Feminist revolution: a fight for recognition, redistribution and a more just world

Decolonial Feminism and Practices of Resistance to Sustain Life: Experiences of Women Social Workers Implementing Mental Health Programmes in Chile

“…This is a matter of concern if we consider, as already mentioned, that the programme does not have care policies for their workers. Most of the interviewees state that care is understood by the programme as an individual responsibility of each workeran orientation very consistent with the capitalist-patriarchal-colonial logic that underlies state policy (Darat, 2021;Montanaro, 2017;Vivaldi & Sepúlveda, 2021). In fact, several participants report that in the face of the strong emotional burden of the professional intervention they have had to pay for therapeutic processes with their own resources, something that has been referred to by Baines et al (2020) as the emotional/personal costs of the intervention.…”

“…The findings presented here allow us to observe how the logics of patriarchal-colonial capitalism are experienced and contested by social workers implementing a mental health programme in Chile. The emphasis on functioning (working, to generate the money to survive) in the framework of neoliberal capitalism that is still at the heart of the Chilean model (Palacios-Valladares, 2022;Vivaldi & Sepúlveda, 2021) means that mental health is not a priority for users and workers. Nor does the programme, paradoxically, put life at the centre: it works at the expense of the material and emotional resources of the social workers.…”

“…In this article, we analyse the precariousness faced and the resistance exercised by women social workers in the implementation of a state mental health programme aimed to monitor and support impoverished, racialised women's adherence to mental health treatment. Drawing upon social work scholars’ contributions to the study of professional resistance (Baines, 2017, 2020; Carey & Foster, 2011; Fine & Teram, 2013; Strier & Bershtling, 2016; Wallace & Pease, 2011; Weinberg & Banks, 2019, among others), we propose in this article to look at women social workers’ professional resistance from the perspective of decolonial feminism and the approaches of sustainability of life (Carrasco, 2003) and feminised resistance (Motta, 2013), which have emerged as conceptual tools to comprehend the feminisation of poverty from patriarchal-colonial oppressions affecting women and dissident sexual orientations and non-hegemonic gender identities in the global south (Mohanty, 2010; Motta, 2018; Pérez-Orozco & Mason-Deese, 2022). This research is based on the assumption that despite the aspirations of scientific objectivity and political neutrality that since its origins and especially during the dictatorship have founded Chilean social work education, there are practices of professional resistance underpinned by the values of feminism that lead to a ‘border’ professional bond – a liminal space in Lugones’ (2021) words – that contains powerful strengths to challenge the everyday expressions of patriarchal-colonial capitalism in professional practice, but that are still silenced in the intellectual debates of academic social work in Chile.…”

“…Thus, the silence around the contributions of either feminism or decolonial thought in the social work literature produced in Chile in its almost one hundred years of history is not surprising, unlike the prolific feminist productions in other schools in the Latin American region and other parts of the world (Martínez & Agüero, 2021). In Chile, the incorporation of feminist approaches in social work has only taken place in the last ten years (Duarte, 2013), very possibly thanks to the strength of feminist movements that in the recent period have installed a powerful critique of the precariousness of life as a result of the neoliberal, patriarchal and colonial capitalism of the Chilean model (Palacios-Valladares, 2022;Perry & Borzutzky, 2022;Vivaldi & Sepúlveda, 2021). Although in the last decade, the debates around violence against women, female labour inclusion, intersectional perspectives, masculinities and LGTBIQ+ identities have increased in terms of publications in scientific journals and book chapters in social work (Muñoz Arce et al, 2021), the gap between these intellectual debates and the professional practice of social work is still wide (Duriguetto & Madeiros, 2018).…”