Chilean higher education and gender-based violence: Demands from expressions of feminism in universities

Abstract

This research focuses on the 2018 cycle of feminist mobilizations at univiersities in which young female Chilean students denounced violence and harassment in higher education institutions, highlighting that violence against women has been normalized and made invisible as it is rooted in the dominant sexist culture. A double objective was proposed for the study: identify which manifestations of gender-based violence were the main catalyst for these mobilizations; and determine how this violence is expressed in university contexts based on the voices of the protagonists of the mobilizations. This movement involved strong criticism to the conception of higher education, revealing it as a field of continuous political dispute that is articulated with the genealogy of the Chilean student movement and the resurgence of expressions of feminism by young people in Latin America.