“We Wanted to Change the World, but the World Changed Us”: Performativity and Regulatory Power in University Gender Protocols

Abstract

This article analyzes the protocolization of gender in Chilean universities as a result of the institutionalization of feminist student demands in 2018. Taking concepts from Judith Butler's theory of performativity, the argument that is developed is that protocols are normative regulations that they obey power formations and hegemonic versions of conceptualizing the female subject, and whose lack of examination, entails the risk of re-naturalizing practices and operations of exclusion derived from the political regime of heterosexuality. Likewise, the protocolization of sexual violence, its objectification in legal procedures and the hegemony of a semantics of the fact, although it responds to a need to provide greater security to the members of the university community under consensual criteria, also runs the risk of be strictly reduced to a legal problem in which the broader dimension of violence such as gender relations and the political regime of heterosexuality, the question of ethics and collective responsibility are blurred under a rationale of individual responsibility typical of the (neo) liberal logics that feminism has deeply questioned in recent decades.