It was a long, difficult process for the Chilean and Argentine states to incorporate Patagonia’s vast territory into their nations, due to cross-border land disputes, multiple waves of conflict with indigenous peoples, and the distance of the region from the metropoles of Santiago and Buenos Aires. To compensate for this, postcolonial elites—as they sustained a campaign of expansion into the region’s supposed lebensraum—felt the need to project their power backward in time, such that Patagonia’s place as part of those nations could gain the legitimacy of tradition and longevity.

This talk will read these authoritarian, nationalist discourses of chronotopic linkage and geopolitical expansionism—“we have a right to this place now, and (because) we always have”—against the grain. Citing the work of Latin American feminist thinkers who have used geopolitical rhetoric to critique colonial domination, it will examine the connections made in a series of Argentine and Chilean cultural texts across three moments in recent history in which Patagonia has been associated with genocide: the massacres of indigenous people in the late 19th century, the region’s persistent associations with Nazism, and dictatorship-era campaigns of geopolitical expansionism and political banishment in the 1970s and 80s.

By countering these instances of geopolitical expansionism with an ethic of feminist expansiveness, this talk posits that anti-authoritarian cultural production in and about Patagonia offers alternate forms of connectivity and community.