Negotiating Gendered Discourses

Michelle Bachelet and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

It has been argued that the first presidential campaign of Michelle Bachelet in Chile and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in Argentina used a rhetoric of newness. Some political observers have said that as the “first women” to successfully run for the highest office in these countries, they were presented as the new faces of democracy. These observers argued that gender was not a determining factor in their electoral success, but the focus on this “first women” frame did generate heavily gendered criticisms of these two candidates. Negotiating Gendered Discourses addresses these views by asking how the gender factor is negotiated when women from the Southern Cone of Latin America run for high political office. In particular, Jane L. Christie examines how Bachelet and Fernández positioned themselves in relation to the numerous women-led social movements, and in doing so, reveals points of intersection between these contemporary political discourses and existing sources of female authority when negotiating complicated ideological debates about human rights, the economy, and women’s rights.