Dancing Jacobins: A Venezuelan Genealogy of Latin American Populism

Subjects of Aspirations

“…From the outset, the government established what it called 'a model of alliance and dialogue' with national capital-holding elites that gave representatives of these groups historic levels of influence in matters of economic policy and legislation (Spalding 2017: 168). This model, which was written into the Nicaraguan Constitution in 2014, kept minimum wage at record lows, enabled the flourishing of free-trade zones and neo-extractivist industries, and suppressed workers organisations and social movements in the name of protecting a good climate for investment (Collombon and Rodgers 2018;Sánchez 2016;Walters 2021). By 2017, social assistance programmes were significantly curtailed as Venezuelan funding dwindled.…”

Femme populism: Vulnerability and desire in Argentine political aesthetics

“…Moreover, understanding the centrality of affect to political identity is essential to understanding the appeal of femme populism. However, in the case of the most ardent Cristinistas, vulnerability is used to further masculinist notions of sovereignty—or at least their logic of spectatorship—that produce the “monumental governmentality” of Sánchez (2016)—a strategy of governance by which a “shared object of devotion and identification . .…”

“…The diversity of the masses must be flattened to create the fiction of the homogeneous people, made possible through a fetishism of the leader, akin to Lefort's Egocrat—“the one” above all others: a homogenizing and inherently phallic signifier (Palacios, 2020). 10 The “disciplined” attunement of the gaze to the leader is an essential aspect of a strategy of governance that Sánchez (2016) aptly calls “monumental governmentality.”…”

“…The authoritarianism of populist aesthetics in the Latin American context, as theorized in much more depth by Rafael Sánchez (2016), unites the otherwise potentially unruly mass into the disciplined “people”—the subject par excellence of populism. In the context of Peronism in Argentina, Cristinista femme populism indicates generational shifts and Peronism's need to stand for increasingly diverse social sectors and, therefore, ambiguous ideological commitments.…”

“…As that which eludes fixed meaning, Cristina must give the illusion of cohesion. For Sánchez (2016), this configuration of sovereignty is intimately aware of the power of the gaze, as populism is self‐consciously theatrical. Femme populism, in particular, indexes how the gaze of “the people” is related to desire and the constitutive lack upon which it is predicated—the yearning for cohesive symbolic meaning that is intrinsically unattainable.…”