CULTURA Y DIVERSIDAD DE FORMAS DE VIDA: LA HOMOSEXUALIDAD 1 (original) (raw)

Homomercracia. Social Change and Sexual Diversity in Times of Emerging Neoliberalism in Chile

2016

During the last few years, increasing sensitivity has been shown toward civil and sexual rights for gay, lesbian and transgender people in Chile. There are several reasons for this, which include, for example: the emergence of the student movement in 2006, which encouraged several social groups to demand recognition of their rights, and institutional support from the conservative government of Sebastian Pinera (2010-2014). From here, important steps in favor of the LGBT population where taken, making them more visible in the media, approving the antidiscrimination law in 2012, and creating the conditions for the approval of the civil union agreement in 2015 during Michelle Bachelet’s tenure as president. Accordingly, this qualitative case study examines the symbolic dimension of LGBT civil rights discourse in the 10 years leading up to the approval of the civil union agreement in 2015. This research uses phenomenology as a broad conceptual umbrella, and Critical Discourse Analysis a...

Democracy in the Country but not in the Home? Religion, politics and women's rights in Chile

Third World Quarterly, 2010

This article explores the influence of religious actors on the elaboration of two public policies that are key to the advancement of women's rights and have long formed part of the women's movement's agenda in Chile: the introduction of sexual education in secondary schools in the 1990s and the distribution of emergency contraception in the 2000s. Our analysis of how different actors—from a variety of ideological and power positions—have influenced the two policy debates suggests that their discourses and strategies are highly contingent on the political environment. While conservative religious forces retain an enormous capacity to hinder policy making and implementation in the arena of family and sexuality, the government's determination to confront such interference seems to have grown in a context of fewer authoritarian enclaves, a more pluralist society and a strong sexual and reproductive rights movement. The diversification of religious positions on issues of family and sexuality has also affected the room for manoeuvre in the policy arena.

The Origins of Chile's Democratic Culture

Digitale Bibliothek Thüringen, 2015

The 2011-12 wave of social movements in Chile seemed to express a profound critique against democracy, as this modern ideal has been interpreted and practiced in this country. In our view, the current legitimation crisis can be explained as a clash of two social imaginaries whose first traces are already visible during early republican life and which together constitute Chile’s political culture. According to this longer-term approach we need to return to the founding period when the nation and the state were built and delve into the origins of the Chilean constitutional tradition. The ‘founding clash’ of political self-interpretations and its outcome, which took place between 1810 and 1833, determined path-dependently the outlook of Chile’s democratic culture as we know it today. Charles Taylor’s imaginaries approach has served as a guide to explore the cultural face of Chile’s political modernity by attending to the unique way in which the North Atlantic modern social imaginary has been re-configured when placed within a pre-modern (colonial) Hispano American social imaginary. Since the early part of the nineteenth century, Chile’s legal and political structures seem to have been justified instrumentally, in accordance with a liberal-atomistic imaginary, combined with an authoritarian element inherited from colonial times. But we also find such liberalism co-existing right from the beginning of the Republic with the presence of a popular-democratic social imaginary –in a way, coextensive to all the Hispano-American peoples. This latter affirms the value of community and citizen participation. Chilean social movements, in particular those of a political-constituent kind, have not challenged liberalism per se but have sought to find a way of realizing popular sovereignty through greater participation and the establishment of what they consider a truly liberal-democratic system. In doing so, they are heirs to that original popular social imaginary, which was violently suppressed and displaced from the political system after the 1829-30 civil war and the emergence of the ‘Portalian state’. The social movements of 1918-1925 and the recent social unrest from 2006 to the present are cases in point where a crisis of allegiance to official political practices and institutions emerges