Samantha Ann Martin

This project examines how Chilean feminists use emotionally evocative discursive genres to bring relevance and salience to their social justice movements in public spaces. For example, posting a gender violence testimonial on social media might instigate feelings of pity, while chanting about police brutality at a rally may prompt anger. As activists produce or perform these affective genres, laypeople share them, politicians react to them, and the news media promote or discount them. This research identifies how these genres materialize across contexts, how form and meaning change when they do, and how they are evaluated as (not) meeting activist goals. Specifically, this project will investigate how these genres circulate across feminist contexts affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and a recent social uprising in Chile. The methodological approach involves twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork in Santiago, Chile, including participant observation at protests and meetings, interviews with activists and laypeople, and the analysis of a digital archive of affective genres. This project will contribute to anthropological understandings of how genre production, reception, and circulation are mediated by ideologies of language, emotion, and feminism as they intersect with Chilean structures of gender, race, and class.