Ideological Consolidation, Subject Formation, and the Discursive Creation of the “New Woman” in Revolutionary Cuba

• Published in: Qualitative sociology Vol. 47; no. 2; pp. 325 - 358
• Main Author: Triplett, Jen
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Springer US 01.06.2024; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Attitudes; Cross Cultural Psychology; Hegemony; Ideology; Legislation; Mass media; Mass media effects; Personality and Social Psychology; Political elites; Political leadership; Qualitative research; Revolutions; Social Sciences; Socialism; Sociology; Transformation; Women; Women; Visual Analysis; Ideology; Socialism; Latin America
• ISSN: 0162-0436; 1573-7837
• DOI: 10.1007/s11133-024-09560-2

Within elite-led projects of ideological transformation, how do leaders encourage practices that reflect and reinforce the ideas, attitudes, and beliefs they are trying to make hegemonic? This article investigates how political elites use different mechanisms of subject formation as they attempt to replace one hegemonic ideology with another and to shape new subjects to match. Whereas leaders of the Mexican and Nicaraguan revolutions often approached creating “new women” through legislation and campaigns, the Cuban revolutionary elites leveraged their swift and broad control over mass media to complement institutional means of subject formation with discursive ones. I draw on careful qualitative analysis of 112 issues of the state-run women’s magazine Mujeres ( Women ) to show how leaders combined both linguistic and visual discourse to promote the development of the socialist “new woman” by encouraging women to participate in a wide range of labor outside of the home and by assisting them as they adjusted to the new material realities of the immediate post-revolutionary period. Bringing mass media swiftly and fully under state control allows leaders to communicate the ideological attitudes and behaviors they wish to promote among the people, while limiting alternate conceptions of revolutionary subjecthood.