Patricia Richards

“Good Women and Bad Indians: Constructing and Resisting the Gendered Mapuche Subject in Post Dictatorship Chile”

Wednesday, May 9, 2007
Noon
300 Younkin Success Center
1640 Neil Ave., Columbus, OH 43201

Co-sponsored by OSU Women in Development, Center for Latin American Studies, and the departments of History, Spanish and Portuguese, and Women’s Studies.

This lecture is a brown bag event. Bring your own lunch, or have drinks and snacks on us.

Patricia Richards received a Ph.D. in Sociology from University of Texas-Austin in 2002. She is an Assistant Professor in Sociology and Women’s Studies at the University of Georgia.

Her publications include “The Politics of Difference and Women’s Rights: Lessons from Pobladoras and Mapuche Women in Chile” (forthcoming, Social Politics); “The Politics of Gender, Human Rights, and Being Indigenous in Chile” (Gender & Society, 2005); Pobladoras, Indígenas, and the State: Conflicts Over Women’s Rights in Chile (Rutgers University Press, 2004); “Expanding Women’s Citizenship? Mapuche Women and Chile’s National Women’s Service" (Latin American Perspectives, 2003); and “Reviving Social Rights in Latin America: The Potential Role of International Human Rights Documents” (Citizenship Studies, 2000).

This talk is part of a broader project that examines how gendered and racialized meanings of belonging, and of the nation itself, are deployed by different groups in the “neoliberal multicultural” context, and how national and transnational policies and discourses are internalized, interpreted, and resisted in everyday life.

In this talk, Richards specifically looks at the ideas about race, ethnicity, and nation that are being mobilized among indigenous and non-indigenous parties involved in conflicts in the Chilean South, and how they interact with gender ideologies and expectations.

• How and to what purpose are contrasting understandings of national identity deployed by different groups?
• How do dominant groups construct the Mapuche in this context?
• How do Mapuche resist these constructions and formulate their own?
• What does this say for the changing identities of the various groups and for the identity of “the nation” itself?

Much recent literature on neoliberal multiculturalism argues that it represents a new form of” governamentality” involving the subjectification of a new type of citizen. The talk will bring attention to how this process actually happens at multiple levels, not just at the level of state-civil society relations, and how it is contested and often contradictory.

Patricia Richards
Assistant Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies
University of Georgia