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 (Kandiyoti 1988; Pilcher and Whelehan 2004). Beyond just the concept of patriarchy, such critiques have been an indispensable part of an emerging problematization of simplistic, monolithic accounts of gender oppression in general. In this article, I use the term “patriarchy” as a convenient designation of not only the particular concept of patriarchy but homogenous, monolithic accounts of gender oppression more broadly. I am interested in one consequence of critical conversations regarding patriarchy: its wide-ranging, albeit uneven displacement within women’s and gender studies by a number of other terms to frame gender-related oppression, the most important being “intersectionality” (Crenshaw 1991). I argue here that while these critiques of patriarchy and its eventual eclipse by intersectionality theory are clearly important and necessary, both have been incomplete. Despite the far-reaching reappraisals of patriarchy and the turn to more nuanced, intersectional approaches, unrecognized issues with the former continue to haunt how we conceptualize and talk about gendered dynamics and power relations within the latter. For example, a growing body of transnational feminist theorizing takes to task the uncritical acceptance of the nation as a necessarily meaningful unit of analysis for feminists. Arguing against binaries of global versus local, for example, Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan propose a transnational approach that focuses on the “lines cutting across them . . . [as] transnational linkages influence every level of social existence” (1994, 13). This is not just another call to globalize our perspectives. Transnational feminisms, as delineated by authors like Grewal and Kaplan, critique global and international feminisms as in fact relying on and reifying the notion of discrete nations that can be simply compared to one another (Kaplan, Alarcón, and Moallem 1999, 14). Rather, they encourage an examination of how categories of race, ethnicity, sexuality, culture, nation, and gender not only
intersect but are mutually constituted, formed, and transformed within transnational power-laden processes such as European imperialism and colonialism, neoliberal globalization, and so on. In this vein, I argue here that critical work on patriarchy has neglected a key central dimension: the potential and actual interrelationships of historically and geographically specific patriarchies to such transterritorial and transnational processes. . . .
