Gendered Scenarios of Revolution: Making New Men and New Women in Nicaragua, 1975–2000

Conclusions: Empowerment and Struggle in the New Millennium

189 Conclusions Empowerment and Struggle in the New Millennium This book has examined Sandinista state formation and its aftermath in the neoliberal period through the experience of the campesino community of El Tule. I have done so by heeding Aretxaga’s (2003, 399) call to explore the state’s subjective dynamic by examining “the fantasies” that tie individuals to the state and how the state “has, and enacts, its own fantasies” about its subjects, and about itself and its own powers. My specific aim in this examination has been to consider the implications of the FSLN’s use of the figure of the New Man as the paradigm for revolutionary subjectivity for its goal of liberating campesino men and women. I have shown that the Sandinistas understood the New Man as the modern-day heir of a long line of heroes struggling for the liberation of the poor and oppressed. This New Man, shaped by a consciousness of class and nation, would rise above particularistic concerns to express his ethics of solidarity and sacrifice for the poor of Nicaragua, whom he represented. By embracing the ethics and historic mission of the New Man, Nicaraguans would construct an egalitarian community of class and nation united in a common practice of national liberation and revolutionary state-formation—what I have called the Sandinista scenario. The Sandinistas’ professed intentions to create an egalitarian solidary community appear, on first impression, to confirm Benedict Anderson’s (1983, 16) influential claim that nationalism is based on imagining a national community as “a deep, horizontal comradeship.” Yet as my analysis has shown, the Sandinistas in fact imagined their national community in ways that riddled it with fractures and inequalities. As Hale (1994) has 190 · Gendered Scenarios of Revolution demonstrated for the Miskitu Indians, so I have shown for campesinos that the Sandinista project excluded sectors that did not reflect the leadership ’s own political identities and set them up as objects of Sandinista enlightenment. Thus a gendered analysis of the case of El Tule has revealed that, while the Sandinistas created an alliance between themselves and male family heads, the Sandinista scenario nonetheless entailed the patriarchal subordination of campesino men as representatives of a “backward ” class; and it entailed the marginalization of campesino women as not (New) Men. Building on the work of Rodríguez and Saldaña-Portillo, I have argued that these inequalities of power were encoded in the very figure of the New Man. For far from representing the epochal change the Sandinistas envisioned, this New Man contained ideological continuities with the “old” man of liberal bourgeois culture, particularly a masculinist presumption of an enlightened, modern male subject charged with illuminating the (premodern) (un)consciousness of the masses with the light of class and national consciousness. The Sandinistas’ investment in the New Man ideal is consistent with scholars’ findings in Sandinista Nicaragua and elsewhere that state elites hold on to the reins of power, in part, by shaping subjects according to their own class, gender, and race/ethnic perspective, which they project as universal (on Nicaragua, see Hale 1994; Field 1999). It also accords with feminist theories of the state that posit that patriarchalism (or masculinism ) is inherent in the state form itself (Brown 1995; Eisenstein 1979; MacKinnon 1982; Pateman 1988). I have also stressed, however, that the Contra War was determinant in pushing the leadership toward increased verticalism (see Walker 1997) and an upholding of the most pernicious aspects of patriarchy. In short, the Sandinistas’ patriarchal vanguardism and promotion of policies that contradicted their own aspirations for an egalitarian socialist community must be read against all these varied processes and pressures. How the Sandinista scenario played out in El Tule tells us much about the dynamics of state formation and the particularities of the Sandinista case. Through a range of cultural-pedagogical means, the Sandinistas created roles for campesino men and women based on the figure of the New Man. The enactment of these roles, however partial, shaped campesino revolutionary subjectivity and set in motion an ongoing process of (re) producing the Sandinista scenario. Yet because roles in scenarios can never fully map onto actors’ social roles but rather stand in varying degrees of tension to them, there is always some impetus to disavowal, noncompliance , or resistance. In the case of El Tule, this meant that while Conclusions · 191 campesinos embraced the idea of New Man (and New Woman), they appropriated...