Sexual Political Violence and State Terrorism in Chile (Review) (original) (raw)

2024, NACLA Report August 16

Review of Jocelyn Maldonado Garay:Violencia política sexual y terrorismo de Estado en la dictadura civil-militar en Chile. La genealogía oscura del neoliberalismo. (LOM Ediciones, 2023) Jocelyn Maldonado Garay’s new book, Violencia política sexual y terrorismo de Estado en la dictadura civil-militar en Chile argues that beneath state terrorism and sexual violence imposed upon people’s bodies lies the neoliberal logic of dispossession. In colonial times and during the construction of the capitalist nation-state, state violence took the form of wars, rape, sexual abuse, and sometimes Indigenous genocides. While state terrorism mobilized memories and practices of these previous eras of violence, the neoliberal governance embraced by the Chilean dictatorship also installed a sophisticated model of dispossession that exerted both material and symbolic violence on individual bodies, collective social groups, and society. Under Pinochet’s dictatorship, as dynamics of repression became more complex, the sexualization of violence reflected just how profound punishment and the imposition of authority could get.