Karen Kampwirth's edited volume, Gender and Populism in Latin America, provides an excellent interdisciplinary introduction to the diverse ways in which populism is gendered. Given the vast scholarship on Latin American populism, it is surprising that this is the first collection on the topic of gender, making its appearance all the more welcome. Bringing together established experts on the topic of populism and insightful work by newcomers to the field, its chapters are representative of some of the superb results that this overdue scholarly attention brings to the study of Latin American politics and society. Our understanding of both populism and the construction of gender benefits tremendously from this cross-fertilisation.
Kampwirth has assembled an impressive range of chapters covering the period from the 1930s to the present, and while she acknowledges that some readers will undoubtedly be disappointed that their favourite populists are not discussed, the geographical coverage is fairly broad (including Argentina, Bolivia, Mexico, Ecuador, Peru, Nicaragua, Brazil and Venezuela). Several chapters deal with the ‘classic populists’ of Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador and Nicaragua, who from the 1930s onwards employed traditional redistributive policies to provide material benefits to women. This helped to create broad-based political support for the presidencies of Lázaro Cárdenas, Juan Domingo Perón, Getúlio Vargas, José María Velasco Ibarra and Anastasio Somoza García. Although, as Michael Conniff shows in the Brazilian case, women were not on the whole more receptive to populist appeals than men, populists' attention to maternal issues was often central to their political appeal. The ‘neo-populists’, who adopted neoliberal structural adjustment policies while expounding populist rhetoric, receive comparatively short shrift, represented only in Stéphanie Rousseau's and Ximena Sosa-Buchholz's writings on Peru and Ecuador, but the authors demonstrate that Alberto Fujimori's and Abdalá Bucaram's projects also targeted women – though the lack of available distributive benefits occasioned some curious attempts to appeal to their interests, including Bucaram's attempt to make Lorena Bobbitt a national hero. The remaining chapters deal with the most recent wave of populists in Venezuela, Brazil and Bolivia, whom the authors refer to as ‘radical populists’ following the lead of Hugo Chávez himself, whom Gioconda Espina and Cathy Rakowski record as having coined the term in a retort he made to George W. Bush in 2007. Kampwirth and Sujatha Fernandes, in their chapters on Nicaragua and Venezuela, tentatively suggest a category of ‘revolutionary populism’, which they believe may be different from classic, neo- and radical populism.
The relative consistency in the way the authors define populism and its waves throughout the volume is reflective of the fact that they tend not to explain populism in terms of gender: they resist the temptation to hazard guesses as to which types of gender policies have done the most to consolidate populist coalitions throughout the region. Rather, a central aim of the volume, which the authors achieve admirably, is the demonstration of the remarkably diverse ways in which gender is constructed in populist political moments. Although it is difficult to separate the question of whether women benefited materially from the populist politics of various leaders, several of the strongest essays do just that, demonstrating instead the ways in which ideologies of gender are produced in distinct populist contexts. Several authors encourage such reflections by employing a comparative approach in their chapters, contrasting the populist political styles and policies of presidents from different periods and, in the case of Rousseau, who examines Fujimori's Peru and Evo Morales' Bolivia, different countries. Victoria González-Rivera's fascinating chapter employs a similar comparative approach in her examination of historical memory and the construction of gender among somocista women, who were politicised and empowered through their interaction with the state, and neo-somocista women, who ignore the experiences of the older generation and have constructed a more traditionally conservative ideology of gender.
The question, ‘What determines whether … populism presents an opportunity or a threat for those who would promote greater gender equality?’ (p. 226) underlies the majority of the essays. The answers are so diverse that several of the authors are led to focus upon the ways in which populism creates openings for unanticipated forms of politicisation that can lead to empowerment, regardless of the intentions of the populist leaders who instituted the policies that occasioned them. As a result, even those leaders whose rhetoric employed masculinist tropes or whose maternalist policies aimed to reinforce traditional gender roles could unwittingly open the door to the expression of feminist demands. Joel Wolfe explores this theme fully in his examination of Juscelino Kubitschek's populism which, although it emphasised the nuclear family, nevertheless created space for change by promoting the empowerment of the working class. Jocelyn Olcott comes to similar conclusions regarding the presidencies of both Cárdenas and Luis Echeverría. ‘Popular expectations for these populist governments’, she writes, ‘could not be contained or scripted by state-run programs’ (p. 44). Karin Grammático shows that the Montoneros' Agrupación Evita had unintended consequences for the emergence of radicalism among its members in Argentina, even though the organisation maintained its namesake's antipathy toward feminism. Several of the chapters offer evidence of similar openings that the authors could have described more explicitly: Sosa-Buchholz convincingly analyses the masculine ideals performed by Velasco Ibarra and Bucaram, but her description suggests that unintended feminist apertures may have also resulted in these cases. Espina and Rakowski's arguments and evidence remain in the realm of policy, but Fernandes' chapter complements their findings. Despite the trope of revolutionary motherhood that predominates in Chavez's Venezuela, participation in community organising encourages the creation of new identities that challenge the gendered division of labour in society; individuals engage the state critically, transforming ideologies of gender in the process.
An excellent addition to the literature, this volume will be of great interest to scholars interested in the long history of populism and will also make an accessible and thought-provoking addition to the reading lists of students of modern Latin American history and Latin American gender studies. Karen Kampwirth is to be congratulated on providing what will hopefully be the first of many important contributions to this rich area of investigation.
