de lo sexual que parecen
obvias, pero en realidad no lo son, que no sabemos decir que no,
que cualquier duda es un no y no que te estén coqueteando o
tratando de hacerse las difíciles. El patriarcado habita muy dentro
de nosotras y el pensar esta liberación sexual, sin ponerse en el
lugar de la otra, sin ser empática con su cuerpa, con su historia, en
sus cicatrices, es profundamente patriarcal y heterosexual” (169).
In effect, “liberation” for Álvarez is overrated: a false ideal some-
times imposed on feminists in order to do more, sexually, than they
are comfortable with.
41. For Fraser, the public sphere is often marked by “pre-political”
forces that impede equal discussion: “informal impediments to
participatory parity that can persist even after everyone is formally
and legally licensed to participate” (63): “men tend to interrupt
women more than women interrupt men; men also tend to speak
more than women, taking more turns and longer turns; and wom-
en’s interventions are more often ignored or not responded to
than men’s” (64). These small ways in which women’s participa-
tion in the public sphere is repressed by men often indicate larger
exclusions.
42. For example, Álvarez writes, “La belleza occidental niega y afea
cuerpos que no se asemejan a sus formas. Las diferentes cuerpas de
nosotras, latinoamericanas, son modificadas constantemente, no
sólo por la industria de la dieta y la cirugía, también existe todo un
entramado fuertísimo de racismo y horror al ser morena” (196).
Colonialist racism and the European standards of beauty imposed
by capitalism are part and parcel, for her, of Chilean
exceptionalism.
43. Álvarez expresses suspicion of the ways in which academic thought
has appropriated queerness: “La llamada radicalidad queer me son-
aba algo extraña al encontrarme en algunos círculos queer y nuevos
colectivos nacientes. Por ejemplo: ser queer y ser parte de una uni-
versidad católica … ser/estar queer y manejarse en los términos del
poder, en la academia, en el gobierno, en las instituciones” (168).
44. Paraphrasing the Spanish feminist activist and journalist Itziar
Ziga, Álvarez states: “Las mujeres aprendimos que nuestro aspecto
físico siempre nos va a traer problemas … es imposible hablar de
feminidad sin hablar de violencia” (100).
270 C. FISCHER

45. For Rivas, given that “queer,” in Spanish, does not have the same
political charge as it does in English—where it was coined as a way
to reappropriate an insult, as Brad Epps (2008) has written—it
becomes more politically palatable, and therefore more accepted,
in mainstream discourse, particularly in “espacios académicos
locales que no ven en la nomenclatura un peligro o cuestion-
amiento, sino una glamorosa nueva fórmula de saber exportada
desde los EE.UU” (68). In this sense, “queerness” in the Hispanic
context loses the political urgency of dissidence in which it was first
conceived.
46. As of August 2015, the offices in the tower were empty. See http://
www.emol.com/noticias/Economia/2015/08/05/743537/
Costanera-Center-podria-verse-afectado-por-mala-planificacion.
html.

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Fraser, Nancy. 1990. Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique
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Giorgi, Gabriel. 2014. Formas comunes: Animalidad, cultura, biopolítica. Buenos
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———. 2008. Feminismo, género, y diferencia(s). Santiago de Chile: Palinodia.
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———. 1973c. Hoy día le toca a la píldora. Ramona 2(75): 15–17.
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© The Author(s) 2016 273

C. Fischer, Queering the Chilean Way,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-56248-7
 INDEX

Numbers & Symbols Álvarez, Constanzx, 9, 18, 237, 239,

33, The (film), 2 254–9, 268–9n40, 269n42,
269n43, 269n44
Araya Peters, Arturo, 89
A Arce, Luz, 160–1n1
abnormality, abnormal, 39, 40 Arenas, Reinaldo, 65n19
AIDS, 102, 103, 116n42, 117n45, Aylwin, Patricio, 3, 156, 181
118n47, 145, 160, 186, 191,
199–203, 205, 216n4, 222n27,
223n28, 224n37, 225n39 B
Aira, César, 176n64 Bachelet, Michelle, 3, 18, 181, 218n9,
Alekan, Henri, 175n57 233, 246, 248, 249, 254, 258,
Alianza para el progreso. See Alliance 268n36
for Progress Badham, John, 174n49
Allende, Isabel, 205 Balcells, Carmen, 93
Allende, Salvador, 3, 15, 27n32, 52, Barahona, Pablo, 171n41
62n4, 73, 109n10, 111n17, Barros, Gracia, 173n46
113n27, 123, 217n6, 226n40, Barros, Yonni, 2
236 Beauvoir, Simone de, 24n22, 115n37
Allen, Woody, 158 Bechis, Marco, 228n55
Alliance for Progress, 3, 9, 15, 34, 35, Bellatin, Mario, 176n64
50, 52 Benjamin, Walter, 75, 112n24, 184,
Altamirano, Carlos, 165–6n22 220n17

Note: Page number followed by ‘n’ refers to notes.

© The Author(s) 2016 275

C. Fischer, Queering the Chilean Way,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-56248-7
276 INDEX

Berenguer, Carmen, 221n22 Chicago Boys, 125, 155, 163n9

Blanco, Fernando, 23n19, 116n42, “Chile Actual”, 131–3, 182
189, 217n9 “Chilean Way”, The, 1–5, 8, 10–14,
Bolaño, Roberto, 26n28, 167n28, 19, 19n1, 100
176n64, 185, 205 ChileFilms, 171n44
“Boom,” The, 42, 45, 52, 53, 60, Christian Democratic Party, 35, 77,
63n11, 92, 113, 154, 175n54 161n3
Borges, Jorge Luis, 171n43 Colectivo de Acciones de Arte
Botticelli, Sandro, 209 (CADA), 25n26, 130, 165n21,
Böttner, Ernst. See Böttner, Lorenza 165–6n22, 208
Böttner, Lorenza, 9, 13, 17, 185, 204, Colectivo Universitario de Disidencia
207, 209, 215 Sexual (CUDS), 26n27l, 239–41,
Brito, Eugenia, 172n46, 221–2n22 253, 255, 259, 264n16
Brodsky, Marcelo, 228n55 Communist Party, 84, 197, 198
Bronson, Charles, 129, 146–53, 158, Concertación, 9, 131, 158, 159,
170n40, 171–2n44, 173n48, 176n61, 182, 199, 216n3, 250
174n50 Contreras, Manuel, 182
Brunet, Marta, 27n29, 222n23 Copello, Francisco, 165n19
Bryce Echenique, Alfredo, 113n26 Corporación de Reforma Agraria
Bucci Gallery, 208, 210 (CORA), 87, 88
Büchi, Hernán, 158 Corporación Nacional del Cobre
(CODELCO), 163n9
Cortázar, Julio, 64n11, 92, 113n26,
C 115n37
Caffarena, Elena, 242, 243, 247, Costanera Tower, 245, 259
261n9, 265n19 Criscenti, Nino, 53
Calderón, Guillermo, 13, 18, 237, Cuatro Álamos, 166n25
248 Cueca (dance), 200, 226n42
Calvino, Italo, 115n37 Cuthbert, Sofí, 161n3
Carabineros (Police), 55, 104, 202, Cybersyn, 74, 107n1
224n32
Carmen Waugh Gallery, 137
Casa de las Américas, 93 D
Casas, Francisco, 25n26, 165n19, Dávila, Juan, 135, 166n24, 189,
166n25, 199 222n24
Castillo, Carmen, 108n6, 217n6 De Castro, Sergio, 163n9, 171n41
Castro, Fidel, 80, 83, 95, 106, De Sárraga, Belén, 243, 261n9
113n26, 114n33 D’Halmar, Augusto, 26n29, 222n23
Cauas, Jorge, 125 Dittborn, Eugenio, 143, 145, 146,
Cayuqueo, Pedro, 260n3 165n22, 166n22, 170n39
Chaskel, Pedro, 111n23, 242 Don Francisco, 147, 151
 INDEX 277

Donoso, José, 9, 15, 23n19, 33, 36, Francia, Aldo, 53, 68n28
158, 169n35, 171n42, 177n65, Frei Montalva, Eduardo, 15, 34, 50,
193 52, 63n6, 67n28
Dorfman, Ariel, 26n28, 96, 113n26, Frei Ruiz-Tagle, Eduardo, 181
172n45, 217n6 Fresno, Anita, 161n3
Duras, Marguerite, 115n37 Freud, Sigmund, 203, 216n5,
218n10, 226n46, 265n25
Friedman, Milton, 125
E Fuentes, Carlos, 36, 63n9, 64n11,
Edwards, Jorge, 13, 16, 80, 93, 115n37
110n13, 177n65 Fuguet, Alberto, 13, 130, 153–60,
El Mercurio, 107n2, 137, 154, 155, 174n51, 174n53, 175n54,
157, 167n28, 171n44, 175n57, 175n56, 175n57, 175n59,
235, 268n37 176n61, 176n62, 176n64,
Eltit, Diamela, v, 13, 26n28, 65n19, 177n65, 177n66
66n26, 130, 135, 158, 165n19, Fundación Iguales, 197, 224n36,
165n22, 172n46, 208, 217n6, 240
221n22, 222n22, 222n23, 234, futurity, 187–92, 197, 198, 213, 214,
235, 237 224n35
Enríquez, Miguel, 76, 112n24
Época Gallery, 169n35
Errázuriz, Paz, 130 G
Escena de Avanzada, 137, 164n18 García Garzena, Víctor, 84
Esmeralda (ship), 96–8, 101, 115n38 García Márquez, Gabriel, 92, 115n37,
EspacioCal, 171n44 154
Espinosa, Yuderkys, 192–4, 257 García, Rodrigo, 154
exceptionalism, exceptional, 1–10, Garvey, Frank, 206, 207, 209
33–41, 46–52, 73–7, 233–70 Golborne, Laurence, 1
Eyzaguirre, Nicolás, 235, 260n5 Gómez Morel, Alfredo, 177n65,
222n23
Gómez, Sergio, 153
F Goytisolo, Juan, 115n37
Farji, Sabrina, 228n55 Guajardo López, Fenelón, 129, 146,
Fernández, Cristina, 230 147
Final Stop Law. See Ley de punto final Guevara, Ernesto “Che”, 79, 83, 97,
Fleming, Victor, 225n39 110n13, 201, 226n43
Flores Delpino, Carlos, 13, 16, 129, Guzmán, Jaime, 5, 7, 161n5
146–8, 172n46 Guzmán, Jorge, 172n46
Forch, Juan Enrique, 169n36 Guzmán, Patricio, 9, 13, 16, 79, 80,
Foucault, Michel, 7, 15, 23n18, 82, 84, 86, 88, 91, 160n1,
25n23, 39, 40, 56, 219n13, 243, 216n1, 217n6, 228n55
245, 261n7, 266n27
278 INDEX

H La Moneda, Palacio de, 81, 235,

Harberger, Arnold, 163n9 265n21
Henríquez, Víctor, 169n36 Landau, Saul, 53
Hidalgo, Samuel (Salmuera), 255 Larraín, Pablo, 151, 174n50
hooks, bell, 257 Lavín, Joaquín, 126, 127, 155, 156,
Huidobro, Vicente, 15 160, 163n10, 163n11
Huneeus, Cristián, 166n23, 166n26, Leighton, Bernardo, 161n3
172n46 Lemebel, Pedro, 8, 16, 17, 23n19,
Huneeus, Jorge, 261n8 25n26, 26n28, 78, 80, 101–6,
116n39, 116n40, 116n42,
117n43, 117n45, 118n47,
I 118n48, 165n19, 166n24,
Ibáñez Langlois, José Miguel, 167 171n42, 176n64, 185, 189, 191,
n28 198–203, 205, 210–12, 219n13,
Imbunche, 46–52, 66n25, 169n35 220n17, 222n23, 222n24,
Iowa Writers’ Workshop, 176n64 222n25–3n28, 224n37, 225n39,
Israel, Patricia, 173n46 226n41, 241
Ivens, Joris, 53 Leppe, Carlos, 9, 13, 16, 25n26, 129,
130, 133–46, 160, 165n19,
166n22, 166n23, 166n25,
J 166n26, 167n26, 167n28,
Jara, Joan, 226n40 168n29, 168n30, 168n33,
Jara, Víctor, 200, 226n40 169n36, 169n38, 170n38,
Jeria, Ángela, 248 220n16, 245, 265n24
Juntas de Abastecimiento y Precios Letelier, Orlando, 161n3
(JAP), 107n2 Ley de punto final, 217n8
Lihn, Enrique, 149, 172n46, 173n46
Littin, Miguel, 15, 3637–41, 53, 54,
K 57–60, 64n12, 64n15, 65n19,
Kahlo, Frida, 209 67n28, 68n30, 68n31, 68n34,
Kaulen, Patricio, 67n28 69n34
Kay, Ronald, 172n46 Loca, 3, 14, 16, 17, 101, 102,
Kirkwood, Julieta, 24n22, 261n9, 116n39, 117n45, 181–228, 239
262n9 Lorde, Audre, 257
Kissinger, Henry, 75
Kreutzberger, Mario. See Don
Francisco M
Mampato Magazine, 205, 211
Mandujano, Graciela, 265n19
L Mapuche people, 5, 33, 251, 253
Labarca, Amanda, 261n9 Marchant, Patricio, 139, 172n46
Lagos, Ricardo, 19n1, 20n6, 181, 235 Marker, Chris, 110n16
 INDEX 279

Martí, José, 64n16 N

Marx, Karl, 38 National Party, 84
masculinities, masculinity, masculinist, Neruda, Pablo, 15
1, 33–69, 77, 124, 188, 233 Novelas de la tierra, 35, 63n10
McOndo, 153, 154, 174n53, 174n54 Novoa, Jovino, 20n6
memory studies, 182, 248, 249,
267n34
Menchú, Rigoberta, 177n36 O
Mezza, Gonzalo, 165n22 O’Higgins, Bernardo, 124
miners, 1, 219n3
Mistral, Gabriela, 15, 23n19, 97,
115n36, 117n43, 222n23, 242, P
247, 261n9 Padilla, Heberto, 94, 95, 113n26,
“model” discourse, 27n29 113n30, 114n33, 115n37
modernity, modern, 5, 8, 15, 35–53, Parra, Catalina, 169n35
58, 60–1, 61n1, 63n10, 64n16, Parra, Nicanor, 97, 172n46
89, 132, 134, 152, 162n7, Patria y Libertad, 85–7
164n18, 168n30, 171n43, Pauls, Alan, 176n64
174n50, 205, 265n25 Paz, Octavio, 115n37
modernization, 15, 34, 36–42, 44–7, Perlongher, Néstor, 25n25, 186, 212,
51, 52, 59, 61, 68n34, 69n34, 219n13, 219n15, 223n29, 257,
135, 244 258
Módulos y Formas Gallery, 140 Piñeiro, Manuel, 94
Moffitt, Ronni, 161n3 Piñera, Sebastián, 1, 2, 8, 234, 242
monstrosity, monster, monstrous, 15, Pinochet, Augusto, 3, 5, 16, 111n28,
33–69, 245 123–5, 127, 130, 131, 133, 134,
Moreno, Sebastián, 217n6 141, 143, 155–7, 159, 160,
More, Thomas, 74, 106 161n1, 161n5–2n7, 164n17,
mourning, 141, 142, 182, 183, 185, 170n41, 181, 182, 215n1,
191, 195, 198, 199, 203, 214, 216n1, 221n22, 223n27,
216n5, 218n10, 218n11, 225n39, 265n20, 266n27
220n21, 223n27, 223n28, 249, Poblete, Olga, 265n19
265n25 Poe, Edgar Allen, 210
Movimiento de Integración y Portales, Diego, 4, 5, 115n34,
Liberación Homosexual 116n43, 117n43
(MOVILH), 197, 224n33, 240 postdictatorship, postdictatorial, 12,
Movimiento de Izquierda 13, 17, 26n28, 132, 156,
Revolucionaria (MIR), 76, 104, 163n11, 181–92, 198, 199, 204,
106, 110n12, 110n13, 112n25, 212–15, 217n9, 218n9, 218n10,
172n46 220n21, 221n22, 227n52
Movimiento Pro-Emancipación de las Prats, Carlos, 84, 85, 157n3
Mujeres de Chile (MEMCH), Preciado, Beatriz (Paul), 26n27, 257
264n19 Puig, Manuel, 36, 63n11, 64n14
280 INDEX

Q Salas, Pedro, 242

queerness, queer, queering, 2, 37, 79, Sanfuentes, Emilio, 171n41
123–78, 185, 237–41 Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino, 149
Savio, Roberto, 53
Schmitt, Carl, 3, 5, 21n10, 127, 160,
R 164n12
Rama, Ángel, 117n43 Secchi, César, 169n36
Ramona, 110n14, 116n41 Semprún, Jorge, 115n37
Recabarren, Luis Emilio, 261n9 SIDA. See AIDS
Red de protección social, 234, 240 Simonetti, Pablo, 17, 185, 192–8,
reproductive arena, 22n15, 55, 57, 59, 215, 222n23, 223n31, 223n32
60, 61n1, 112n25 Soro, Mario, 205
Revista de Crítica Cultural, 183 Soto, Helvio, 68n28
Revolución en libertad, 34 Stahlberg, Michael, 207, 209–11, 214,
Rice, Condoleezza, 239 215, 227n47
Richard, Nelly, vi, 12, 23n19, 24n22, state of exception, 3–11, 14, 16,
26n28, 117n44, 135–7, 139–43, 123–78, 266n27
161n5, 164n16, 165n19, Sur Gallery, 142
166n22, 166n23, 167n28, Sutherland, Juan Pablo, 23n19,
168n33, 169n36, 170n38, 25n25, 188, 219n11, 219n12,
170n39, 183, 185, 186, 218n11, 263n12
219n11, 220n16, 238, 239, 241,
249, 256, 257, 262n10, 263n13
Riggen, Patricia, 2 T
Rivas, Felipe, 12, 239 Taller de Artes Visuales, 143
Rivero, Pedro, 2, 19n3 Tancazo, 84, 85
Roa, Raúl, 99 Teitelboim, Volodia, 91
Robles, Víctor Hugo, 78, 80, 109n10, “Third worldist” film, 36, 60
191, 224n36 Todo Mejora, 197
Rocha, Glauber, 53
Rodríguez, Claudia, 259
Rojas, Alejandro, 82, 83, 166n39 U
Rosenfeld, Lotty, 130, 165n19, UNCTAD building, 102, 103
165n22 Undurraga Saavedra, Sergio,
Rousseff, Dilma, 234 171n41
Ruiz, Raúl, 68n28, 175n57 Unidad Popular (UP), 927n32,
60, 64n12, 73–88, 91–4, 98,
100–6, 107n2, 108n5, 108n8,
S 109n8, 109n10, 110n11,
Sábados Gigantes, 147, 151, 152, 111n19, 116n41, 123, 126,
174n49 161n2, 161n4, 162n6, 172n45,
Sada, Daniel, 176n640 265n20
 INDEX 281

United Nations (UN), 116n43, W

126 Wacquez, Mauricio, 222n23
Utopia, 16, 73–103, 105, 106, 107n3, War of the Pacific, 4
110n15, 112n24, 114n31, 119,
172n45, 192, 201
Y
Yeguas del Apocalipsis, Las, 165n19,
V 185, 199
Valdés, Adriana, 47, 166n23
Vallejo, Camila, 260n3
Vargas Llosa, Mario, 96, 113n26, Z
114n33, 115n37 Ziga, Itziar, 257, 269n44
Velasco, Andrés, 266n29 Zurita, Raúl, 26n28, 130, 164n14,
Vergara, Marta, 265n19 165n19, 165n22, 166n22,
Villa Grimaldi, 166n25, 246, 248, 167n28, 170n39, 172n46,
250, 253, 267n32 208, 221n22