Funa as Political Resistance? Public Shaming, Responsibility, and Judgment in Latin American Feminist Activism

Funa, a term derived from the Mapuche language meaning “rotten,” has evolved in Chilean social and political life into a practice of public shaming and denunciation. Emerging most visibly through La Comisión Funa in the early 2000s, this form of collective action sought to expose individuals - medical, political, and military - responsible for torture and disappearances under the dictatorship who had eluded judicial accountability. Through coordinated public marches, speeches, and naming, funas brought hidden crimes into visibility, reasserting the public’s right to truth and justice within spaces where legal and institutional mechanisms had failed. Over time, funa has expanded beyond transitional justice, becoming a pervasive mode of social accountability used by feminist activists in Latin America to denounce gender-based violence in universities, political organisations, and online platforms. This paper examines funa as a moral and political practice through the lens of Hannah Arendt’s reflections on responsibility, judgment, and resistance. For Arendt, responsibility entails a readiness to think and to judge in the face of wrongdoing as members of a political community. It is both a collective and individual capacity for accountability, a moral obligation to respond to injustice, repair its consequences, and prevent future wrongs. Resistance, in turn, arises when such judgment transforms into public action: the decision to “appear” and speak in defence of a shared world threatened by injustice. From this perspective, funa may be understood as a public action of resistance, one that reclaims the space of appearance Arendt deemed essential to politics by making visible what institutions conceal. Yet, funa also raises complex moral questions. Can funas be understood as acts of resistance that enact a refusal to remain silent in the face of structural gendered violence? Or do they risk reproducing the logic of punitive justice they seek to subvert? By situating funa within this framework, the paper interrogates whether public denunciation or public shaming can constitute a genuine act of political resistance for feminist activism in the context of Latin America, as an action that attempts to preserve the integrity of the common world in the face of gendered violence and institutional impunity.