Re-mapping the Anti-patriarchy Critique, Resituating ‘Gender’: Some Transnational Feminist Considerations

Abstract

The term patriarchy has been critiqued thoroughly, now largely displaced by other terms like intersectionality. While clearly important and necessary, I argue that this critique is nevertheless incomplete, and ongoing problems continue to haunt how we talk about gendered power relations. Following the transnational feminist problematization of the uncritical acceptance of the nation as a necessarily meaningful unit of analysis, I argue that such critiques have neglected the interrelationships of historically and geographically specific patriarchies to trans-territorial and trans-national processes. I offer an illustration of one time and space-specific patriarchy which has thus been neglected. I show the role of patriarchal thought in constructing imperial/colonial hierarchies, beginning with absolutist imperial/political theory and moving through multiple phases of Euro-American colonialism. Such a focus demonstrates the intersections of gender (and age) politics with trans-border constructions of racial/cultural hierarchy. Next, I discuss the UN debates on decolonization, showing that these local-global debates themselves turned on contending patriarchal metaphors and had important implications for gendered power relations in the ‘postcolonial’ world. I argue, thus, that critical feminist approaches to patriarchies need to reconsider the historical and spatial dimensions elaborated above. And I argue that we need to pay more attention to how gender relations that we talk about as bound within the nation actually inform and are informed by cross-border dynamics.