Margarita Pisano


Margarita Pisano Fischer was a Chilean architect, writer, theoretician, and feminist belonging to the Movimiento Rebelde del Afuera.

Biography

Margarita Pisano Fischer was born in Punta Arenas, Chile on 28 October 1932.
She was one of the founders of La Casa de la Mujer La Morada, Radio Tierra, and Movimiento Feminista Autónomo. In addition, she was one of the founders of Movimiento Feminista, an opposition group to the Military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet where the slogan was "Democracy in the country, in the house and in the bed", a phrase promoted by Margarita and Julieta Kirkwood.
As with Francesca Gargallo, the work of Pisano demonstrated the theoretical proposals associated with the field of gender studies but from a feminist perspective away from political analysis and activism. This included one of the main criticisms of "patriarchal feminism", the problems of autonomy and independence of the feminist movement, and the institutionalization of gender advocated by traditional feminism.
Likewise, Pisano was one of the founders of the feminist group "Cómplices" that emerged in 1993, made up of Pisano, Edda Gaviola, Sandra Lidid, Ximena Bedregal, Rosa Rojas, Francesca Gargallo, and Amalia Fischer. They demanded recognition of the different forms of thinking and politics that existed within the feminist movement. Cómplices debuted in 1993 during the Sixth Latin American and Caribbean Feminist Meeting in El Salvador, manifesting itself, as described by Ximena Bedregal, one of the members of the group, as "a political and philosophical proposal in Chile and Mexico in the confluence of different processes, but with the central idea of recognizing that there are different feminisms, explaining the differences, including autonomy, and the construction of a feminist space from autonomy and radicality, as an exercise in the installation of a different speech, the political difference made explicit". Pisano and Bedregal's lesbian feminist writings in 1996-7 were credited with identifying a loss of radical feminism. Pisano died in Santiago, Chile, 9 June 2015.

Selected works