taking back the streets women, youth, and direct democracy

[...]...prologue Taking Back the Streets At the end of the twentieth century in places ranging from Latin America and the Caribbean to Europe, the United States, South Africa, Nigeria, Iran, Japan, China, and South Asia, women and young people of both sexes demonstrated against injustices that they thought they could not confront in any other way Equating democracy with social justice, they took over the streets and. .. of the military coup that overthrew Allende and installed the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, another group of women, whose slogan was Democracy in the country and in the home,” attempted to discredit the dictatorship for its violence and extend the realm of freedom to the so-called domestic sphere Criticizing repression wherever it occurred, these women attempted to shame the dictatorship and the. .. promote them The contradictory uses of the term democracy owe a great deal to Cold War terminology.16 According to the National Security Doctrine of the United States, partially institutionalized in the School of the Americas in 1946 and the Truman Doctrine of 1947, the United States and its allies were locked in a struggle to the death with the Soviet Union Dividing the world between “communism” and democracy, ”... shooting at the workers For the first time that day, a group of citizens shot back The police raised a white flag, the shooting stopped, and the police bus sped to a nearby hospital with their wounded Later the police and soldiers returned and laid siege to the district Members of the original column filtered out in small groups, hiding their small cache of arms in an abandoned house Then the army invaded... inhibited them from regaining their sense of identity Agger realized that they were not the women they had been brought up to be: many had violated their ascribed roles as good daughters and mothers by engaging in politics Then the sense of purpose they felt as activists had de- Prologue 9 serted them, replaced by the shameful sense that they had contributed to their own suffering through their political... painting signs and murals, and otherwise performing in public in the hope of enhancing the common good It entails the transformation of public spaces, such as streets, plazas, courtrooms, and media outlets, into democratic spaces where people can express themselves and invite others to respond Direct or participatory democracy is a political theory in motion, worked out in the practices of the social movements... Identity and Justice against Oblivion and Silence) began to carry out escraches—rowdy and theatrical street demonstrations—to shame former torturers and their superiors Followed by the same sort of direct action in Chile (there the demonstrations were called funas), the escraches were intended to bring debates about democracy and justice out of hiding and into the public arena By turning the tables... “communist.”18 From the 1960s to the 1980s, priests and nuns, who made a commitment to the poor by teaching peasants to read or by providing medical care to landless workers, could be murdered as “communists.” The alternative to communism, according to the National Security Doctrine, was democracy. ” People on the right and the left both used the term Democracy could stand for their own candidates gaining... Consideration of the way women and young people make spectacles of themselves reveals how gender and generational identities contribute to demonstrators’ cultural repertoire and shape their political performances The view of political culture from the perspective of women and young people taking to the streets offers an opportunity to reverse the trend to divide gender and political studies and use the achievements... crush them I shared with my neighbors and friends a desire to talk, take photographs, and otherwise record what was happening Whether they called themselves feminists or activists, all of the women and young people in this book used their gender and generational identities strategically They acted out their versions of the truth in highly specific ways Suppressing references to the differences among them, . alt=""