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Gender and Populism in Latin America
Passionate Politics
256 pages | 6 x 9 | 2010
ISBN 978-0-271-03709-7 | cloth: $65.00 sh
Paperback edition is not available in the U.S.
“This book offers a range of rich case studies on an array of populist leaders and experiences. More significantly, it illustrates how populism is gendered and how it promotes different, even contradictory, gendered practices. Drawing on examples from the early twentieth century to the present, and from Mexico to Argentina, it not only fills a gap in our understanding of populism, it also sheds new light on the gendered politics and impact of major figures and events in modern Latin American history.” —Margaret Power, Illinois Institute of Technology
“Karen Kampwirth has put together a fascinating and timely book that uses the lens of populism to compare patterns of women’s political mobilization and a gender perspective to explore the varieties of populism, both historical and contemporary. Insightful, provocative, and relevant.” —Jane Jaquette, Occidental College
“The case studies in this book offer a compelling and nuanced view of a multifaceted reality: populism is extremely difficult to grasp, both theoretically and empirically, and its complexity and ambiguity also apply to its gendered underpinnings. As the more general debate still unfolds as to whether Latin American populism is or has been a liberating or a controlling force toward the disfranchised masses, the same uncertainty prevails regarding its effects on women. Given the elusive nature of the topic itself, this book as a whole may raise more questions than it answers, but the editor and each of the individual contributors have done an outstanding job in giving the reader highly useful and intelligent insights into the role that gender plays in Latin American politics.” —Victor Armony, Université du Québec à Montréal
The resurgence of democracy in Latin America in the 1980s and 1990s brought with it two waves of populism: first, the neopopulism of leaders like Salinas in Mexico and Fujimori in Peru, who promoted neoliberal solutions to the economic problems of the 1990s; and second, the radical populism of leaders like Chávez in Venezuela and Morales in Bolivia, who repudiated neoliberal policies in favor of some form of socialism in what has come to be called “the pink tide.”
Many have studied populist movements, for they offer fascinating insights into Latin American history and politics. But until now there have been no book-length studies of the relationship between gender and populism throughout the region. The essays in Gender and Populism in Latin America analyze the role of masculinity and femininity in the political careers of figures ranging from Evita Perón to Hugo Chávez, considering the relationship between populism, democracy, authoritarianism, and feminism in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Mexico, Nicaragua, Peru, and Venezuela.
In addition to the editor, the contributors are Michael Conniff, Gioconda Espina, Sujatha Fernandes, Victoria González-Rivera, Karin Grammático, Jocelyn Olcott, Cathy A. Rakowski, Stphanie Rousseau, Ximena Sosa-Buchholz, Kurt Weyland, and Joel Wolfe.
Karen Kampwirth is Professor of Political Science and Chair of the Latin American Studies Program at Knox College. She has two previous books with Penn State Press, Women and Guerrilla Movements: Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chiapas, Cuba (2003) and, co-edited with Victoria Gonzlez, Radical Women in Latin America: Left and Right (2001).