Overview

In 1999, Venezuela became the first country in the world to constitutionally recognize the socioeconomic value of housework and enshrine homemakers' social security. This landmark provision was part of a larger project to transform the state and expand social inclusion during Hugo Chavez's presidency. The Bolivarian revolution opened new opportunities for poor and working-class-or popular-women's organizing. The state recognized their unpaid labor and maternal gender role as central to the revolution. Yet even as state recognition enabled some popular women to receive public assistance, it also made their unpaid labor and organizing vulnerable to state appropriation. Offering the first comprehensive analysis of this phenomenon, Engendering Revolution demonstrates that the Bolivarian revolution cannot be understood without comprehending the gendered nature of its state-society relations. Showcasing field research that comprises archival analysis, observation, and extensive interviews, these thought-provoking findings underscore the ways in which popular women sustained a movement purported to exalt them, even while many could not access social security and remained socially, economically, and politically vulnerable.

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9781477319147

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Reviews

[A] well executed book...[Elfenbein] makes a strong case for why a gendered lens is indispensable to understanding Venezuela's Bolivarian revolution and politics more generally...Engendering Revolution is an exceptional contribution to our gendered understanding of revolutionary states. * Journal of Women, Politics Policy *

[A] well executed book...[Elfenbein] makes a strong case for why a gendered lens is indispensable to understanding Venezuela's Bolivarian revolution and politics more generally...Engendering Revolution is an exceptional contribution to our gendered understanding of revolutionary states. * Journal of Women, Politics Policy * [Elfenbein] offers a radical view of the Bolivarian revolution that has been unavailable in the past, as she not only makes women visible within the movement but portrays their socio-political and economic participation as being vital to the continuation of Chavez's leadership...Engendering Revolution is a must-read for all scholars of gender relations, social reproduction, social movements and the state, as it makes an especially unique and powerful contribution to the discussion of the Bolivarian process in Venezuela. * Mobilization *

A rich and engaging history...Engendering Revolution adds a critical dimension to existing work on women and the Bolivarian revolution by addressing the burden of popular women's unpaid work, the ways it buttressed the Bolivarian state, and what Elfenbein would describe as the continued reproduction of hegemonic gender roles in the revolutionary process...Engendering Revolution is revealing in its mapping of the history of women's organizing and mobilization before and during the time of Chavez. Its thorough treatment of the subject and engagement with the gendered nature of the state, state power, and state-society relations remind the reader that gender relations are indeed power relations, and that women's visibility and mobilization may not necessitate power. * The Latin Americanist * [A] well executed book...[Elfenbein] makes a strong case for why a gendered lens is indispensable to understanding Venezuela's Bolivarian revolution and politics more generally...Engendering Revolution is an exceptional contribution to our gendered understanding of revolutionary states. * Journal of Women, Politics & Policy * [Elfenbein] offers a radical view of the Bolivarian revolution that has been unavailable in the past, as she not only makes women visible within the movement but portrays their socio-political and economic participation as being vital to the continuation of Chavez's leadership...Engendering Revolution is a must-read for all scholars of gender relations, social reproduction, social movements and the state, as it makes an especially unique and powerful contribution to the discussion of the Bolivarian process in Venezuela. * Mobilization * A pioneering and in-depth study...In addition to being a broad, arduous, and rigorous research from a methodological point of view, Engendering Revolution provides sociological, ethnographic, and political results that, under a gender perspective, reveal in different ways the dynamics between the working class women and their organizations, but also the Bolivarian revolutionary state during the Chavez mandate...Elfenbein conducts a masterful extended case study with a methodology that she adapted in a creative manner to the social reality under study...this overwhelming book offers a new way of approaching the gender role and gender justice in Venezuela, a thorough research that seeks to find the essence of the dynamics of relations between the state and poor women and their organizations in that country. * Journal of Latin American Politics and Society *

Author Information

An independent scholar, Rachel Elfenbein holds a PhD in sociology from Simon Fraser University and was a Fulbright scholar to Venezuela. She was awarded the Latin American Studies Association’s 2018 Helen Safa Award for the research featured in Engendering Revolution. She works as an educator, researcher, facilitator, and counselor with civil society organizations in North America and southern Africa.

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