Images in Movement(s): Representations of Hooded Women’s Bodies in Santiago de Chile’s 2018 Social Manifestations

Abstract

In this article I analyze critically the representa-tions of hooded women’s bodies during the 2018 feminist protests in Chile. I seek to determine their specificity in relation to two dimensions of the phenomenon associated with political problems from a semiotic-material perspective. On the one hand, I show how identity struggles articulate in the context of these mobilizations considering the ways the forces of the neoliberal government regime seek to delimit the expressions of protest of these bodies through their encapsulation within a grid of intelligibility linked to the hegemonic representation of what social conflict is in Chile. On the other hand, by analyzing visual representations through images generated in the context of these manifestations, I show how hooded women’s bodies emerge as assemblages that articulate the human and the non-human, tracing landscapes of aesthetic-political struggle based on expressions of their sensitive and affective powers, which enable them to become refractory of neoliberal semiotization strategies.