Dissonances in the Institutionalization of Gender in Chilean Universities: Theoretical Reflections for the Ongoing Debate¹

Abstract

The Chilean feminist movements challenged the state and educational authorities regarding recurring instances of gender-based violence that were perpetuated and silenced. Reports of harassment and sexual abuse led to a broader critique about the ways in which education plays a part in the establishment of a model that sustains gender gaps. University authorities responded with institutional policies, establishing protocols and formal spaces to address these issues. However, these measures have revealed new problems. Given that the institutional response to the feminist uprising illuminated a range of nuances, obstacles, and new tensions related to issues of punishment, reparation, and justice, we identify four critical points of these political dissonances that emerged in Chilean universities following this cycle of protests: 1. problems in the definition and naming of violence and experiences of grievance; 2. public exposure of grievances, including “funas” (public shaming) and punitive practices; 3. disputes over the meaning of the slogan “non-sexist education”; 4. challenges in integrating the feminist complaint within the university community. Based on the analysis of slogans, key protest moments, and a comprehensive literature review, we argue that these tensions may hinder feminism’s transformative potential while simultaneously enabling a valuable internal critique.

1. Introduction: Feminist Protest in Transnational and National Contexts

Since 2013, Chile has witnessed a renewed public presence of feminist movements, whose protests have been characterized by unprecedented mass participation. This intensified in 2016 with the regional spread of Ni una menos, reaching a climax in 2018—known as Mayo feminista (Feminist May)—following a wave of demonstrations primarily initiated in universities and all-female secondary schools, in response to allegations of harassment and sexual abuse which were later extended to the demand for non-sexist education. The movement was led mainly by feminist and LGBT+ students + [1], who were recognized as a “brilliant generation” that “changed the course of history” [2] (p. 159) insofar as they expanded the demand for free, public, and high-quality education—an issue that had gained significant traction in the country since 2011—toward a demand for non-sexist education [3] (p. 19). The relevance of these mobilizations was reaffirmed in the massive and unprecedented demonstration of 8 March 2020—following the 2019 social uprising—which saw at least two million people take to the streets across Chile [4]. This occurred amidst a wave of feminist actions that took place during the social revolt, including the performance Un violador en tu camino by the collective Las Tesis, which gained global reach and was replicated in countries around the world, in multiple languages, and by women from vastly different cultural backgrounds. These events, along with the widespread support for these demonstrations and demands in Chile, provided clear “signs of a cultural shift and a movement that is undoubtedly making history” [5] (p. 19).

The nature of the slogans employed during feminist mobilizations functioned as a form of pressure on institutions. The alignment between activist discourse and empirical evidence enhanced the public legitimacy of a broad array of phenomena associated with historical gender inequalities within universities. Issues such as sexual harassment and labor disparities in academia became increasingly difficult to deny, supported by existing data [6]2. Simultaneously, a well-informed feminist rhetoric emerged within the student body. Federico Navarro [7] characterized these voices as “sophisticated, informed, and bold”, challenging the traditional asymmetry between students and faculty. Sonia Montecino [8] further notes that the discourse of the 2018 student movement was already shaped by the institutionalization of gender studies in post-dictatorship Chilean universities.

Among the slogans that circulated in 2018, “Ya no basta con protocolos” (“Protocols are no longer enough”) stood out, appearing on posters and banners. This phrase criticized the inadequacy of existing protocols to address sexual harassment in Chilean universities, suggesting that feminism brings moral depth to an issue previously handled primarily through administrative procedures. After 2018, slogans like this helped inspire at least two significant transformations.

First, Law 21.369 established a national regulatory framework, replacing the fragmented and uncoordinated measures that institutions had previously adopted. Second, the law required higher education institutions to develop gender policies that include models for the prevention, investigation, and punishment of sexual harassment, gender-based violence, and discrimination.

Both transformations can be understood as an institutional acknowledgment of feminist demands, reflecting a shift toward more comprehensive and rigorous approaches than the mere development of isolated protocols.

A defining feature of the current Chilean feminist protest cycle is the directionality of its demands, which extended beyond direct perpetrators towards institutions, with educational and governmental administrations being the most prominent targets. In higher education institutions, complaints have been directed at authorities such as faculty deans and university rectorates. This challenge arises at a time of increasing female university enrollment. However, as evidenced by data from the Radiografía de Género en CTCI [9], this rise has not resulted in an equal distribution of men and women across different knowledge fields, nor in an increase in the number of women in academic positions or decision-making roles. An example of this is that in 2022, 7.8% of women who graduated from undergraduate programs in Chile did so in STEM fields, making the country one of the OECD members with the lowest percentage, surpassing only Japan, where the share of female graduates in STEM is 7.7% [10] (p. 10). These disparities have multidimensional consequences, affecting both women’s lives and the production of knowledge [11].

In this context, the feminist movement introduced substantial debates around gender gaps, inequalities, and various forms of discrimination. This led to unprecedented events, such as feminist interventions in university elections for leadership positions from which students have historically been excluded. An example was the protests against dean candidates who had remained silent on reported cases of sexual harassment [7] and against authorities who, despite not being direct perpetrators, were held responsible for institutional failures. Forms of pressure such as university occupations gained widespread support in 2018, fueled by the shared understanding that these issues persisted and were normalized due to a history of silence that resulted in institutional impunity [12].

These demands were crossed by a perception of forced silence, reflected in slogans displayed on banners at the country’s largest universities, such as “Nos han callado, ahora es cuando” (“They have silenced us, now is the time”) and “La institución forma violadores” (“The institution produces rapists”) [13]. The association of men and masculinity with potential perpetrators led to separatist approaches in several spaces of political action, such as female-only assemblies where men were not allowed to participate. This is illustrated in a testimony published by a participant of activities during this period in the Biobío region, who stated that “The absence of male presence in this space gives me a peace I don’t ever recall feeling” [14]. This separatism, in some cases, translated into the creation of “safe spaces” characterized by the inclusion of “todes menos hombres cis” (“everyone except cis men”), sparking negotiations over the participation of gender and sexual dissident groups. This, in turn, led to discussions on how to name these assemblies and occupations (women’s? women and dissident groups? feminist and dissident groups?), generating tensions between feminist and LGBTQ+ movements and raising critical questions about the boundaries of feminism’s political subject and its articulation with other gender and sexuality movements [1]. One example of the challenges that emerged from these tensions relates to trans-exclusionary positions, from which the Chilean feminist movement has not been exempt [15].

The demand for a “non-sexist education” in 2018 was framed by a diagnosis of universities and secondary schools as institutions that perpetuate sexist abuses while normalizing and rendering them invisible. These experiences—within spaces that are considered privileged—can be interpreted as “highly damaging” for those who “experience harassment or discrimination” [16]. In this regard, Olga Grau argues that there is “a kind of idealization or disembodiment of what takes place in university spaces”, which prevents their recognition as “places inhabited by people with their own biographical trajectories, characteristics, and vulnerabilities, expressed in their multiple manifestations and interactions” [17] (p. 77). According to Grau, universities function similarly to the family as an institution, producing the same effect: an obstacle to “seeing or recognizing acts of abuse of power and sexual abuse” [17] (p. 77). For the author, the 2018 feminist protest cycle exposed universities to “a new truth: that of the violence present within them” [17] (p. 79). This explains why many female university professors joined the cause, publishing collective statements that addressed these issues structurally, as the demands were understood as radical, profound, and grounded in a broad critique of education as a central institution in the reproduction of the patriarchal gender system [18]. This was not only an expression of solidarity with a student-led cause but stemmed from the identification of female academics with many of these demands, having experienced the very abuses being denounced in their own careers.

The testimonial book about the 2018 feminist revolts, “Que todo el territorio se vuelva feminista” (“May the entire territory become feminist”) [19], narrates how these mobilizations profoundly transformed the lives of female students, stirring them “deeply in relation to their history, their emotions, and their relationships with their surroundings” [19] (p. 14). The book also highlights how specific demands triggered deeper and broader critiques, leading to more extensive demands directed at universities, such as “the public positioning of authorities, the acceleration and transparency of ongoing investigations, the recognition of trans students’ chosen names, the updating, creation, and implementation of institutional protocols, the incorporation of a gender perspective into curricula, equal pay across different academic and administrative levels, greater representation of female professors and women in leadership positions, and the eradication of machista3 violence in classrooms” [19] (p. 14).

This 2018 feminist uprising caused a stir within higher education institutions and their communities—something we have termed “dissonances”. In music, dissonance refers to a combination of sounds that are not harmonious or coordinated, something that sounds unusual and likely unpleasant. According to the Real Academia de la Lengua Española, disonancia primarily means to be “off-key”, with its secondary meaning being a “lack of conformity, discrepancy, or disagreement” [20]. We find this concept relevant to our study because one of our initial motivations was to explore the connections and interferences between feminist voices and institutional responses. How accurately have these demands been understood? What quantity and variety of simultaneous messages emerge in these discourses, and how do they resonate, settle, and materialize? And as for universities, how much of this do they see and hear?

In the social sciences, the notion of “cognitive dissonance” refers to internal disharmonies between different systems that shape our ways of thinking, feeling, or believing. Meanwhile, “affective dissonance” relates to the discomfort caused by emotional expressions that clash with the expected affective repertoire of a particular group. Drawing on the concept developed by sociologist Elspeth Probyn, Claire Hemmings defines affective dissonance as “the judgment that arises from the distinction between experience and the world” [21] (p. 157), a sensation that can evolve into a perception of injustice and, subsequently, into a desire to rectify it. This process of politicizing discomfort makes it possible to envision a different kind of political practice, leading to what Hemmings calls affective solidarity: the result of collectivizing emotions and linking them to political action.

Just as dissonance is something that does not fit within a particular musical context, its classification being arbitrary as it is dependent on a historical time or geographical location, affective dissonances evolve according to the frames of reference that become embedded in common sense. If we understand the institutionalization of gender as the possibility of “sustaining equality policies on normative and institutional supports that give them stability and project them” [22] (p. 43), we can see that, without a doubt, the so-called “Feminist May” led to an institutional reading of realities that had long existed within universities, such as the naturalization of sexual violence and, in general, of sexism. This new reading became formalized when Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) began and/or advanced in their processes of institutionalizing gender policies, and—even more so—when these policies ceased to be optional and became mandatory following the enactment of law 21.3694.

Although these issues were undeniably brought to light during the first half of 2018, the strength and breadth of this movement would not have been possible without the feminist history that preceded it. Therefore, we are also interested in thinking about this process through the lens of what historian Joan W. Scott calls “reverberations”: “expansive waves that move from dispersed epicenters and transform geological formations in their path” [23] (p. 324). In this sense, Feminist May would be a product, for example, of the mobilizations for public, free, and quality education from 2011, where feminist banners already appeared demanding non-sexist education, as well as of the Ni una menos marches from 2016, which spread not only in Chile but across the Latin American region. At the same time, the institutionalization of gender policies and the enactment of law 21.369 are reverberations of the 2018 feminist student movement. This concept is understood not only as a differentiated re-articulation of past processes and demands but also as the repercussions of past echoes [23]. If the concept of “echo” refers to how feminist policies are transmitted and transformed across space and time, “reverberation” is understood as the way in which feminist strategies and concepts circulate and connect, adapting and changing in diverse contexts. This creates anachronistic solidarities that renew the (always fictitious) unity among women [24].

This article aims to identify four ‘knots’ that we consider central to understanding the dissonances in the processes of gender institutionalization in Chilean universities following the feminist uprising of 2018.

2. Discussion: Feminist Complaint and Critical Knots

This landscape contains a few unresolved debates, likely due to the speed and massiveness of the feminist eruption onto the political, social, and cultural scene [25]. Drawing on the theories of the “affective turn” [26], Sara Ahmed has developed the concept of “feminist complaint” to describe how it becomes embedded in institutions—especially universities—as “sticky data” [27]. In other words, these are grievances that settle in a hostile environment and/or crash against a wall. This implies both that a complaint could negatively affect the future of the person making it, while also allowing us to learn about how institutions function or to tell a different story about an institution [27] (Ahmed, 2022). The author argues that collective feminist complaints lead to the execution of counter-institutional work, which often falls into the hands of feminists themselves and becomes a form of domestic labor within the “University house”, “with all the monotony and repetition that this phrase implies; painful, administrative work” [27] (p. 52). For this theorist, the complaint, expressed as pain, dissatisfaction, protest, formal accusation, or pressure, may result in consequences that discourage the use of the word, creating a “please do not use” attitude in spaces meant to address it. In other words, complaints may even build what could be described as a buried archive [27] (p. 78).

In the Chilean case, we can observe purposeful institutional responses to feminist complaints in universities. By 2018, 70% of the universities affiliated with the Council of Rectors of Chilean Universities (CRUCH) did not have protocols to address gender-based violence [28]. However, today, all higher education institutions are legally required to have such a protocol. State initiatives also aim to generate diagnoses and build capacities within these institutions. Examples include the calls from the National Agency for Research and Development of Chile (ANID) for the InES Género (Gender Research in Higher Education) program since 2021, the call for Anillos de Investigación (Anillos Research Projects) projects with a specific gender thematic area in 2022, and the enactment of the aforementioned Law 21.369. Additionally, students taking the floor acts as an institutional critical consciousness, generating mechanisms of cross-sector dialog. However, certain obstacles have revealed themselves as urgent crossroads that must be addressed for feminist responses to be transformative, consistent, and long-lasting. As Ahmed points out, the installation of the complaint can turn into “a mess, a tangle”, with the emergence of “so many dead ends, so many crossed wires” [29], which risks all that work failing to result in sustainable change over time.

In this proposal, the impasse described by Ahmed, along with the images she offers (mess, tangle, dead end), will be reappropriated from a situated and geolocalized knowledge [30]. When we refer to “feminist knots”, we are invoking the concept put forward by feminist sociologist Julieta Kirkwood in the context of the Chilean dictatorship. She used the term to describe a series of political conflicts or “disharmonies” that referred to historical constructs but also to contingent practices around knowledge, power, and the different styles of practicing politics among feminist women and women militants of political parties. The author pointed out that rather than providing solutions to these “knots”, it was crucial to explore their possibilities as key elements of “a living movement” [31] (p. 189), one that embraces the risks involved in the “conjugation” of “the verbs to dialogue, to polemicize, to participate” [32] (p. 189). Thus, Kirkwood encouraged following “the joyful path of constant testing, a back and forth in the interpretation” of these knots [31] (p. 189). Following this invitation, we use the notion of “critical knots” to account for a series of political disharmonies that emerged after the feminist complaints had been lodged in academic institutions. These hinder its transformative potential and, simultaneously, channel a productive internal critique by indicating where it would be necessary to “conjugate the verbs to dialogue, to polemicize, to participate”.

These two concepts, knot and complaint, will not be applied in a mechanical manner. Rather, they are reformulated as anchoring points for the development of a conceptual model that may, in the future, support empirical research on the institutionalization of gender following the emergence of demanding, dense, and disruptive feminist protests. Moreover, we believe that it is important to focus on moments that tend to be less visible in analyses, such as the processes of institutionalization. Unlike the more intense cycles of feminist mobilization—such as the one that occurred between 2015 and 2019—the institutionalization of feminist demands requires analytical approaches that can account for slower, fragmented, and often discontinuous dynamics. In the Chilean context, this cycle can be more clearly situated from 2021 onwards, with the implementation of Law 21.369. This is a period whose impacts are more difficult to assess in the short term and which demands specific conceptual and methodological tools to understand its scope, contradictions, and effects.

The proposal of the four critical knots that we present below emerges from an analytical exercise that combined press review, specialized literature, and previous research experience in the field of feminist mobilizations within universities. This exercise allowed us to identify those aspects with greater visibility and institutional impact in the process of gender institutionalization in Chilean universities.

Our first finding was the predominance of the “violence framework” as the hegemonic way of interpreting feminist demands [12,17,33,34,35,36]. This framework not only structures the media and political treatment of the conflict, but also underpins regulatory instruments such as Law 21.369. Based on this observation, two knots were defined that were directly related to this framework and its effects on institutional responses.

The third knot arises from an open question left by the slogan “for a non-sexist education”, central to the feminist uprising of 2018. As the slogan is not self-explanatory, it requires inquiry into how it was institutionally translated, which dimensions of gender inequality it made visible, and which were left out of that translation.

The fourth knot introduces a transversal view of the entire set of processes: How is the value and work of institutionalization distributed within the university? Who is assuming these tasks and with what symbolic and material consequences? These questions allow us to problematize how, within the institutional transformations themselves, the logics of inequality reproduction continue to operate.

In summary, the selection of these knots responds to three analytical criteria: (a) the identification of predominant collective interpretive frameworks; (b) the processes of institutional translation of activist discourses; and (c) the accumulated experience in the installation of feminist demands within the university space.

Thus, the critical knots do not aim to constitute a closed typology, but rather to offer an initial conceptual tool for studying the institutionalization of gender. This approach not only enables a situated reading of ongoing processes, but also opens the possibility of being enriched by empirical research and by comparisons between diverse institutional contexts at both national and international levels.

This form of organization seeks to establish the minimal conditions of intelligibility for phenomena that have not yet been sufficiently addressed from a theoretical standpoint in the Chilean context. Internal consistency is ensured through the coherence between the theoretical frameworks involved and the argumentative structure of the text, which maintains a progressive and critical line of development in each axis addressed.

Likewise, we consider that the argumentative validity of this model lies in its ability to organize a complex problem, rather than in any claim to offer a definitive answer. The proposed knots are presented as starting points that allow for the formulation of research questions, the identification of areas of opacity or controversy, and the delimitation of relevant analytical dimensions for studying the relationship between feminism and institutionalization. This proposal is therefore open, revisable, and expandable. In fact, we assume that future empirical investigations will not only enrich each knot with new evidence, but may also propose others, depending on how the field develops.

2.1. Knot 1: Delimitation, Denomination, and Hierarchization of Violences and Experiences of Grievance

One of the great achievements of feminist movements globally has been to bring to light historically silenced experiences of abuse, giving them a name that legitimizes them as a moral harm that concerns society as a whole. However, a problematic aspect, both externally and within feminist activism, is the delimitation of these violences, which—in a heterosexual and hierarchical representation (abusive man–abused woman/girl)—leaves some experiences unnamed or names them disproportionately or indiscriminately, especially when referring to harassment and gender-based violence.

On one hand, we identify a gender script that makes certain situations in which harm and violence occurs less intelligible. For example, those between a woman with a greater place in the hierarchy and a man with a lesser place in the hierarchy in the university space, between a woman and another woman, between a man and another man, or between cisgender and transgender individuals. The fact that these reports may be quantitatively fewer seems not only an insufficient argument but also one that impoverishes the debate, preventing a more heterogeneous and systemic understanding of sexual violence as a phenomenon and raising concerns about the illegitimacy imposed on those configurations of violence that seem less audible.

The increasing expansion of the concept of violence [37] and, on the other hand, the disproportionate or undifferentiated use of terms to refer to grievances and violence (as if everything was the same thing) would also impoverish the understanding of the phenomenon. As Sarah Schulman points out, “Emotional cruelty, rejection, or group harassment can be worse than violence, but they are not the same. If this broad range of precise experiences is lumped under the generic term ‘violence’, then nothing has any differentiation, hence all the variations lose their meaning” [38] (p. 115).

The controversial book by Marta Lamas, “Acoso sexual: ¿Denuncia legítima o victimización?” (“Sexual Harassment: Legitimate Complaint or Victimization?”) [39], is symptomatic of historical argumentative tensions among feminists, which have been reactivated in the present. The author traces the legal installation of sexual harassment in workplaces and later in universities in the United States, largely due to the work of radical feminist Catherine MacKinnon [40]. Lamas argues that the central premise of this lawyer’s work was that women “are an oppressed class, that sexuality is the cause of this oppression, and that male domination rests on men’s power to treat women as sexual objects” [39] (p. 27). For the feminist theorist, this foundational argument—still influential today—carries various issues, such as promoting “a womanist and victimist discourse” [39] (p. 27) or the totalizing focus on the sexual content of discrimination over other forms of harassment [39] (p. 31).

In the context of a more recent phenomenon related to the #MeToo movement in the U.S. and the subsequent response from a group of French women who publicly defended “the freedom to importune”5, Lamas underlines these women’s frustration with “the extremism of considering every sexual request as harassment” [39] (p. 84), which would give rise to scenarios of public accusation without the opportunity for response or defense [39] (p. 85). The protest expressed in the document goes further, suggesting that society is moving toward a “puritanical climate” that, in demanding the protection of women, condemns them to be “eternal victims (…) under the control of phallocentric demons” [39] (p. 86) Thus, for Lamas, “harassment” would now represent “a semantic redefinition, in which the term (…) is used to name sexist acts” [34] (p. 8).

The “extraordinary reception” that MacKinnon’s work has received in the political sphere is one of the key questions raised by Wendy Brown [41], and one that we also deem pertinent to address in the context of contemporary Latin American feminism. For Brown, MacKinnon’s analysis hinges on establishing an identity (rather than a relationship) between sex and gender and conceiving sexuality as a necessary “eroticization of domination”. What worries the author is that in the current political climate, “the most polyvalent analyses in terms of their representation of subordination and gender construction, most sensitive to race and class in gender, most compatible with the rich diversity of female sexual experience, most complex in their representation of sexuality and sexual drive, most singular and democratic in their political vision” seem unable to compete with MacKinnon’s “science of domination” [41] (p. 173).

In the Latin American context, the problematic reception of Lamas’ aforementioned text not only raises the question of how we name violence but also of how we use experience in the current framework of testimonial devices that are part of the “moral economies of trauma” [42,43]. Specifically, and understanding that “experience” has become a key concept in feminist theory, thinkers such as Joan Scott [44], Donna Haraway [30], Catalina Trebisacce [45], and Laurent Berlant [46] have critiqued the uses of experience as literal transparency, cognitive or moral superiority, self-evidence, or truth of the subject. As Scott puts it, “it is not individuals who have experiences, but subjects who are constituted through experience. In this definition, experience becomes (…) not the definitive evidence (…) that lays the foundation for what is known, but rather what we seek to explain (…) Thinking about experience this way gives it historicity, as well as giving historicity to the identities it produces” [44] (pp. 49–50).

The need to historicize feminist uses of experience as cognitive or moral superiority [47], and, likewise, to increase the complexity of the understandings and the work with experiences of grievance, becomes even more acute in the current moment, filled with a series of “devices to tell pain, to speak of pain, to heal pain, to organize pain”. These not only solidify one of the political paradoxes of our time, the need “to present oneself as a victim to be recognized as a citizen”, but frame and channel the definitions of “good” and “bad” victims, determining which victims are heard and which ones are not [42] (pp. 9–10).

The Latin American reappropriation of the #MeToo slogan, “Amiga, yo te creo” (“Friend, I believe you”), would also raise these problematic issues that presuppose a subject transparent to herself, a subject who knows everything about herself. As Schulman argues, “sexism has exploited this truth until turning into the lie that men always know more about women than we do about ourselves. But refuting male supremacy does not mean pretending that we fully understand each other (…) When we insist on ‘believing women’ no matter what (…) we might deny them the possibility of much more nuanced and complex stories about themselves, which may be the very thing that can help them move closer to leading full lives” [38] (pp. 58–65).

2.2. Knot 2: Public Exposure of Grievances.—“Funas”6 and Punitivism

Public accusations as a form of political action—materialized in funas or public shaming of those accused and/or perpetrators of violence (especially sexual violence)—have generated controversies around the delineation of sexual violence, punitivism, the use of the victim category [48], and the spaces of disagreement within feminism [49]. This is heightened by the context of the so-called “funas 2.0” [50], a concept that refers to the overuse of social media and the possibility of exponential dissemination they provide. One of the most illustrative recent milestones of the massification of a demand through social media was the #MeToo phenomenon in the context of sexual harassment allegations in Hollywood. According to Schmeisser [51], the clear intentions of the “funa” would be to punish through social sanction and prevent future attacks by the same perpetrator. However, the logic of punishment warns of a “punitive climate” which would be problematic for the current political debate [51] (p. 26). The activist discussion around the “funa” mechanism reflects a combination of factors requiring consideration in terms of positioning. Vera Gajardo [52] points out that central aspects in this discussion include the meanings of justice associated with the “funa”, its emotional dimension, the sense of collectivization of the grievance, the clash it may provoke with institutionalized mechanisms, the relationship with the desire for punishment and/or the prevention of violence, and—finally—its contextual positioning within a feminist protest cycle marked by massification and the centrality of experience in the circulation of narratives. The consideration of all these elements enriches the debate and provides a complex analysis of contemporary feminism and its critical knots.

In feminist criminology, the incorporation of criminal elements into the feminist struggle was celebrated insofar as it enabled the intervention in cases of violence within spaces that were considered “intimate” under the argument of “preserving family unity” [53] (p. 56). Thus, the integration of a penal perspective helped to ease the “widespread sense of impunity”. However, the increase in reports, penalties, arrests, and convictions has not reduced gender-based crimes [53] (p. 62).

A similar concern has been raised by the trans lawyer and activist Dean Spade [54] regarding anti-hate crime legislation in the context of queer and trans policies. While Spade shares the need to make the harm and grievances suffered public, and to demand that it matters. However, he also points out the paradoxical nature of defending this carceral logic: “What does it mean to demand justice and recognition from that system?” [54] (p. 22). For the author, proscription and exile as tools of carceral culture “are part of the greater promise of criminal punitive systems to keep us safe and resolve our conflicts” [54] (p. 23) and deprive us from “recognizing any complexity, including the complexity of our own lives as people who experience harm and, at the same time, cause harm to others” [54] (p. 31). All of this raises the question of whether these punishments are the most effective solutions to end a social problem and also—from the perspective of Ileana Arduino [55] (p. 76)—notes as a problem that this “punitive show” ends up neglecting “deep feminist demands”. Along this line, Catalina Trebisacce points out that violence has become a “master signifier” [56] (p. 133), popularized by “technologies of escrache” and “punitive populism”, which would manifest in the recreation of virtual courts on social media under inquisitorial logics that include the hyper-exposure of victims and perpetrators [56] (p. 136). In the context of a “present besieged by urgency”, Trebisacce notes that the uncritical reception of virtual escrache has crushed political imagination, fragmented communities, and ultimately delegated the punitive solution to the state or to “the narcissistic virtual community”. Thus, “the technology of escrache governs the networks and our minds. A digital panopticon that works with the instantaneous effectiveness of words made images that cannot withstand the diachronic time of any critical process” [56] (p. 136).

In the case of universities, the funa often runs parallel to the institutional solutions offered, operating as a potential obstacle to dialog and the production of more immediate instruments (for example, protocols to address situations of harassment and sexual abuse).

The overarching logic to which funas would respond is punitivism, which Nicolás Cuello and Diego del Valle partly understand as extreme trust placed in law and punishment, resulting from the “desire for safety” that characterizes “the current affective crisis” [57] (p. 19). This desire for safety could also be a key to interpreting another of the feminist strategies that characterized the most recent cycle of protests: separatism. While this feminist strategy—and that of other social movements—has historically responded to the patriarchal threat or the need to create a distinct language [58], in the current context, the demand for “safe spaces” is presented as an ideal that moves away from a transitional, and contingent strategic use, becoming closer to and/or solidifying itself through a punitive logic. Lauren Berlant is explicit in describing the ideal of the safe space as a fantasy: “a space in which there are no problems, a place whose legal constitution would be so powerful that there, desire could meet with moral discipline, turning the dreamed rule into reality” [46] (p. 33). Meanwhile, Brooke Shelley points out that “the idea that certain genitality is more guilty of patriarchy or violence is dangerous in the sense that it perpetuates more cissexism than safety (…) The idea that ‘penises’ should be excluded also harkens back to frightening notions of second-wave feminism about how all violence is male violence” [59] (p. 86).

Considering these issues, various questions arise regarding potential solutions to sexual violence and its logics: Is punitivism the answer to impunity? [60] What model of justice constitutes a transformative path and a means of repair in the case of sexist violence? [51] (p. 45) What is the ethical and at the same time effective mechanism for coexistence in spaces where violence occurs, without these implying rituals of public humiliation, silencing, or the expulsion of members as the only alternative? These questions are at the heart of the most problematic issues when violence occurs in communities where both perpetrators and victims coexist. In this regard, Schmeisser describes and highlights solutions that have demonstrated effectiveness in certain processes with a community approach, where responses and procedures would depend on establishing levels of harm caused, prioritizing a call in (focusing on accountability for the harm caused), over a call out (public sanction and expulsion from the community) [45] (p. 51).

2.3. Knot 3: Dispute over the Content of the Slogan “Non-Sexist Education”

Situating the prominence of feminist activism in university spaces is essential to understanding the central elements of the demand for “non-sexist education”, a demand that is framed within societal violence. Prescriptive statements present in the mobilizations, such as “one is not born macho, the Chilean education system makes you that way”, highlight the urgency for educational transformation [12] (p. 169). Just as universities were critiqued for being reproducers of societal violence, they were also positioned as potentially fundamental spaces in the path toward the eradication of machismo violence. In some way, there was a trust expressed in the civic-forming capacity of universities. As some banners at the 2018 protests stated, “the new public education needs feminism”. However, the diagnoses and demands in these mobilizations covered broad aspects of different nature, such as curriculum changes, the redistribution of formal power in universities, closing gender gaps in science and technology, the improvement of protocols against sexual harassment, etc.

The slogan “non-sexist education” has sparked an important debate, contesting “the languages, modes, meanings, and practices of what would constitute non-sexist education” [61] (p. 3), and shifting the slogan towards “specific demands ranging from the inclusion of non-sexist policies in educational curricula (modification of bibliographies and behaviors inside and outside the classroom) to the transformation of internal regulations, graduate profiles, and training and capacity-building spaces, among others” [61] (p. 3). This dispute became evident in the attempt by a group of parliamentarians to declare “non-sexist Education” unconstitutional in 2024, in the context of the discussion around the recently approved Comprehensive Law against Violence Towards Women, which is part of the law (already in force) to Prevent, Sanction, and Eradicate Gender Violence [62].

The above shows us how education has been a key area of dispute in the anti-gender advance articulated around the so-called “gender ideology”, which has strongly opposed comprehensive sexuality education, non-sexist education, and the rights of the trans population, appealing to the freedom of education and the preferential right of parents in the education of their children [63]. Also, in the university context, feminist scholars and researchers who teach and/or research gender topics have faced intimidation by these same sectors. A clear example was the request from far-right lawmakers to “obtain detailed information about those developing activities related to gender ideology” at the University of Chile and the University of Santiago [64].

Currently, the dispute over what is understood as non-sexist education takes place in a context characterized by the mainstreaming of gender equality and equity policies, the opposition of an “anti-gender ideology” sector, and, in turn, the devaluation of feminist knowledge fields, understood as complex bodies of knowledge with diverse epistemological, theoretical, and pedagogical currents that are often marginalized in formal education spaces. Recognizing feminist knowledge as a complex field of knowledge that is being contested allows us to understand that non-sexist education is also an area of debate within feminism itself. This is why it has not been possible to provide easy solutions, as “feminist pedagogical proposals should not be considered a manual of clearly defined instructions nor a set of pedagogical techniques, but rather a feminist political stance, an open and constructive debate that informs the ways of teaching and learning of teachers and students” [61,65].

Keeping the question of sexism in education open also implies recognizing that the ways in which it manifests will vary in different historical moments and contexts, given that its materialization is always situated [66]. This requires that we pay attention to which understandings of sexism and gender are being most accepted in educational policies, which feminist perspectives may tend to individualize social problems or establish binary and biologically essentialist definitions of sexism, gender, and violence, and the impact of these factors on the ways sexism is addressed in education. It also requires us to recognize the relevance of intersectional perspectives on sexism and violence, which assume the inseparability of sexism and other forms of inequality and discrimination such as classism, racism, ableism, and among others.

Given that one of the central tasks of the university is knowledge production and transfer, one of the underlying issues in the demand for a non-sexist education is the epistemological dimension. This raises questions such as the following: What is the impact on knowledge production when epistemic communities are made up of people with similar characteristics? What are the biases resulting from gender gaps in different areas of knowledge? How do these biases seep into the ways knowledge is transferred?

In this regard, feminist epistemologies reflect on decisions about what and how we teach, and in what way, on the curriculum and syllabi. According to Morgade, “The decisions involved in designing a curriculum imply power relations, and curriculum theories, in that they seek to define what the curriculum should be, cannot avoid being implicated in matters of power” [67] (p. 24). In this sense, it is also necessary to problematize the historical tension between feminist academic experience and the situated experience of student activism, understanding that the urgencies7, emphases, agendas, and genealogies of feminism do not necessarily align in both types of experience. However, from an anti-essentialist understanding of feminist experience [24,41,45], such tensions and paradoxes not only do not necessary constitute an obstacle, but rather reflect the dynamic nature of a living social movement that embraces the risks involved in the “conjugation” of “the verbs to dialogue, to polemicize, to participate” [31] (p. 189). In this sense, the tension between academic and activist experiences traverses the four nodes proposed in our conceptual framework.

It is worth mentioning that the concern for a curricular transformation in higher education institutions is currently at a key moment due to regulations such as the aforementioned Law 21.369. In its Article 5, which refers to the prevention model, the law mandates the inclusion of human rights, violence, and gender discrimination content in these institutions’ curricula. In this regard, it will be important to analyze and assess the impact of institutional and curricular changes underway, constantly questioning what, how, for what purpose, and for whom teaching is performed.

Another element that can be drawn from the demand for a non-sexist education is the understanding of the educational system as a reproducer of stereotypes, retransmitted both in everyday practices within university life and in the multiple dimensions of the pedagogical dynamic. This translates, for example, into what subjects or careers would be appropriate for men or women and the differentiated expectations transmitted regarding intellectual or physical development. These issues have an impact on individuals’ life trajectories when choosing feminized or masculinized studies, which are also associated with unequal participation in the labor market since salaries and symbolic power tend to be lower in feminized careers [68] (p. 67).

Reflecting on the challenges that the demand for a non-sexist education presents, we echo the questions raised by Follegatti: is it possible to challenge a reading that not only argues for equality, but also for a transformation of the same paradigms that enable exclusion and discrimination in the university setting? [69] (p. 121).

2.4. Knot 4: Difficulties in Integrating the Feminist Complaint into the University Community

The thematization of patriarchal violence has been able to enter university institutions through basic consensuses, progressively involving authorities and generating guidelines to seek cross-cutting responses. However, and this is not unique to the Chilean case, there are gaps between the urgency of demands for change and their actual implementation and transformative effect within academic institutions.

This is noted by Marta Lamas based on experiences at the National Autonomous University of Mexico [34], as well as by Rita Segato and Marta Lang [60] in relation to the challenges of repairing communities collectively harmed by patriarchal violence. The latter acknowledge the importance of creating solidarity spaces among women to unfold the feminist complaint, as these spaces have provided trustworthy settings where voices and experiences are not discredited, which in turn has allowed for the collective development of tools and strategies against violence [60]. However, Segato and Lang [60] express concerns about the transformative potential of feminism due to the lack of community ownership of denunciation in its deepest sense. A symptomatic issue in this regard is the scarcity of mixed-gender spaces that promote an understanding of violence and work towards the construction of “transformative communities”, meaning spaces that actively engage in change. This issue also connects to Ahmed’s [27] argument that “counter-institutional work” often falls on feminist academics who, in addition to their scholarly duties, end up performing the equivalent of domestic labor within universities. This dual burden is exacerbated by the high demands of academic productivity, further reinforcing gender gaps in this professional field.

Regarding the problem of justice, communities, such as those within universities, often include people who both denounce and are denounced. In this regard, Segato and Lang indicate that the solutions that have prevailed in these cases are “summary trials”, which “self-perceive as a justified visceral collective response to the complaint” [60] (p. 21). The authors note that the result has not led to the de-patriarchalization of spaces nor to the creation of “a strengthened collective consciousness” [60] (p. 3). Instead, these acts often leave “an effect of pain, bitterness, and frustration in all those involved” [60] (p. 3) because, to a large extent, the outcome involves the “cancellation” of the other, exiling them and “symbolically killing them” [60] (p. 3). Social media’s dangerous power also carries the risk that these public judgments will have an unacceptable margin of error, calling into question “the credibility of the movement’s demands” or even associating it with injustice and abuse of power [60] (p. 4). The underlying challenge for community integration in these cases would be to develop an understanding of justice through collective values, which implies guiding actions by understanding that there has been “a wound suffered collectively”, and that the “repair and healing of the bonds of coexistence” will make community and its transformation possible [60] (p. 5).

In this last knot, there is a relevant aspect related to the role of those who implement gender policies concerning violence in universities. In the case of Chile, Natalia Hurtado [70] points out that universities were compelled to institutionalize gender policies through various measures (such as violence protocols, support offices, and among others). However, these formal actions are confronted with a gap between their implementation and the reality of a university community built on different premises. Hurtado emphasizes the constant discomfort experienced by those working to apply these measures without the existence of appropriate institutional tools, or even “in spite of them” [70] (p. 206), revealing an institutional overflow that creates a paradox in the gender institutionalization processes in universities. The lack of formal tools gives rise to “micro-legalities” due to gray areas that the institution fails to address, leading to improvised solutions in the course of their work [70] (p. 212).

Mariana Gaba’s [71] research on the institutionalization of gender in Chilean universities highlights how organizational dynamics reflect a space of constant struggles anchored in various dimensions. For the author, there is constant negotiation in the scope of action that results from the tension between autonomy and the institutionalization of gender policies, as well as problematic forms of legitimization of those leading these processes. Such work also unfolds under the pressures related to the speed imposed by mobilizations such as the “Chilean Feminist May” and the punitive emphasis that this temporality could have generated, revealing issues of coexistence and the imbalance between the urgent call for intervention and the resources available for promotion and prevention [71].

In response to the concern for student coexistence in cases of gender violence, the Restorative Justice Network in Universities (RJRU is its acronym in Spanish) [72] described a mediation case that occurred at a university to exemplify the field of action of the chain of professionals involved in these processes. Upon reviewing the institutional tools available to address conflicts within the student community in relation to gender violence, the authors underline the insufficiency of regulations to address the cases, whether due to ignorance, the limitations of the norms, the high level of informal reports, and other reasons. Considering these limitations, they indicate that the professionals involved often seek alternatives for conflict resolution, creating a specific knowledge that often aligns with restorative justice.

The document describes a mediation as a response to the “funa” of a student, demonstrating that the exhaustion of the available institutional options requires offering measures inspired by a community-based conflict resolution Among the aspects analyzed from this intervention, RJRU emphasizes the importance of the professionals involved having the necessary technical training for a task that demands significant physical and psychological strain.

3. Conclusions

Following the feminist uprising at the social level, which became visible after the student mobilizations of 2018 and was later followed by gender institutionalization processes in Chilean universities backed by legal mandates, it is evident that the feminist movement in Chile is currently in a highly visible cycle of protest. The issues raised challenge the state and educational institutions to more comprehensively question the ways in which education has historically played a foundational role in maintaining and reproducing the gender hierarchy. In response to this, university authorities—often in collaboration with students—have implemented a series of institutional policies, establishing protocols and formal spaces to address these concerns. However, these measures have also revealed new problems and obstacles which we aimed to highlight and critically examine.

Based on the preliminary identification of a range of divergences that arose following the feminist revolt in Chilean universities, we asked ourselves: How has the feminist complaint been addressed, and what are its effects within the framework of gender institutionalization in Chilean universities? What are the dissonances that the feminist revolt has introduced within these institutions? We believe that these questions provide deep investigative possibilities to understand these phenomena in different local experiences. With the aim of addressing these questions, we proposed that they be organized into four critical knots that we believe can help develop associated reflections. These four knots were defined as the (a) delimitation, naming, and hierarchization of violences; (b) the public exposure of grievances; (c) disputes over the content of the slogan “non-sexist education”; and (d) difficulties in integrating the feminist complaint within the university community.

Although the concept of “non-sexist education”, which largely supported the Chilean educational mobilizations, was sustained by the desire for a substantial and holistic change in education overall, it is important to unravel the substantive content of this slogan and contrast it with the reality regarding which demands have been addressed and which have not. One possibility that we visualize, according to the organization of the critical knots, is that the recent feminist protest’s identification with the demands related to experiences of sexual violence could overshadow other diagnoses and calls to action related to different areas of transformation, as well as rigidifying the conceptualization, directionality, and imaginaries of violence. Additionally, if we refer to context, we realize that we are not only speaking about transnational historical and social events linked to a single cycle of feminist protest. We are also talking about a temporality with limits in its horizons of possibility to develop conflicts. We live in an era where the space and expectation for conversation are largely determined by the creation of political and social subjects digitally mediated in almost every area of everyday life. We also witness a historical legacy that has granted the victim’s position a particular and privileged space for being heard. Thus, the appropriation of pain as the protagonist emotion and the nomination of typologies of grievances become the clearest ways to demand justice and visibility. The ability to listen in a world with restricted yet simultaneously hyper-expansive codes, like social media, tends to resort to gimmicky and sensationalizing figures in the competition for visibility, without this automatically leading to a deep social understanding of the related phenomena. All of these contextual matters serve to remind us of the value of disagreements within the feminist movement as necessary for developing the type of conversation required. As Vera Gajardo points out, attention to these disagreements presents “a valuable opportunity to rescue feminist memory from its history, epistemology, underlying conflicts, and openness to new learnings” [52] (p. 21).

In this context, institutional and counter-institutional work unfolds to establish the feminist complaint within universities. The “failures” in the institutional process of gender institutionalization in universities often return the complaint to the same spaces created to address them.

The urgency that the term “violence” brought to universities is perhaps an important reason for having entered the “greater” university policy and politics, but, on the other hand, it generates expectations regarding the limits of institutional work in a framework where it is necessary to deal with an intermittent activation of conflicts without having the university community being fully committed to all the stages and moments of this process. Therefore, questions like the following seem pertinent: Is feminism as a framework sufficient to interpret the institutional conflicts related to the feminist irruption? What are the supports—and the clashes—that exist between government and administrative support (such as through Law 21.369 in Chile), and the internal complexity of university communities?

This work’s reflective invitation opposes the demand for immediate answers. On the contrary, we argue that incorporating complexity into evaluating a social movement’s effects will prioritize fostering a problematic conversation that remains open rather than leading to a hasty celebration of victories. Future interdisciplinary research may offer policy recommendations for higher education institutions.

A future investigation for the empirical validation and contrast of this model would focus on the analysis of the four proposed critical knots, exploring how they emerge and are addressed in different universities, as well as the differences in their institutional treatment. Furthermore, the strengths and weaknesses of gender institutionalization in relation to these demands would be examined, identifying possible shortcomings and opportunities for improvement.

The data collection techniques could include the analysis of institutional documents and press archives, semi-structured interviews with key actors in gender institutionalization, and engagement with students and groups affected by university policies. This would be complemented with discussion groups and participatory workshops to generate proposals and validate the findings.

This approach would allow for the empirical contrast of the model, identifying not only its applicability and validity but also the possible modifications that may arise from field research, contributing to the enrichment and expansion of the model.

This study sought to make visible the dissonances in the institutionalization processes of gender policies in Chilean universities, expressed through four analytical knots. These findings raise questions about how these policies are being implemented and the potential challenges involved.

Framing and delineating the key issues that need to be addressed is essential for tackling the complexity of institutional transformations of this magnitude. Such changes require concrete adaptations in institutional mechanisms and university policies, as well as profound cultural and political shifts. The collective, cross-cutting, and engaged efforts of university communities, together with a willingness to engage in dialog, deep listening, and openness to the dissonances that may emerge along the way, will enable the development of a meaningful institutional conversation.