Engendering Revolution

[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 Chávez’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 Chávez 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

Rachel Elfenbein invites us to see Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela through a gender lens, drawing on feminist theory and a rich ethnography to provide a pathbreaking, critical, and original analysis of the policies and politics associated with Chavismo. Engendering Revolution deals with Chávez’s political mobilization of women and their later disillusionment, revealing the ways in which gender inequality was deeply imbricated in the laws, policies, and rhetoric of his revolutionary project. This book needed to be written, and in writing it, Elfenbein has made an outstanding contribution to the study of revolutionary states, as well as Latin American and gender studies. ~Maxine Molyneux, University College London Institute of the Americas

This insightful book demonstrates that Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution, which claimed to have a “woman’s face,” depended on poor women’s unpaid work. Deploying a wide-ranging ethnographic analysis, Rachel Elfenbein explores the reality behind Venezuela’s pathbreaking constitutional recognition of reproductive labor within a context of political and social polarization. She shows how the “revolutionary maternalism” of twenty-first-century socialism translated into a profound reliance on women to support their families, communities, and the polity itself. By centering the lives of poor homemakers, Elfenbein reveals the significance of gender relations to the revolution and its impact on some of its hardest-working citizens. ~Elisabeth Jay Friedman, University of San Francisco

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 Chávez. 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