Final proyect: La mirada civilizadora

In the book Vírgenes viajeras: Diarios de religiosas francesas en su ruta a Chile, 1837-1874 (2000), Sol Serrano collects the diaries of several congregations of French nuns on their trip to Chile. Some of these nuns belonged to the Society of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, who traveled from Paris in 1852. The reason for this trip was to find convents of that order. During this journey, some of them wrote intimate letters-diaries with the details of their trips, their arrival to the new territory and their first encounters with the locals, but especially the difficulties they encountered on their way. The writing of these letters, as in other texts produced in the convents, was the product of a writing on request by the superior mothers or the priest of the congregations, who wanted to keep control of the sisters from a distance and inform the rest of the nuns of their activities. In my essay I will analyze how the nuns of the Congregation of the Sacred Heart of Jesus use the complaints to elaborate a civilizing vision about this new territory and its inhabitants in these diaries-letters. The complaint is used as a rhetorical tool in the text to inform the Church and her other sisters, who read her letters of the difficulties and dangers of this trip, since many died in the mountains.

On the other hand, in their letters they establish moral judgments in order to disqualify and minimize the other, like the black men and indigenous people who help them move from one place to another. I argue that this civilizing vision intents to divide the Chilean territory- social, moral and racial divisions- following an orderly structure that is directly referenced from Europe. In this paper I will use Chandra Monhanty's texts, "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses" and Descolonizing Methodologies by Linda Tuhiwai Smith, in order to answer the following questions:

1.How is this civilizing look elaborated?

2.What is the goal of this civilization?

They are white women who come to spiritually conquer the Chilean territory. From this position of supremacy they are elaborating a discussion in their diaries where they talk about the third world women, but at the same time they are part of a chain of oppression, since they must respond to the priests who ask them for a report of their activities. Through the texts of Chandra Monhanty, "Under Watern Eyes" and Descolonizing Methodologies of Linda Tuhiwai Smith I will try to show how these "imperial eyes" divide the territory, but also how they write from a privileged position from which they try to civilize these souls of the Third World.

Through Sara Ahmed's articles: "Complaint as Diversity Work" and "A Complaint Biography", I intend to delimit how the complaint works in the text as a form of denunciation and how the complaint is part of a story linked to silence, an attempt to discriminate and isolate the people who complain. However, these women were already in the periphery because of their sex, their status as religious and foreigners:

1.Can the complaint become a tool for decolonization? What is the purpose of the complaint in the text for the nuns and how is the complaint presented?