The draft Constitution presented by the members of the Constituent Convention of Chile contains the design of a regime of affective political control. Although at the moment it is just a collection of articles without the proper legislative structure, with many redundancies and contradictions, it is worth reading as it represents the culmination of the doctrine of the “awake” or “woke” left.
Although the constituent has good intentions and wants to correct previous and future injustices, the text reveals the desire to suppress the foundations of liberal democracy in which human beings are equal before the law, and to replace the equality of citizens with a fragmentation of “affective” identities and orientations.
This affective political regime has subjectivity as a paradigm. The rights, according to many of the articles proposed by the Chilean constituents, do not belong to all citizens (even if they say so), but to all those people who are defined or defined by the State in some way.
Sex-generic dissent
The most striking case is what has to do with gender identity. In the chapter on parity democracy it is stated that “the State recognizes and promotes a society in which women, men, gender diversity and dissidence participate in conditions of substantive equality, recognizing that their effective representation in the whole of the democratic process is a principle and minimum condition for the full and substantive exercise of democracy and citizenship”.
The idea of gender-generic diversities is understood, that is, the various forms of identification, beyond the duality of man, woman, or heterosexual and homosexual. But it is less obvious what is meant by “sex-generic dissent.” Dissent with respect to what or against what?
When the text refers to “substantive equality”, a term that is repeated in the project, it establishes that “the Constitution guarantees substantive gender equality, obliging itself to guarantee the same treatment and conditions for women, girls and diversities and dissent sex-gender women before all state bodies and civil society organization spaces”.
In this case, it seems that sex-generic dissidences are defined in opposition to the masculine. The text returns to “sex-gender dissidence” in the section on the right to a life free from gender-based violence, emphasizing that this is violence against women, girls and so-called sexual and gender dissidents. Here the implicit assumption is reaffirmed that the “dissidence” is with respect to the masculine, who would be the perpetuator of gender violence, as it is in fact in most cases.
A first conclusion is that in the draft of the possible future constitution the very vague category “sex-gender dissidence” was included in order to accommodate all possibilities of sexual behavior and gender identification beyond those known as masculine, feminine, homosexual, heterosexual. , bisexual, transgender, pansexual, non-sexual, etc.
The very idea of dissent also implies opposition to other sexual preferences or gender identification, especially male. A dissident would be any person who, based on their tastes, affections or passions, wants to be or do what they want, without suffering any discrimination, according to the Chilean constituent.
To this imprecise category of sex-generic dissidents must be added another in which women lose the biological exclusivity of being the only ones who can have another human being in their body and give birth.
In the chapter on sexual and reproductive rights it is written: “The State guarantees the exercise of sexual and reproductive rights without discrimination, with a focus on gender, inclusion and cultural relevance, as well as access to information, education, health and services and benefits. required for this, ensuring to all women and persons capable of childbearing the conditions for pregnancy, a voluntary termination of pregnancy, voluntary and protected childbirth and motherhood…”
Who are, besides women, people with gestational capacity? Pregnancy becomes an asexual process, emptied of its femininity.
Not citizens, but feelings
The constitutional text breaks with the distinction between public action and the individual space of feelings. Let us remember that the expedient of “mental illness” (that is, affective states) was used to suppress and imprison dissidents in fascist and communist totalitarianisms.
When the bill prescribes the right to identity, it says that “everyone has the right to the free development and full recognition of their identity, in all its dimensions and manifestations, including sexual characteristics, gender identities and expressions, name and sex-affective orientations”. “.
What differentiates sex-affective orientations from others? The only thing that seems different is the emphasis placed on the affective, that is, on the feeling as an identification variable.
In a formulation on the right to personal integrity that has a very laudable objective, such as the prevention of ill-treatment and torture, the text proposes that “Everyone has the right to physical, psychosocial, sexual and affective integrity…”.
How can psychosocial or affective integrity be regulated? What is the role of a State in the normalization of human subjectivity? The answer is, in principle, none. However, in the regime of affective political control, the State has an obligation to protect and shape feelings.
When talking about the right to equality and non-discrimination, the proposed article has an invasive character of the private sphere of affection: “In Chile there is no privileged person or group. All forms of slavery are prohibited. The right to protection against all forms of discrimination is guaranteed, especially when it is based on one or more grounds such as nationality or statelessness (sic), age, sex, sexual or affective orientation […] or any other social condition”.
The affective orientation is not easy to define, as the sentimental parameters have a great subjective load, they are variable and sometimes labile. And, in the case of “any other social condition”, it leaves the door open to capricious interpretations by state bureaucrats.
Adjectivize equality
Chilean constituents place a lot of emphasis on adjectives of equality as “substantive” or the “substantive” exercise of democracy.
However, equality should not be adjectival, as it includes all human beings without distinction. We are the same, period. As the Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaims in its first article: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights and, endowed as they are with reason and conscience, should behave fraternally towards one another”.
However, in the constitutional project, the “substance” of equality does not reside in its universal conception of the human, but in the disaggregation of the person according to purely subjective definitions. And it is precisely in the regulation of the subjective that the text grants great power to the State to implement a policy that decides which emotions are acceptable and which are not.
This project is symptomatic of a global trend in which a discourse that fragments the very conception of the human being is imposed. This discourse penetrates all institutions and dissolves the person into micro-identities that depend on the moods of the powerful who, vigilantly, will persecute and re-educate those who do not fit into the affective molds prescribed by their “true” doctrine.
*Translation from Spanish by Giulia Gaspar.
