The amazing story of how ‘Women’ conquer it all? The production of gender scripts in the Chilean curricular documents of history and social studies

Abstract

This article explores the construction of the category ‘Woman’ in the official history and social studies curricular documents distributed by the Chilean ministry of education to all public and charter schools in 2014. It answers two major questions: what are the characteristics and acceptable gender performances of the category ‘Woman’ in these Chilean curricular documents? Are there differences in the expected/acceptable performances of woman according to her categories of ethnicity/race or social class? I will argue that these curricular documents construct a historical narrative where two archetypal categories represent possible, oppressive and thinkable gendered citizens. Students that wish to be identified as ‘Woman’ will be able to read these categories as scripts for gender performance. There are other unthinkable but yet identifiable gender categories that represent the ghosts of danger and un-governmentality for ‘Woman’. One of the objectives of this paper is to disrupt untroubled ‘inclusive’ historical narratives in neoliberal democracies.