Paper short abstract:

Part of an ethnographic study about Chilean feminist high school students in 2018. The presentation focuses on the students' testimonios about their school's oppressive neoliberal gender norms, and their struggles to resist and transform these processes of gender/political subjectification.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the testimonios of Chilean feminist high school students who narrated and analyzed how state institutions, particularly their own high school, attempted to produce them as feminine neoliberal successful girls and their own stories of resistance to these mechanisms. The data for this article was produced within a yearlong critical ethnographic study on the processes of production of high school feminist students’ gender and political subjectivities in Chile during 2018. During the ethnography I conducted testimonios interviews, and art based collective testimonios workshops. The feminist students in this proyect critiqued the subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) violence by which their school and teachers tried to produce them as specific types of "girls." Thorugh these stories of struggle the students produced themselves as subjectivities who experienced oppressive and violent gender norms processes, and at the same time could name, map, and resist these procedures, constructing them as motivations and reasons to act and identify as political actors. Students were able to open up "fractures" in normative discourses in their performative engagements with them. I argue that these feminist testimonios were tools used by the students to create resistant and mestiza subject positions for themselves. Student were able to move across the borders and limits of what was produced by the institution as correct gender/political subjectivities for female minors. The feminist students expressed feelings regarding how norms to be recognizable were unlivable for them, which in turn made them resist, challenge, and engage in imperfect performances of "female student."