ABSTRACT
Vast networks of professionals and activists who are feminists, or who are at least sensitive to women's issues, are at work today in Chile and other Latin American countries. Since the elections of 1990 and the apparent general demobilization of Chilean social movements, the women's movement seems to have lost its visibility and has, in fact, been pronounced transformed, paralyzed, or even dead. An important legacy of the practices of social movements during the last two decades has been the tendency to highlight the centrality of the question of identity in politics; the meanings and practices of citizenship suddenly mattered. An important supposition in much work on social movements is the rediscovery of "the political" as a realm in its own right, which, via a revaluation of liberal democracy, is viewed as a potentially pluralist space. Ultimately, a revenge of "civil society" seemed to take hold in the purged discourse of still-leftist social movement analysts in the 1980s.
