Negotiating Gendered Discourses

It has been argued that the first presidential campaign of Michelle Bachelet in Chile and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in Argentina used a rhetoric of newness. Some political observers have said that as the “first women” to successfully run for the highest office in these countries, they were presented as the new faces of democracy. These observers argued that gender was not a determining factor in their electoral success, but the focus on this “first women” frame did generate heavily gendered