Women Mobilizing Memory

Ayşe Gül Altınay, María José Contreras, Marianne Hirsch, Jean Howard, Banu Karaca, Alisa Solomon

• Editorial: Columbia University Press
• ISBN:
  9780231549974
• Categoría: Sciences sociales
• Categoría: Féminisme et théorie féministe

Women Mobilizing Memory, a transnational exploration of the intersection of feminism, history, and memory, shows how the recollection of violent histories can generate possibilities for progressive futures. Questioning the politics of memory-making in relation to experiences of vulnerability and violence, this wide-ranging collection asks: How can memories of violence and its afterlives be mobilized for change? What strategies can disrupt and counter public forgetting? What role do the arts play in addressing the erasure of past violence from current memory and in creating new visions for future generations?

Women Mobilizing Memory emerges from a multiyear feminist collaboration bringing together an interdisciplinary group of scholars, artists, and activists from Chile, Turkey, and the United States. The essays in this book assemble and discuss a deep archive of works that activate memory across a variety of protest cultures, ranging from seemingly minor acts of defiance to broader resistance movements. The memory practices it highlights constitute acts of repair that demand justice but do not aim at restitution. They invite the creation of alternative histories that can reconfigure painful pasts and presents. Giving voice to silenced memories and reclaiming collective memories that have been misrepresented in official narratives, Women Mobilizing Memory offers an alternative to more monumental commemorative practices. It models a new direction for memory studies and testifies to a continuing hope for an alternative future.

PART ONE

Disrupting Sites

CHAPTER I

Stadium Memories

The Estadio Nacional de Chile and the Reshaping of Space through Women’s Memory

KATHERINE HITE AND MARITA STURKEN

In the stands of the Estadio Nacional in Santiago, Chile, the site of the largest sports and entertainment events of the country as well as a national voting station, there is a small cordoned-off area. Amid the plastic orange seats of the large arena, this area next to the field consists of several rows of empty wooden benches. Above the aged and splintered benches, a sign reads “Un pueblo sin memoria es un pueblo sin futuro” (A people without memory is a people without a future). As part of a series of memorial projects at the stadium to commemorate those who were detained, tortured, and killed there from September to November 1973, the empty wooden seats form a kind of time capsule, an entreaty to remember through the material preservation of the original benches. The seats sit as a silent ruin, an eyesore in the larger stadium environment, and a reminder that the stadium was once the site of brutal repression. The Estadio Nacional has become, more than forty years after the coup, a site of memorialization.

In this essay, we aim to situate the memorialization processes of the Estadio Nacional in relation to radical women’s activism through memory. The reclamation of the stadium as a space of memory can be seen in the context of feminist tactics of solidarity and resisting political violence, among both older generations of women who were revolutionaries and former political prisoners and younger generations of progressive activists, as well as the history of feminist women’s activism through the tactic of intervention into public space. The stadium’s use as a site of detention and torture and its partial repurposing as a space of memory raise issues related to visuality and invisibility, gendered spatial relations, and activist women’s mobilization of memory in relation to architectural forms and violent histories.¹

Like those of memorialization projects throughout the world, the Estadio Nacional efforts have not been smooth. The process in Chile reflects local dynamics of power and struggle from the margins as well as the ways the conflictual and repressive past, and the pain and silences it produced, continues to weigh on the present. While we can situate the Estadio Nacional within a long history of stadiums being repurposed as places of violent repression, its transformation into a site of memorialization while still functioning as an active venue for sports and entertainment makes it a unique space of intersecting and contrasting social realms. The empty seats of the stadium memorial sit there not only as memories of the stadium’s violent past but are also actively intervening into the present as a spatial form of protest. In its contradictions and paradoxical uses, the Estadio Nacional opens up a space for the mobilization of memory for social change, deploying the memory of the stadium’s past to engage issues of social justice in the present. The stadium’s memorial projects reveal a unique intersection of spatial practices, mobilizations of memory, and women’s memory as a site of activism and renewal.

Containment and the Chilean Coup

Chile’s September 11, 1973 military coup d’état resulted in the death of the democratically elected leftist President Salvador Allende and the beginning of the seventeen-year dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. The regime’s early and intense focus on systematically eliminating the Chilean left produced a pervasive state terror, including the murder and forced disappearance of an estimated 3,200 citizens, the torture of tens of thousands of Chileans, massive numbers of exiles, and the enduring neoliberalization of the economy and politics. For much of the world familiar with the coup and the 1973–1990 Chilean dictatorship, the black-and-white photographs of the detentions at the Estadio Nacional, which circulated in the international press, remain iconic, even though the stadium only functioned that way for three months.

This iconicity derives from the fact that from September to November 1973, the stadium was the dictatorship’s largest detention center, with as many as 20,000 prisoners from Chile and thirty-eight other countries.² The stadium was also the focus of periodic global attention. On September 22, 1973, in a move to assure both Chileans and the international community that those being held were being treated humanely, the junta conducted an official press “tour” of the conditions there. Yet, the military’s strategy backfired, as reporters and photographers observed first-hand the soldiers’ cruel treatment and the poor state of the detainees. The stadium was emptied of prisoners in November 1973 in order for the World Cup qualifying matches to take place there (a match in which the Soviet Union refused to participate, resulting in a default). The regime’s reopening of the stadium after several months was an attempt to cleanse its sordid history and to normalize it as a nationalistic space of the Pinochet regime going forward.

According to the 1991 Report of the National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation, officially at least forty-one people lost their lives inside the stadium. Because of the numbers of those who were detained there, tortured, killed, and then dumped in Santiago streets, ditches, and in the Mapocho River during the regime’s early months, journalists and human rights advocates assume there were many more.³ Among the stadium prisoners were approximately 1,400 women, who were held in separate spaces on the stadium grounds, including in locker rooms adjacent to the main coliseum.⁴ Since women constituted a small number of the approximately 3,200 people who were killed and disappeared, women’s experiences as subjects and victims of the dictatorship were rendered all the more invisible during the detention and in its aftermath. The women do not appear in the iconic black-and-white photos. When the military emptied the stadium in November, many of the women were released (often only to be re-arrested shortly thereafter), while others were moved to clandestine detention centers and a women’s prison, where they experienced further abuse. Some remained prisoners for several months, others for a year or more, and others had their sentences commuted to forced exile.

In March 1990, after seventeen years of military rule, a national referendum forced Pinochet to step down from his position as dictator; he then became the commander in chief of the army. In 1998, Pinochet was named a “senator for life,” as specified in the military-orchestrated 1980 constitution. Nevertheless, the former general was arrested in London in October 1998 on the order of the Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón. This surprise arrest and his subsequent eighteen-month detention seemed to produce a moment of public release in Chile. It opened a new space for Chilean survivor testimonies, which began to appear in major media reports as well as through memoirs and documentaries.⁵ This also became a period in which Chilean memorialization efforts like those surrounding the Estadio Nacional began to proliferate, primarily as small, fragmented, but determined struggles to mark sites of loss and to reclaim former sites of clandestine detention and disappearance.⁶ Through the fitful yet persistent work of former political prisoners and their families, human rights advocates, architects, journalists, filmmakers, political organizers, and more recently, a robust group of younger volunteers, the Estadio Nacional has been reclaimed as a site of memory, education, and activism.

Stadium Architecture, Visuality, and the Gendering of Space

While the Estadio Nacional is unique in being partially remade as a site of memory, there is a long history of stadiums being repurposed as sites of detention. From recent examples of Syrian refugees being held at the Stadium of Kos, Greece, in August 2015; to the SuperDome as a site of neglect, brutality, and death during Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005; back in history to the detainment of Jewish prisoners at the Vélodrome d’Hiver (Vel’ d’Hiv) in Paris in 1942 before they were deported to extermination camps, stadiums have served as sites of containment, detention, and torture.⁷ This kind of repurposing of space demonstrates in many ways the long history of crowd control in modernity. A stadium is a site of spectacle by design. Yet, precisely because they are built to accommodate large numbers of people, stadiums are also governed by the design of crowd containment, with restrictive venues of access and egress to prevent unpaid entry, and large hidden spaces underneath, used under normal circumstances for celebrities, entertainers, and sports teams. The scale of stadium spectacle has long aligned its meaning with nationalism (as sites of national sports teams, with the direct alignment of sports with patriotism, in particular in relation to football and world sports events such as the World Cup), with masculinist aesthetics, and with fascism with its deployment of massive rallies as events of spectacular affirmation.⁸

Architect Benjamin Flowers has outlined the different modes through which stadiums can be understood, such as nationalism and transnational capital flows, and among these he defines “death and destruction” (as epitomized by the use of stadiums for detention and the building of stadiums on sites that have been destroyed) and “war incubator” (as sites where sport contests and nationalist events become incitements to war) as two central typologies.⁹ The built environment can become a space of oppression precisely because it is designed to restrain the energy of the crowd, which has resulted in many incidents of individuals in crowds being crushed to death as they surged up against the barriers at stadiums.¹⁰ These disasters are largely attributed to a conflict between spaces and crowds; as Camiel van Winkel writes, “There is, in the history of the modern sports stadium, an ominous undercurrent of mutual provocation between crowd and architecture. The architecture attempts to impose discipline on the crowd, but time and again it transpires that deciders and managers have miscalculated its blind force.”¹¹ Architectural design of discipline can turn quickly to architecture as death.

The Estadio Nacional embodies in many ways this history of modern stadium architecture and its shadowy history of violence. Built in 1938, and modeled on the fascist aesthetic of Nazi Germany, it was always an incomplete project, with its various stages of construction (including a renovation in 1962 and a later renovation in 2009) almost all incomplete in some way. As Valentina Rozas-Krause has written, the history of the stadium is a narrative of incompleteness, of “interrupted” modernism, which began with an embrace of modernist aesthetics as a symbol of a burgeoning consumerist middle class, distinguished from the landowning oligarchic aristocracy. She defines the structure as evoking the “unfinished promise of modernity,” which further deteriorated in an unfinished renovation for the 1962 World Cup, and more fully debased in its transformation into a site of detention and torture in 1973. She writes, “Its potential dungeons, the panopticon-like Press Gallery in the marquee, and the control of the flow of people that the spatial design of the National Stadium facilitated, appear to be the main functional arguments—although they were never declared as such—that led the military to use it as a prisoner camp.”¹² These intersections of modern design, fascist and disciplinary architectural modes, and incompleteness signal both the potential of the stadium as a site of state terrorism and its eventua...