Following the brutal Neo-Nazi attack of a young gay man, Daniel Zamudio in March this year, yesterday the Chilean Congress approved an anti-discrimination law.

Nationally and internationally, social organisations have been campaigning for an anti-discrimination law to be passed in Chile for seven years, heightened after the assault. The law was fast tracked by President Sebastian Pinera following the 24-year old’s death.

After seven years of opposition from Chile’s political right, the law was passed in the Senate with a 25-3 vote. Previously, the bill had been passed in the Chilean Chamber of Deputies, with 90 votes in favour and 16 against.

The new law states that it is a criminal offence to discriminate against race, ethnicity, nationality, political opinion, religious beliefs sexual orientation, gender, illness, handicap and appearance, among other motives.

The move has been criticised by certain churches, but has elsewhere been viewed as cultural leap for Chile where discrimination is prevalent.

Chilean courts are now investigating Zamudio’s death, though the four attackers have denied his murder as well as their Neo-Nazi involvement. Zamudio died after he was tortured by four attackers who branded his body with the Nazi symbol.

 

In a recent Quilmes advertisement by advertisement agency Young & Rubicam, a battle is staged between the sexes, with male and female leaders spurring on their respective flag-bearing, animated ‘tribes’. The woman shouts to her clan “We’ve come a long way…do you want to return to not having the vote?”, while her male counterpart retorts “men have reached the moon and now we can’t even get to 10pm” without having to deal with female issues.

Tired of losing his male ‘authenticity’, he rallies his troops with a vengeance. Sticks are waved, chests are bared, hair braids are shed and tribal marks are daubed on with lipstick, in preparation for battle. But in the ultimate of bathetic moments, the battle dissipates into passionate embraces with the tagline “when machismo and feminism meet (later adjusted to ‘men and women’), equality is born.”

Aside from the tangentiality of Argentina’s iconic brand in the staged reconciliation of these age-old social movements, the advertisement serves to reinscribe essential notions of gender, all too common in the advertising industry in Latin America. Rather than reaching a compromise between alternative agendas, as one would conjecture from the tagline, the implicit conclusion of the advert is that when women are put back in their place – in the sanctioned world of domesticity – society, and by extension, one is lead to assume, consumerism thrives.

An Imported Ideal 

In a country which generates myriad cultural myths, and which remains in thrall to European ideals, according to Sharon Haywood, founder of Any-Body Argentina, it comes as no surprise that advertising is thriving in Argentina. With a 20% increase in the last five years alone, Argentina currently holds claim to have the fastest growing advertising industry worldwide, according to statistics from MagnaGlobal.

The Argentine internet is, accordingly, an assault cause of prurient pop-up boxes, which require so much clicking and manoeuvring

that, by the time the viewer reaches any pertinent information, their attention span is already besieged by commercial plugs, multiplying their needs exponentially.

As print editions of newspapers continue to decline, overtaken by the web’s ceaseless wellspring of information, the media has become more dependent than ever on the revenue of an industry whose intrusive techniques and subliminal messages are in direct

contradiction to the seemingly transparent agenda they uphold.

According to Haywood, the predominance of advertising in this country is intimately related to the propensity of Argentines to look to Europe as its cultural mirror.

“We in the west have exported this perfect image of beauty….and Argentina is a prime example of how that image has been imported and manipulated to an extreme.”

Take the recent L’Oreal advertisement which sets up the old-style glamour of Cannes with the tagline “All that, Argentine women have it too.” According to Haywood, this imported ideal serves as an indicator of allegiance to European models and as a determinant of social status.

For the sociologist and historian Dora Barrancos, exporting western images is an integral tool in the mechanics of globalisation, obsessively drawing attention to alternative, stylised worlds.

The white, fair-haired, western figures which confront the passerby from magazine stand and advertising billboard alike, argues Haywood, have few natural counterparts on the capital’s ethnically diverse streets. It is perhaps unsurprising that the world’s first store dedicated to Barbie, frequently held up as the Trojan horse of western influence, was launched in Buenos Aires in 2007. And that plastic surgery, often included in personal health plans, has become a national phenomenon.

Insistently, the message propagated by the press is that “the key to happiness lies in reproducing this aesthetic ideal and in successfully nailing down a man.”

The demand for beauty in Argentina is insatiable. As in Catherine Hakim’s mantra of erotic capital, beauty – in its marketised form – is all too often equated with instant success.

Images of women baring-it-all in suggestive poses are the currency of television, advertising and the printed press. The country has imported the western world’s fixation with Andy Warhol’s ready-made celebrity culture and transformed it into something more unsettling. Television dancing contests are morphed into prurient, titillating strip tease, with a camera that obsessively zooms in on silicone-enhanced assets.

The whole notion of personality, individuality and uniqueness are subsumed within a standardised maxim that the body is an asset to be exploited. Women are, accordingly, expected not only to emulate, but to exhibit a model-like physique, air-brushed to perfection.

Digitally or surgically enhanced, this ideal exists solely as a construct, a profitable commodity exploited by the supremely powerful fashion, beauty and diet industries.

“This is a society that is constantly telling you that you need to fix something physically about yourself,” says Haywood. The hypersexualisation of images of women in the media serves not only to objectify the fairer sex, but to systematically discredit their sexuality.

Media Straitjackets 

In The World Conference of Women in Beijing in 1995, attended by representatives from 189 countries, communication was considered to be a fundamental area in the advancement of gender equality.

The media, it was decided, should “develop, in terms that do not conflict with freedom of expression, professional directives and codes of conduct, and other forms of self-regulation, to promote unstereotypical images of women and increase the participation of women involved in decision making in the media.”

Ethics do not yet appear to have entered the media agenda in Argentina. Whilst European adverts have at least registered the need to address the ethnically and physically diverse characteristics of 99.9% of its consumers, albeit it in often self-congratulatory guises, Argentina still remains culturally enthralled by an exclusive, exclusionary ideal of beauty.

“All countries, and Latin American countries in particular, are profoundly contradictory,” says Barrancos. “Argentina remains backward in its representation of women, whilst in the legislative field, it has become very dynamic.”

According to Barrancos, since the restoration of democracy in the 1980s, Argentina has made significant advances in achieving a certain level of parity between the sexes. A number of critical laws have been passed in Congress in recent years, safeguarding and sanctioning female rights. Law 26,485, passed in November 2009, includes several critical  clauses prohibiting the publication and dissemination of images and messages in the media which “naturalise the subordination of women.”

But, Barrancos argues, there has “not been a strong, concerted effort to address the treatment of women in the media” on a social level.

“Second-wave feminism never happened in Argentina because we were too occupied with social revolution… As a result female objectification and the marketisation of the body has not come into focus.”

President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner famously sought to distance herself from the term feminism during her 2007 election campaign, declaring that she was “feminine, not feminist,” with the implicit suggestion that the two attributes were incompatible.

More recently, following a bombardment of media scrutiny, she has at least conceded that women face significant discrimination in the press on a daily basis.

For academic Carolina Escudero, the election of a female president and the significant increase in female deputies (41%) is a significant step in motivating Argentine women with the belief that they too can attain positions of power.

The ‘quota law’, a positive discrimination bill to promote female representation in legislative offices, was passed in 1991, making Argentina the first country to require a minimum number of female candidates in political parties. The law stipulates that for every two male parliamentary candidates, there has to be at least one female, thus affirming women as active agents in public policy.

But, Escudero argues, “there is a tendency to treat women in positions of power as celebrities.” By focusing on their physical attributes, the media systematically demeans and disqualifies these women from occupying the same status accorded to their male counterparts.

Haywood concurs. Having been dubbed the “queen of botox” by the opposition, “if anything, [the portrayal of] the president reinforces the standard.”

According to statistics from the World Association for Christian Communication (WACC), a biannual study which analyses gender inequality in mass media, only 24% of news stories feature a woman as the protagonist. And when women do feature in news stories, most frequently they are represented as victims (36%), according to a study conducted by ELA.

“Developed and undeveloped countries are both faced with the same problem” of under- or mis-represented women in the media, says Escudero.

“Women are frequently treated as pure decoration, as accessories to male protagonists. Only very rarely does a woman make a televised appearance in which she is consulted or asked to impart knowledge.”

The media is still a man’s world. “The fact that more women are visible in the workforce,” says Escudero, “does not necessarily correlate to a change in the quality and content of those media. When you do find women in managerial positions, they have often adopted a masculine perspective.”

“We need women who are prepared to bring a gender perspective to bear in terms of image and content, if we are to change that.”

The A la PAR network and the recently closed Artemisa Noticias have been collectively instrumental in providing alternative gender-based forums to the male-dominated mass media.

Over the past seven years, Artemisa has brought a gender perspective to bear on the mass media, drawing attention to the slant of the reportage, language usage and image selection. Besides training and sensitising more than 600 journalists and officials in Latin America, it held the first national conference on media coverage and access to abortion in 2008. A section of Artemisa’s team will continue to work under the newly launched organisation, Communication for Equality.

“It is undeniable that your culture or environment is going to affect your own perceptions,” says Haywood. Like her colleague, the British psychotherapist Susie Orbach, founder of Endangered Species, she argues that the monopoly of visual culture in contemporary society has resulted in a morphed, narrow concept of femininity.

“Society, of all ages, learns more from the media than any other single source of information,” according to an Artemisa study. The paucity of real women, of identifiable role models, inevitably conditions social and behavioural mores.

For Haywood, our current warped model leads to a dysfunctional relationship with the body. Divesting it of its practical and creative function, it is reduced to a fetish, a cultural artefact subject to the whims of the marketplace.

A recent study conducted by the lingerie brand Triumph, revealed that 87% of Argentine women are not happy with their bodies. Far from democratising beauty, the objectification of the female body by the mass media results in a propensity to self-objectify in a radically disempowering process.

In a mediated culture, representation is everything. “There is a still a real backwardness in the press.” says Escudero. “All too often you see images of nude women which have no bearing on the story they accompany.”

“The decree to ban Rubro 59 was a critical step, but much remains to be done,” says Barrancos. “Our problem is cultural, not legislative. But there needs to be strong intervention by the state to raise consciousness and regulate the marketisation of our media.”

After 25 days struggling in hospital, Daniel Zumudio, the man who was left brain dead by a Neo-Nazi attack on 6th March, died on Tuesday after a complication in brain surgery.

The 24-year old was brutally attacked by four young men between the ages of 19 and 26, who have been identified by an anonymous phone call to the police. The attack was fuelled by homophobia, and the group branded his body with the Nazi symbol. They also ripped off part of his ear and tortured him.

His death has provoked a moral outcry in Chile and demand for an anti-discrimination law to be implemented.

Speaking from his visit to Asia, the Chilean president Sebastián Piñera condemned the attack. “The brutal and cowardly attack and death of Daniel Zamudio hurts not only his family but also all those people with good will.”

He assured that “his death would not go unpunished” and that the Chilean government is united against discrimination.

Human rights organisations have pointed to Chile’s seven-year rejection of an anti-discrimination law as blame for the attack. The family’s lawyer Jaime Parada has named the Chilean deputies as “morally guilty” for the attack.

Chilean deputies have pushed through an emergency anti-discrimination law. In the meantime, the four attackers will be sent to trial within 90 days.

A homosexual US citizen and journalist, Chandler Burr, has been told he can adopt two Colombian boys aged 10 and 13, after authorities originally took the children away due to his sexual orientation.

The adoption was finalised in March 2011 but the boys were removed from Burr’s care after the writer casually mentioned he was gay.

Head Colombian bishop, Juan Vicente Cordoba, told the Colombian daily newspaper, El Tiempo, that Burr has a “disorder of sexual identity” which will have repercussions on his relationship with the male children. Though homosexuality was removed from the Psychological manual DSM in 1994, Cordoba argues that homosexuality is universally agreed to be a disorder.

“I do not know him and I am not accusing him of anything, but one thing is clear and that is that he has homosexual tendencies and he is going to receive a boy of 10-years-old and an adolescent of 13, and between them there won’t be a father-son relationship,” he said. “He will receive two children at an age when they may be attractive to him, which could be a temptation”.

The bishop continued to argue that is was not advisable to allow a homosexual man to adopt male children, and that female children may have been safer given the ‘circumstances’.

General Director of the family welfare institute (ICBF), Diego Molano, told the newspaper Colombia Reports that the minors will benefit from living with their adoptive father in the US.

Buenos Aires is a cosmopolitan place. It described by the website www.thegayguide.com.ar as “probably one of the most open-minded cities in Latin America” and both the international press and the national government have advertised the Argentine capital as “gay friendly”. To a certain extent, this acceptance of sexual diversity does not just apply to the gays and lesbians, but also to the trans community. As Sam Walker reported for The Argentina Independent, the presence of transsexual and transvestite prostitutes in the Bosques de Palermo are a recognised, and widely accepted, feature of the city.

But despite the acceptance of trans prostitutes in certain districts, discrimination against transsexuals is still rife. María Rachid, president of the Argentine Federation of Gays Lesbians Bisexuals and Trans (FALGBT) emphasises the “extreme exclusion and marginalisation” of the trans community.

She describe how “when they’re about 12 years old they are thrown out of their homes…they are on the street and are only able to access prostitution. They can’t continue their studies. They can’t get a job. This means that they also don’t have access to public health. They have an average life expectancy of 35 years.”

Over the past 20 years, the discrimination has given birth to a political movement. The Argentine Association of Transsexuals, Transvestite and Transgenders (ATTTA) and the FALGBT are two groups that campaign nationally for transsexual rights.

Both organisations went to the national congress on the 31st March this year to lobby for the introduction of two new laws: one which would make it easier for transsexuals to change the name and gender on their official documents, and another that would broaden healthcare coverage for the community. However, despite limited progress that has already been made, Claudia Pía Baudracco, head of ATTTA, tells me: “there’s still a great fight to be fought.”

While acknowledging limited progress in the present, Baudracco is damning in her description of how transsexuals were treated in the past: “There were years of genocide, of trans-phobic deaths…the great scourge of not being able to access healthcare…today we have been able to overcome some of these obstacles that were a bane to our community.”

She describes how the greatest advances have been made in terms of the visibility of the community: “Twenty years ago we didn’t have the right to go out in public, to do what we’re doing now, to do an interview in a public space.”

There have also been improvements in access to general healthcare and HIV/AIDS treatment. However, although Baudracco acknowledges Argentina has made progress on a “social and cultural” level she also argues: “In many cases this social and cultural change, if it’s not backed up by legislation that protects it, results in obstacles.”

ATTTA, the group that Baudracco leads, fights for the rights of the trans community in three main areas: education, health and civil rights. Baudracco describes how, at present “a girl of 12, 13 or 14, when she begins to show her identity as a trans woman, is completely shut out by the system, both the education system and the health system.”

The ATTTA leader places special emphasis on the importance of improving access to education, saying that she herself was thrown out of school at 13, and only went back to complete her secondary education in 2005. Afterwards she went on to study at university, but she stresses that it is “a minority” of transsexuals who manage to complete secondary education, let alone reach university.

Access to proper healthcare is also a concern. One of the achievements of the trans movement over the past 20 years has been in improving access to HIV/AIDS treatment and general healthcare. Because most transsexuals cannot find work apart from prostitution, the community has been hit particularly hard by the epidemic. Baudracco explains that many fellow transsexuals died because they didn’t receive proper treatment. Now the access to anti-retroviral drugs has improved radically but the right to other types of health care, including feminising treatments and sex reassignment surgery, is still limited.

At present, in order to undergo a sex change operation, transsexuals still need the special authorisation of a judge and a doctor, which can take years to win. Baudracco describes how this unfulfilled need, “leads to shoddy, back street (medical) practices and… the use and abuse not just of hormones, but of hormones and silicon,” which in itself is dangerous.

Baudracco and Rachid both argue that the best way to resolve these issues is for the Argentine government to acknowledge transsexuals’ rights as citizens. With this aim in mind, both ATTTA and FALGBT went to congress on 31st March to campaign for a “law of gender identity”. The bill is modelled on a Spanish law that came into force in March 2007, which allows transsexuals to change their official details and undergo sex change surgery without the ruling of a judge.

Marcela Romero, transsexual rights campaigner, member of ATTTA and vice president of the FAGLBT argues that politicians have a responsibility to pass the bill and “to recognise us as the people and the citizens that we are.” Romero made news last year when she won a legal battle to be able to change the name that appeared on her national id card. However, although she was obviously pleased with the judge’s decision, she emphasised to the press that not many other transsexuals were in a position to appeal to the courts for their rights, and that it was “essential to resolve this legal vacuum”.

Baudracco not only agrees that she is not represented by the government, she also asserts that the state actively legitimises and participates in discrimination against transsexuals. She says that the “neo-liberal model” of Argentina politics fosters the rule of an elite and perpetuates a reactionary conservative government. She accuses religious groups of being in connivance with the political right wing, saying that they “hide behind religious fundamentalism so that the far right in Argentina can continue in power.”

Baudracco also dismisses conservative opposition as deeply hypocritical, saying that the social groups that block pro-transsexual legislation are the same ones who see transsexual prostitutes in Palermo. She says that even though Christian groups call her “‘unnatural’…for me ‘unnatural’ means being a man, the father of a family, with a typical home, and having children, and then going out to have sexual relations with a transvestite.”

She also points the finger of blame in particular at the police. She describes the security forces as rife with corruption and she accuses them of assaulting and exploiting the trans community. She also describes police negligence: “there are many cases of murders with regulation weapons issued to the security forces. The cases are never cleared up, where they always try to wipe out all types of evidence and don’t investigate them.”

Baudracco even compares the marginalisation of the trans community to “the Armenian genocide” and says that the government displays “attitudes very similar to Hitler’s”. “It would be much more direct to make us face a firing squad and kill us all, than to deny us education, work, heath and a place to live with dignity. I think that’s an even greater genocide,” she states.

With such strong language being used, it is obvious that transsexual rights are a controversial political topic. However, on another level, they are also a deeply personal issue, which don’t have to do with state, but with the individual.

Baudracco emphasises that her gender identity is up to her, and the only thing that should matter to the government is that she’s an Argentine citizen: “I can’t go through my life taking down my trousers to show whether I’m a transvestite, a transsexual or a transgender. First of all I’m a person.”