‘ ¡Quién fuera noche para caerle encima!’ Piropos in Chile: Sexual harassment or flirtation?

Piropos, a type of flirtatious street talk, are a discourse practice that social movements against street harassment in Chile have condemned for their male chauvinist and sexist content. This paper analyzes the structure of piropos to see their effects in both the way piropos portray women, and the discourse piropos promote and/or maintain towards women. From a compendium (Memoria chilena, 2008), 67 piropos were selected and grouped based on the conceptual metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson, 2003) they use to represent women in society. Conceptual metaphors represented women as religious entities, food, criminals or offenders, and objects found in nature. A fifth metaphor included under the label 'transfiguration' represents the objectification of the one uttering the piropo in order to get closer to the receiver of this discourse practice. The methodology considered (1) power and social distance (Poynton, 1989; Kerbrat-Orecchioni, 1992) to understand the relationship between the participants of this practice, and (2) transitivity (Halliday, 2014) to understand how lexical choices of both processes and participants reflect how human experience is expressed. The analysis revealed that the piropos analyzed use several resources to perpetuate a male chauvinist discourse that objectifies women and considers them as inferior and, generally, powerless.

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