“I have every right to burn and break. I’m not going to ask anyone’s permission, because I’m breaking for my daughter. And whoever wants to break, let them break, and whoever wants to burn, let them burn, and whoever doesn’t, don’t bother us.”[1]

—Yessenia Zamudio, mother of María de Jesús Jaime Zamudio, who was a victim of femicide in Mexico in 2016

After months of intermittent work due to the COVID-19 related lockdown, the Colectivo Malvestidas (Poorly Dressed Collective) took to the streets on December 19, 2021 to call out and repudiate the true pandemic that is machismo, a learned way of projecting masculinity that demonstrates superiority over women.

This date is the official Chilean National Day Against Femicide, and commemorates the death of six-year-old Javiera Neira, who was murdered by her father when she tried to defend her mother from his attempt to kill her. The Coordinadora 19 de Diciembre, an activist organization against femicide, promoted this project in the Senate, which was approved unanimously by the National Congress in 2018 and became Law 21, 28 on November 10, 2020. The law establishes the dignity of femicide victims and recognizes the contribution of feminist movements in the fight against sexist violence[2] in the country (Diario Oficial, 2020).

In Chile, as in other parts of the world, the pandemic revealed and aggravated the already-present gender inequities and social emergencies endemic to contemporary society. At the local level, in 2020, calls to the “help line”[3] for domestic violence increased by more than 70% compared to the previous year (Fuentes, 2020). Women have experienced situations of violence and abuse with unusual cruelty, where they are supposed to be safe. The greatest danger, then, has been in their own homes.

The action took place in the so-called Plaza de la Dignidad (Former Plaza Baquedano) in Santiago, one of the main sites for protests in Chile since the popular revolt of October 18, 2019 to date.[4]

Performance A(R)MADAS by Colectivo Malvestidas. Plaza de la Dignidad (Former Plaza Baquedano), Santiago, Chile, December 19, 2020. Photo: Rodrigo Arenas @ggarbanzos. Makeup: Marcos Zamora @efecto_sedante.

The intervention constitutes the third and final part of a creative project that lasted for several months during the lockdown. We started by collecting kitchen towels used by female family and friends. Then, on different days, we made the uniform of “domestic fighters,” with a nod to the samurai warriors. No kitchen cloth was altered or modified; we preserved each towel’s shape. The use of these domestic cloths alludes to the kitchen as a political space, where a historically denigrated and feminized activity takes place. These towels thus gain importance in the performance, and when sutured together, compellingly resignifies each piece’s intimate, domestic form into a large-scale public site of militant protest. 

Performance process, making clothing. Colectivo Malvestidas, Centro Cultural Balmaceda Arte Joven, Santiago, Chile, December 2020.

In Chile, the COVID-19 crisis (beginning in 2020) occurs in the midst of the social, political, and cultural turmoil that began months earlier with the popular revolt, which in turn led to a historic constituent process.[5] The protests and uprisings against the neoliberal economic model[6] that has subjected the country to the tyranny of the capitalist market were not silenced despite the lockdown. Personal stories of domestic struggles and feminist demands proliferated across social networks through actions promoted mainly by women, with the purpose of supporting themselves in situations of multidimensional vulnerability increased by the novel coronavirus. Considering that we had all been prohibited from public space and therefore constrained to domestic space, as the Colectivo Malvestidas we speculated about the meaning that Carol Hanisch’s 1969 famous sentence “the personal is political” acquires in this context.

The kitchen symbolizes the historical marginalization of women from the public space, hindering their political and social representation and participation (Benavente, Espinace and Rojas, 2021). Since the 1970s, feminist art has been able to account for and problematize this reality. Seminal works include Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975) and Birgit Jürgenssen’s Housewives’ Kitchen Apron (1975). In Latin America, the documentary directed by the Brazilian artist Beatriz Mira based in Mexico, Vicios de la cocina, las papas silban (1978), is an especially significant example.

During the pandemic, the self-managed and clandestine preparation of “ollas comunes”[7] (common pots) proliferated throughout the country (Pleyers, 2021). This survival strategy is deeply rooted in the memory of the working- class struggle and is led again mostly by women who integrate and/or provide food to a marginalized and vulnerable population (ONU Mujeres y Vértice Urbano, 2021). This constitutes an eloquent case of how the kitchen can become a space for social articulation and subversion.

The act of taking the kitchen out into the street and collectivizing it also makes the domestic political — it removes the kitchen from its historic isolation to turn it into an open and public place. We believe that this enables the recognition and problematization of its deeply rooted violence.

Since 2016, we have been engaged in the so-called “new feminist wave” in Chile by both theorizing and exhibiting the aesthetic and political uses of clothing in the intervention strategies by collectives and gender-sex dissidents and women who “from intuition”[8] are committed to feminist causes. 

Protesters attribute an intention and a function to clothing, that is, they “activate” it as objects with agency (Cuba, 2021). In doing so, they expand the material limits of clothing and intervene in both the affective and corporeal experience of activism while also producing archetypal images that function as visual experiences of the enactments. The political activation of clothing has been key in the construction of ephemeral communities, in the rearticulation of the idea of protest and, above all, in the rejection of neoliberal patriarchal capitalism.

From our perspective, the performance Un violador en tu camino (A rapist in your path) by the feminist collective LASTESIS and the actions of the women self-convened as Capuchas rojas en resistencia (Red hood who resists) are part of this movement locally, to name a couple of examples. In May 2018 hundreds of women gathered in  downtown Santiago with their heads covered in glitter, feathers, sequins and pearls. Some did it alone, others grouped, but all shouted at the same time “No more discrimination and gender violence in universities.” They were the hooded feminists who were carrying out — unknowingly — the greatest feminist uprising in the history of the country. On November 25, 2019, a month after the popular revolt began, La marcha más grande de Chile (The biggest march of Chile) was held with about 1,200,000 people participating. This date is also the commemoration of the Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, and taking this into consideration the hooded feminists, now under the name of Capuchas rojas en resistencia, marched demanding the consecration of women rights, better access to power and that the new constitution is written with parity. While this garment has become a symbol of “the new feminist wave,” the Government intends to punish its use by modifying the Penal Code to establish greater penalties for those who cover their faces in contexts of mobilizations.

On November 25, simultaneously in front of the Courts of Justice Palace of Santiago, more than 2,000 women participated in the intervention Un violador en tu camino by LASTESIS. Dressed in “party” clothes, the women perform a choreography singing an incisive song in opposition to patriarchy, the main forms of violence women encounter and the lack of justice. Survivors of sexual assault are frequently asked what they were wearing when they report the situation. Through the resignification of clothing to produce a specific discourse, LASTESIS criticizes society and the executive and judicial powers for becoming complicit in the crimes committed with impunity by highlighting clothing as an instigator of crime.

Interventions and activist performances of this type are taking place throughout Latin America. The collective Mujeres Creando from Bolivia dressed the statue of Isabel la Católica in La Paz with Indigenous women’s clothing on October 12, 2020 (Columbus Day). This intervention challenges how Spanish colonialism established the figure of the white woman as an ideal model of beauty and virtue. This pernicious, racialized construction of femininity continues to circulate in Latin American societies and discriminates against the non-white woman. Years before on March 8, 2015, and some 6,000 kilometers away, a group of fifteen-year-old girls took to the city streets of Ecatepec, Mexico to protest against femicides, resignifying the quinceañera and the “princess party dress” in a intervention that confronts the State and society. Their dresses were dirty, torn, and bloody, alluding to the bodies that are victims of the crudest expression of sexist violence: femicide. The action was coordinated by their teacher Manuel Amador, as part of the workshop Women, Art, and Politics at the secondary school they attended at the time.

We suggest that these interventions are articulated by the Latin American political and social realities and particular feminist agendas in which they are situated; the political appropriation and occupation of public space; and the way in which clothes are re-signified, where manual techniques (sewing, embroidery, knitting, etc.) associated with the feminine space prevail. These actions are part of a broader panorama, in which clothing has been politicized in different ways. Emblematic cases are, from a historical perspective, the Suffragettes (late nineteenth and early twentieth century), the Black Panthers (1966–1982), and more recently, the Pussyhat movement (2017), the female celebrities dressed in all black at Golden Globe in recognition of Time’s Up/#MeToo (2018), and the Black Lives Matter movement (2020).

However, the presentation and reflection on this creative project, also seeks to rethink the narratives historically excluded by fashion studies. The discipline continues to overlook the ways in which clothing in Latin America is problematized beyond the perspective of Eurocentrism. The euro-centric gaze of fashion presents Latin America, as well as other territories that have also been a bastion of colonialist thought and action, as a place that possesses culture, but is denied as a legitimate place of production of knowledge. In this way Latin America exists in this gaze, but without Latin America in actuality/reality, rather it focuses on an exteriority that displaces practices, popular community knowledge, and long-term memories, which are practices that nurture individual and collective identities that have one of their most significant expressions in clothing.

The current feminist movements in Chile give shape to a “political moment” that is essential to theorize, and as Colectivo Malvestidas we amplify the agitating, subversive, and provocative function that clothing has occupied in this context. Clothing, after all, is one of our “weapons” for simultaneously dismantling dominant and oppressive discourses and developing critical disruptive and counter-hegemonic discourses.

Backstage, prior to the Malvestidas performance in the public space. December 19, 2020. Photo: Rodrigo Arenas @ggarbanzos. Makeup: Marcos Zamora @efecto_sedante.

Benavente Aliaga, D, Espinace, D, and Rojas, J. (2021). La representación política de las mujeres en Chile desde el derecho a sufragio a la paridad de género. UNIVERSITAS. Revista de Filosofía, Derecho y Política, Vol. 38, pp 218-248. Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Recovered from: https://e-revistas.uc3m.es/index.php/UNIV/article/view/6585 [5 december 2022]. 

Colectivo Mujeres Creando. (2019). Plaza Chola Globalizada. Recovered from: (38) Plaza Chola Globalizada - YouTube [March 22, 2022]. 

Cuba, L. (2021). Activar para relacionar: algunas reflexiones sobre un proceso de creación y activación de objetos vestibles. In Javiera Núñez and Colectivo Malvestidas (Eds.) Moda y Poder. Santiago: Enhorabuena Editorial.

Fuentes, A. (2020). Violencia de género: la pandemia que viven las mujeres en cuarentena. Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Recovered from: Violencia de género: la pandemia que viven las mujeres en cuarentena - Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (uc.cl) [March 3, 2022].

Ley 21.282. Por la cual se declara el 19 de diciembre de cada año como el Día Nacional Contra el Femicidio. 10 de noviembre de 2020. D.O. No. 42.801. Recovered from: https://colegioabogados.cl/ley-n-21-282-diario-oficial-electronicomartes-10-de-noviembre-de-2020/ [5 december 2022]

Mora, J and Varea, F. (2021). Día Nacional Contra el Femicidio: nueve mujeres se han suicidado por violencia de género entre 2016 y 2021. CIPER Chile. Recovered from: Día Nacional Contra el Femicidio: nueve mujeres se han suicidado por violencia de género entre 2016 y 2021 - CIPER Chile [March 3, 2022].

ONU Mujeres y Vértice Urbano. (2021). El rol de las mujeres en las iniciativas solidarias y de ayuda en contexto de crisis de COVID 19: Composición y características de organizaciones de la sociedad civil que entregan respuesta humanitaria. ONU Mujeres y Vértice Urbano. Recovered from: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MNrP4DzBj4PpRaMT2y1qrRf1IivPzraK/view  [November 29, 2022].

Pleyers, G. (2021). Movimientos sociales y ayuda mutua frente a la pandemia. Revista Latinoamericana de Políticas y Acción Pública, Vol. 8 No 1, pp 9-22. FLACSO Ecuador. Recovered from: https://www.academia.edu/49123806/Ayuda_mutua_y_movimientos_sociales_frente_a_la_pandemia [November 29, 2022].

Zamudio, J. (2020). Me mataron a mi hija, no hagan un maldito circo. Recovered from: (38) ““Me mataron a mi hija, no hagan un maldito circo”” - YouTube [March 22, 2022]. 

Author Bios

Article Citation

Poblete, Tamara, and Loreto Martínez. “Colectivo Malvestidas (Poorly Dressed Collective): Critical Practices in Fashion, Clothing, and the Body.” State of the Field, special issue of Fashion Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, 2023, pp. 1-16, https://www.fashionstudies.ca/colectivo-malvestidas/, https://doi.org/10.38055/SOF010105.