Eagerly blond: Screening fantasies of whiteness in José Antonio Kast’s Chile

This article examines four works of recent Chilean cinema and visual culture to critique the racial undertones, in existence since before the foundation of the republic, that inflect the socioeconomic inequalities inherent to daily life there. By analysing the elements of fantasy inherent to the construction of a racially homogeneous chilenidad with which all citizens can supposedly identify (and which aligns with the interests of the country’s elites), I offer a genealogical reconstruction of a reactionary, racist imaginary whose persistence is one of the factors that have made legible the recent election of José Antonio Kast to the Chilean presidency. Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña’s 2018 stop-motion animated film La casa lobo (The Wolf House), Eduardo Menz’sCitation2005video piece Las mujeres de Pinochet (Pinochet’s Women), Alicia Scherson’sCitation2005feature film Play, and Wincy Oyarce’sCitation2013short film Niño bien (Good Boy) all tell an alternative story of racism in Chile, which functions through a mode of selective seeing – what Nicholas Mirzoeff calls “white sight” – that refuses to acknowledge the grinding, structural aspects of Chilean racism. Identifying and denouncing the mechanisms of racism in Chilean visual culture are central, urgent tactics in light of the white supremacist, authoritarian agenda of Kast’s right-wing government.