The "She-Land", social consequences of the sexualized construction of landscape in North Patagonia

Abstract

This article voices a perspective founded in gender geography and regional history, through the study of the symbolic constitution of core and peripheral areas inside Chile and Argentina. The area focused in this analysis is the Patagonian territory, an area of unequal integration. This study aims to reveals the use of female stereotyped metaphors as the basis for territorial subalternity. At this point, revision of Patagonian history shows that this construction of landscape is related to territorial integration, and could have been seen as gender ideology because of the metaphors involved in the State´s arguments. This idea is illustrated with an ongoing nationalist discourse established in Patagonian since the 1930s, which operates as a permanent patriarchal reference and allows the projection of gender metaphors in land. It also takes an actual feminine experience, which shows how recognizing the problem behind the construction of landscape, the geographical and historical patriarchal order is questioned. As a result of this process, the possibility of argue against the subordination of the region emerges from highlighting feminine metaphors of land and feminine praxis, which nowadays confront both the landscape´s official interpretation and an unequal access to resources.