The Revolution Will Be Feminized: Discourse on Women's Participation in Chávez's Venezuela

• In Event: 035 - Section on Sex and Gender Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 18. Resistance

Abstract

Since the election of Hugo Chávez, discussions of Venezuela have tended to follow a broader Good Left/Bad Left dichotomoizing discourse and to approach a wide range phenomena through a lens of Chávez-centrism. These reductive approaches are problematic because they obscure other important socio-cultural factors at play in patterns of society and politics in Venezuela. Although some scholars have begun to challenge these interpretations of Venezuelan society, the majority of authors continue to rely on these tropes. I argue that these trends within Venezuelan political scholarship in general are mirrored in the discourse around the women’s movement in Venezuela. Often, women are characterized as being aligned with either the Bad Left (the Chavista women’s groups) or the Good Left (the Opposition Anglo-centric feminist groups). In this process, issues of gender become subsumed within and indeed eclipsed by discussions of political and class cleavages. The person of Chàvez is also commonly employed as an explanatory variable for events and tendencies within the women’s movement. This emphasis on Chávez’s personalism and the attendant decentering of women as the subject of the literature is seriously problematic. By examining the works of leading scholars on the Venezuelan women’s movement, I find that although most scholarship retrenches these two broad tendencies, some scholars have developed approaches that do not rely on incautious dichotomies or Chávez’s personalism. While this analysis attempts to address these trends within the women’s movement discourse, the discussion also aims to further complicate the various dichotomizing characterizations of Venezuelan society on the whole.

Author

• Jennifer Triplett, Tulane University