“Gendered” Memories: Women’s Narratives from the Southern Cone

Abstract

The 1960s and 1970s in the Southern Cone were marked by authoritarian regimes, supported by the United States, that coalesced around a Cold War ideology of the threat of communism to national security. These dictatorships appeared almost simultaneously in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay. Despite media censorship and fierce restrictions on political activity, these decades were also marked by women’s widespread participation in political, cultural, and social movements. Energized by feminism and the sexual revolution worldwide, women claimed their protagonism in political, social, and cultural debates and, hence, constructed new subject positions for themselves.