The Chilean Body Politic

This monograph explores how Chilean urban workers translated nineteenth-century European political philosophy according to their conditions, locality, and colonial history. The research is grounded on a systematic analysis of local archival material—primarily, newspapers aimed at the working class from 1870 to the 1920s—from a theoretical perspective informed by contemporary feminist critiques and inspired by Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction. This provides a new understanding of late-nineteenth-century Chilean popular culture which shows that the origin of capitalism was commonly interpreted as a loss of virility on the part of Chilean men, who emerged into a modern European like city as degenerative people dispossessed of their traditional “dominion” over Chilean women, land, and culture. The book proposes that the experience of early industrial modernity was posited by Chilean men as equivalent to the loss of an essential masculinity rooted in an economy of patriarchal sexual difference. Consequently, it also reveals that the notion of “revolution” was translated in Chilean culture as the return of an ideal male subject who would re-establish the “natural” distribution of the sexes displaced by a foreign form of capitalist modernity. This research shows the centrality of questions of gender to working-class political thought and criticizes the points of complicity between politics, philosophy, and patriarchy in the Chilean political tradition. It will appeal to students and researchers in political theory, gender studies, feminism, and Latin American studies.