Embodying the Cost of a Predatory State: Depletion via Social Reproduction in Venezuela’s Crisis (2013–2021)

This article brings together the literatures of predation and depletion via social reproduction (DSR) to provide an explanation of the Venezuelan crisis (2013–2021). Venezuela’s gradual descent into a predatory state exacerbated the state’s reliance on the unpaid reproductive labor of women, which provoked gendered harms. We empirically examine DSR as exacerbated by predation that manifests in harms to citizenship entitlements, discursive harms, and bodily harms. The embodied consequences of the predatory state’s reliance on women’s labor manifest in the weakening of livelihoods, reproductive, labor, and political rights. The article proposes a framework to explain the embodied costs of the Venezuelan crisis, with the potential of explaining gendered aspects of the global authoritarian turn. The article broadens both the literature on the state capacity of predatory states by “embodying” it, and the literature on DSR by exploring forms of depletion that occur as a consequence of institutional decline and economic collapse.