Reason and emotion: militant women in the dictatorships of the Southern Cone

Abstract

This work seeks to reflect upon the importance of emotions such as love, friendship and empathy in the involvement of women in the left-wing movements and resistance to dictatorships in the Southern Cone countries, from 1960 to 1980. At the same time, it reflects on the relationship between these emotions, seen as having a political agency, and the motives and choices seen as rational, such as «ideology», scientific and academic knowledge, readings, economic and social issues. The research is mainly based on a collection of oral history interviews, from the project «Gender, feminisms and dictatorships in the Southern Cone» of the Laboratory of Gender and History Studies of the Federal University of Santa Catarina, consisting of more than 200 interviews, carried out in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay. In those interviews, in a comparative and crossing way, I seek for the motivations for the involvement in the political movements in which the emotional components stand out very clearly. But they are always nuanced and legitimized by «rational» motivations, which justify them in the discourse elaborated by the interviewees. My goal here is to understand emotion as part of the political and historical process of the period.