ABSTRACT
The oppression of nonhuman animals and nature is continuous with and linked to masculinist strategies of human domination. This chapter endeavors to make explicit the ways in which patriarchy, as a social domination, is deeply intertwined with the domination of nature. This chapter gives attention to patriarchy as its own apparatus and explores some of the features, critiques, and variations in patriarchal manifestations and their link to gender violence. This chapter then goes on to explore two key pillars of all hierarchical systems: dominance and dualisms. This chapter moves on to more firmly situate patriarchy within in a larger field of human domination over nature by exploring “the hunt”. The hunting of nonhuman animals fused a number of key elements: masculinized normalization of violence and a subjugation of the “Other” which is bound to the aggressive mastery and subjugation of nature. This chapter concludes with a section that considers the power relations explored here as more of a labyrinth than a ladder. In complicating these matrices of domination, the possibility is dismissed that achieving “gender equality” would remedy the problem of gender violence given the existence of other modes of domination, including human domination of nature.
