Girl power? Ethics of joy and becoming Chilean feminist high school students in relation to ideal citizenship normativities

Abstract

This article traces the narratives and experiences of feminist high school students during the Chilean feminist movement of 2018 and explores their relations with normative political and gender subjectivization processes happening at their schools. The data for this article was produced through a critical ethnographic study in a Chilean all-female public high school, which included participant observation, testimonial interviews, arts-based collective testimonial workshops, and analyzed through affect theory. This article shows how this school reproduced binary norms under traditionally feminine parameters and at the same time neoliberal ones that demanded that students be successful and resilient women who individually managed to become productive members of society in the future. The student participants in this study were critical of how their school and their teachers tried to produce them as these types of gendered citizens. They managed to become feminist students in relation to these norms and at the same time create discourses, actions, and materialities that produced more just spaces for them in the present. This article suggests that reading the relations between the feminist students’ becomings and new gendered citizenship normativity deployed at school through a relational and affirmative ethics lens identifies relevant and often unseen aspects in research about structural oppression and resistance.