Book Reviews

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/intejcubastud.14.1.0185
• Published date: 05 July 2022
• Date: 05 July 2022
• Pages: 185114-187
• Author: Anamary Maqueira Linares

BOOK REVIEWS 185

IJCS Produced and distributed by Pluto Journals www.plutojournals.com/ijcs/

Mabel Bellucci and Emmanuel Theumer, Desde la Cuba

revolucionariaFeminismo y marxismo en la obra de Isabel Larguía y John

Dumoulin.1 CLACSO (Latin American Council of Social Sciences), Buenos

Aires, Argentina, 2018. Pbk. 114 pp. ISBN 978–987-722–343-9

Reviewed by Anamary Maqueira Linares2

Genealogies are a titanic task, dealing with the multiplicity of knowledge pro-

duction and with the epistemic privilege of that knowledge. Such epistemic

privilege entails particular languages, core regions where knowledge is produced

and from which knowledge is disseminated, concrete institutional arrangements,

and power structures that determine which and why specific pieces of knowl-

edge are more valuable than others. From a critique of this ‘epistemic privilege’,

the authors of the book Desde la Cuba revolucionariaFeminismo y marxismo en

la obra de Isabel Larguía y John Dumoulin, Mabel Bellucci and Emmanuel

Theumer position their analysis. It is, in particular, due to an “epistemic privi-

lege of the global north” and an “epistemic extractivism”, as stated by Peruvian

feminist Gina Vargas in the forewords (p. 13), that the pioneer contributions the

book aims to rescue from hidden places were condemned to an appropriation

with almost null references.

The authors’ primary objective is to seek justice for a pioneer work of two

intellectuals, Isabel Larguía, and John Dumoulin,3 on novel theoretical contribu-

tions to the so-called domestic labour debate developed within a Feminist-Marxist

framework, and “officially” originated in the 1960s and 1970s in countries like

the United States, Canada, United Kingdom and Italy. The book’s purpose is

twofold. First, it invites a rereading of the relationship between Feminism and

Marxism through the work of Larguía and Dumoulin, a work that was born in

Cuba. Secondly, the authors aim to make visible an “invisible work”.

A notable diversity of methods is applied to accomplish authors’ claims: semi-

structured interviews, memory and feminist archives, historiographic speeches,

official documents, Cuba women studies and, of course, theoretical analysis.

One of the main achievements of the book is the way the authors intermingle the

methodological arsenal to analyse the thread of the Feminism–Marxism rela-

tionship, and more generally the class–gender intertwines.

1 https://www.clacso.org.ar/libreria-latinoamericana/buscar_libro_detalle.

php?id_libro=1432&campo=titulo&texto=

2 Ph.D. student, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Department of Economics

3 Argentinian and United States couple who lived and worked in Cuba during the first

almost 30 years of the Cuban Revolution (from the early 1960s until the end of the 1980s).

DOI:10.13169/intejcubastud.14.1.0185