More than Juanitas

“La señora Juanita” is a deep-rooted metaphor in the collective Chilean unconscious. It represents a universalization of women’s political experience in Chile: a visible and sexist image of the Chilean woman on which norms, policies and programs of “social aid” are based, and on which the political imaginary of all sectors is often centred.

Given the huge risk that conceptual figures like this could taint the constitutional debate, addressing this issue from a perspective that integrates gender, the constitution and ESCE offers an opportunity and a transformative space to deal with the endemic problems of social and economic injustice that affect women and a wide range of people in Chile, with a view to creating a constitutional text with a gender focus.

For this reason, various organisations with many years of experience in feminism or social rights have joined Distrito Global to share stories from Chilean women about how the new Constitution can change their life experiences. With their help, this initiative aims to identify the key elements to making the gender approach universal when it comes to all social rights, to help transform the ways in which these rights are understood and protected.