ABSTRACT
The traditional feminist concept of patriarchy, as a term for naming gender inequality or gendered power relationships between women and men, has been critiqued from a number of fronts. For instance, the concept has been charged with tautology, ahistoricism, and the construction of a homogenizing, totalizing gender oppression. Recent critiques of the use of the term “patriarchy” have focused on a number of interrelated dimensions. Perhaps the central critique concerns patriarchy’s unidimensional conceptualization of gender, its dichotomization of gendered individuals into women and men, and its neglect of differences and power relations within each category. If colonial paternalism denied infantilized and feminized dependent peoples’ political subjectivity, in this local-global space, these anticolonial men attempted to reclaim that subjectivity by reclaiming adulthood and masculinity.
