Towards Feminist Socialism? Gender, Sexuality, Popular Power, and the State in Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution

• In Event: Testing the Transformation: Gender, Sexuality, and the Latin American Left (2)

Abstract

This paper examines how gender and sexuality politics were articulated within the Bolivarian revolution through an analysis of women’s and LGBT movement dynamics, state-society relations, and public policies under the presidency of Hugo Chávez.

In reshaping the state and state-society relations from the standpoint of the popular sectors, which it recognized as internally differentiated, the Chavista regime particularly interpellated popular sector women as central participants and protagonists in the revolution. Women and their gender interests were recognized throughout the new constitution. The state made women visible in discourse, positions of power, institutions, and laws and policies, and it established a number of new social programs that recognized and/or lightened popular women’s reproductive burdens and improved their welfare. As the revolution radicalized, Chávez also framed feminism as central to Venezuela’s construction of socialism for the 21st Century.

This gendered political opening generated new opportunities for popular women’s and later LGBT organizing and their legitimation within the revolution. Not only did the state create new gender machinery, but also new autonomous Bolivarian women’s and LGBT organizations, state-directed popular women’s organizations, and new articulations between these organizations emerged.

Yet state recognition and promotion of popular women’s and LGBT people’s organizations also rendered their organizing vulnerable to appropriation by the state for the broader interests of the revolution. They struggled to maintain their independence and often found their demands for bodily autonomy, identity recognition, and social redistribution subordinated or postponed by state and party authorities and imperatives to defend Chávez and the revolution.

Author

• Rachel Elfenbein, Simon Fraser University