Latin America is not the poorest region in the world, but it is the most unequal. One of the most acute manifestations of this inequality is the critical condition of women, which threatens to perpetuate their subordinate position not only in their homes but also in the cultural, economic, social, and political arenas, even though they often play a crucial role, sometimes invisible. Rachel Elfenbein’s recent and widely documented case study echoes this issue. She conducts a pioneering and indepth study of how Venezuelan women, their unpaid work, the narrative around it, and their time were crucial to sustain the Bolivarian Revolution begun in 1999 by Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, historically a deeply divided multiracial and multiethnic country. Her book is a remarkable research work.
This fascinating research is valuable from various perspectives. From a political point of view, it penetrates the dynamics of the revolutionary Bolivarian state between 1999 and 2012 and studies its complex and essential relationship with working-class women without paid work, who were a key factor for the success and sustainability of the Chavista revolution. From the point of view of gender studies, the book offers an in-depth review and detailed analysis of the struggle of working-class women for the effective recognition of the social and economic value of domestic work, as well as the right to social security for housewives. Likewise, I find it extremely interesting that Elfenbein, as an independent researcher, penetrated the state and society of the Bolivarian Rvolution to bring to light the true, invisible, and silenced role that poor Venezuelan women and their organizations played. This is even more significant considering her previous experience interacting with poor women in South Africa, whose work was vital to sustaining their households and the community.
The extensive and motivating introduction places the reader in the context of the relations between Venezuelan society and the Bolivarian state and between women in these areas. It also includes a section on the invisible work of poor women and the working class. From the beginning, Elfenbein states that her feminist cultural materialist perspective allows her to analyze how gender roles and gender divisions of labor shape states and, in turn, how states shape gender roles and gender divisions of labor.
The introduction also includes an approach to the so-called magical revolutionary Bolivarian state, based on the promise of massive development projects that would bring modernity and progress to Venezuela. This was a result of the enormous public revenues and the country’s reinforced negotiating capacity, derived from the renationalization of the oil industry. On the other hand, the author makes a preliminary reference to some ideas about the process of the Bolivarian Revolution and its inseparable relationship with the unpaid work of working-class women and with revolutionary maternalism, which consists of extending unpaid domestic work to the community and political organizations (as seen in the program Madres del Barrio). Then Elfenbein underscores that she uses the methodology of the expanded case study, which takes into account the daily life of working-class women, their work in homes and communities, and their social and political participation in the country. This initial section ends with a summary of each of the six chapters that make up the book, and with a section dedicated to the conclusions of the research.
Regarding the methodology that Elfenbein used to prepare this research work, I find plausible the rich variety of research sources that she uses exhaustively, from the participant observation to the analysis of documents, archives, and the media. With a qualitative research methodology during a year and a half, Elfenbein carried out dedicated field research on women’s labor rights (Article 88 of the Constitution and other regulations), the political defense of those rights, and the testimonies of working-class women. Her work covers various locations in Venezuela and includes multiple individual and collective subjects, such as women from popular sectors and their organizations.
Likewise, she conducted in-depth interviews in various urban centers in Venezuela, such as Falcón State. All of them were subjected to a subsequent validation process with each interviewee. In the case of women from the popular sectors and workers in the state gender institutions, the identity of the participants was protected by pseudonyms. Elfenbein states that her research process is social and therefore the product cannot be separated from the process, just as the researcher cannot be separated from the research design. Through her work on Bolivarian Venezuela and given the pressure implied by the research process, Elfenbein seeks to understand how that world is structured, which is still a problem when the researcher who conducts this research and sometimes poses the questions is a white woman from the United States.
As Elfenbein argues, our social positions influence opening or restricting the possibilities of understanding the social relations that we study, where the complex issue of unequal power relations comes into play. Her book confirms, once again, how ultimately all knowledge is partial. I would like to highlight that the author had to face frequent difficulties and blocks to access information on working-class women and those government programs that included them, mostly in the last years of Chávez’s government. Such methodological difficulty reveals how the lack of access to that information was inherent and functional to the Bolivarian State. Elfenbein explains to us how the lack of transparency, under the presidency of Hugo Chávez, was a structural characteristic of the magical Bolivarian state, supposedly endowed with powers that instantly came from it and generating rumors that the author interprets as understandings and experiences of the state on the part of the subjects, as representations of the state.
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. According to Elfenbein, sometimes these interactions are evident, while at other times the state and its agents keep them in inaccessible and undetermined areas, away from working-class women and their organizations. Many times, the strategy and interests of the revolutionary Chavista project demand it. As shown throughout the work, this Chavista state advocates the rights of this social sector, but at the same time does not protect them.
In line with these observations, and from my position as a Latin American academic who, in Peru, heads the Socially Responsible Leadership, Women, and Equity Research Group at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, I enthusiastically and highly recommend reading, disseminating, and discussing Engendering Revolution. I have no doubt that it is an original contribution to gender studies in the region and to political work on the Bolivarian Revolution. I really appreciate its novel conception and development, derived from a US feminist perspective. It focuses on analyzing a complex, multiracial, and multiethnic Latin American society that always demanded greater social justice and greater gender justice during Chávez’s long presidential term, despite the inclusive and benefactor discourse of the revolutionary Bolivarian state. Furthermore, in this work, Elfenbein conducts a masterful extended case study with a methodology that she adapted in a creative manner to the social reality under study.
Finally, 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. Moreover, this research also reveals how the government or the state can offer poor women and their organizations support and the promise of integration and, at the same time, redirect the action, time, and energy of this social sector, leaving social justice and gender justice subordinate to the primary objectives of the government or the state.
