So here’s a book that demonstrates that if you’re ballsy enough, you can slip anything past your Dissertation Committee. To wit, Shayne conducts a series of interviews to demonstrate that revolutions can give rise to feminist consciousness in post-revolutionary society. What her data indicates is that in post-Pinochet Chile and post-Batista Cuba, there is no mass feminist consciousness, and in fact the term is actively reviled. To many people, providing about 100 pages of evidence that refutes ones thesis would be enough to scrap the project. But Shayne isn’t most people. Shayne is a doctoral student, and so she does what she must. [It should be noted that this is pure conjecture on my part – I’m only postulating that this is a Doctoral Dissertation because it reads like one and I hope to Christ it wasn’t a serious professional academic effort.] Anyway, let’s see what happens in the text.
Shayne starts off strong talking about El Salvador. Women’s participation in the FMLN was extremely high (30% of combatants and between 27 and 34 percent of the total). (35) In addition, there were public women’s protest organizations and women were mobilizing at all levels both within and outside of the FMLN. However, in the aftermath of the war, women’s issues were shoved aside by the FMLN, leading to the rise of alternative organizations that spanned political boundaries. The organizations have been successful in adjusting Salvadoran policy to be more feminist in some important respects. So far so good.
Where her argument falls apart is when she moves to Chile, which currently has, according to “[n]early all the women I interviewed in 1999 … no women’s movement”. (105) That’s a pretty big damn problem, if you are contending that mass women’s mobilization ought to increase feminist consciousness in post-revolutionary society. So Shayne employs a slight of hand. The revolutionary mobilization did NOT occur during the decades of opposition to Pinochet and the eventual return to democratic rule – it occurred PRIOR. So the revolution occurred with the election of Allende, and the revolutionary mobilizations consisted of socialist “Mother’s Centers” that put women in contact. The consciousness created by the Allende “revolution” then became manifest in the Pinochet era, and contemporary Chile doesn’t count because it’s post-post-revolutionary and the theory only applies during the initial revolution. Or something. The problems don’t get much better in Cuba, which also doesn’t have anything resembling an active feminist movement. Here though, the argument is honest, and observes that the state effectively coopted the grounds for a feminism to develop by implementing gender reforms and creating an “NGO” that is closely related to the state. Thus the conditions for post-revolutionary feminisms are unmet, and therefore one doesn’t occur. So that’s why the book’s argument basically sucks.
There are, however, some really bright spots. The first is her fivefold conditions for post-revolutionary feminism: (1) gender-bending, where women perform dangerous work in support of the revolution and in defiance of social norms (2) logistical and political training (3) sociopolitical cleavages in post-revolutionary society that create the organizational and ideological space for mobilization (4) a sense that, for women, the revolution is incomplete, and (5) the development of a collective feminist conciousness. (10) These criterias yield dependant variables of (1) a politically autonomous movement, (2) a movement significantly empowered to bring about measurable sociopolitical change, and (3) a movement structured in a pluralistic fashion. (10) The second is the concept of “gendered revolutionary bridges” (43). In short, this concept refers to the ways that women can leverage cultural expectations of femininity in service of a revolution – whether by challenging the states’ right to recourse to violence by protesting AS mothers, or transporting weapons, or by sharing the revolutions message with unincorporated citizens. This is an excellent summary of an important concept that needs to be carefully considered by any theory of insurgency or counterinsurgency – specifically, how do cultural expectations both create and limit tactical and strategic options?
In the end, this is an ambitious book that falls short of the mark. It may be the case that the 5 conditions occur incredibly rarely, and so relatively few movements will occur. It’s impossible to know, given that only 1 case in 3 worked out according to the model, and extrapolating from such limited data seems foolhardy. Nonetheless, a good second to third tier book to have around to reference both the criteria and the “gendered revolutionary bridge” concept.
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