Contributions to an ethnography of feminist movements: Expressive recourses in the #Ni una menos and #8M marches in Santiago de Chile

Abstract

The #Ni una menos and #8M marches were central to the Chilean feminist movement’s accumulation of power. In them, a wide repertoire of expressive resources was used aimed at building audiences and publicize the meaning of the denouncements. Based on fieldwork involving observation and photographic records of these political demonstrations (held in Santiago de Chile in 2017 and 2018), this work provides a description of the resources used, and a reflection on their capacity to express contained emotions. To narrate shared suffering, question adversaries and democratize the field of political invisibility. The work concludes that through the use of different expressive resources, the women were able to visibilize their claims and find a way to appear in the public sphere, which allowed them to demand their right to be recognized as equals.