GENDER AND SEXUALITY

This content is protected and may not be shared, uploaded, or distributed without the express permission of the author. © 2020 Katja M. Guenther, University of California, Riverside [email protected]

GSST 1 Week Two Lesson One Patriarchy

You’ve probably noticed by now that our major concept this week is patriarchy. In the Johnson reading and the YouTube lecture, you are introduced to what patriarchy is and how it operates as a social system. Historically, the term “patriarchy” referred to social systems in which the father or the oldest man in a kinship group held power over the family or tribe. In Greek, patriarchy literally means “rule of the father;” only in the mid-twentieth century did the word take on the broader meaning of an institutionalized pattern of men’s dominance in society. Many patriarchal societies are also patrilineal, which means that inheritance follows men’s ancestry and that usually only men can inherit (this continues to be true in many parts of the world; while in the US it is no longer legally true, in cultural practice, men tend continue to hold power in many families and many of our marriage rituals—such as women give up their own names and taking that of their husband, or a father “giving away” a daughter by walking her to a marriage ceremony—are a relic of when women were men’s property).

The origins of patriarchy have been subject to historical scholarship, and there are multiple (and generally contradictory) explanations of when and how patriarchy developed. Some archeologists have found evidence that male hierarchies emerged when eastern Europeans (Ukrainians) invaded southern and central Europe as early as 7000 BC. Some historians trace the roots to several millennia later (4000 BC) when the concept of fatherhood took root. Another theory on the development of patriarchy, advanced by feminist historian Gerda Lerner, is that patriarchy developed between 3000 and 600 BC in the Middle East when tribes began trading women as a way to build bonds of loyalty across groups of people. This practice had social benefits for increasing a sense of social solidarity across groups of people and reducing the likelihood of warfare, but it also established the idea that women could be traded away without their consent, and that men had rights to self-determination that women do not have—the seed of patriarchal ideologies that are still with us today. Karl Marx and his collaborator Friedrich Engels assert that patriarchy developed in tandem with the rise of private property (particularly as an outcome of the domestication of animals): Marx and Engels argued that once people had private property such as a herd of animals, they needed a way to pass that property on across generations, but could not do so unless men controlled women’s reproduction; otherwise, how would you know whose kid was whose? So women were forced into monogamy. In The Origins of Patriarchy (1884), Engels described the development of patriarchy in terms many Second Wave and contemporary feminists would echo: A wife was to be ruled by her husband, “reduced to servitude,” and “the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the production of children.” The creation of patriarchy, Engels concluded, constituted “the world historical defeat of the female sex.”

This content is protected and may not be shared, uploaded, or distributed without the express permission of the author. © 2020 Katja M. Guenther, University of California, Riverside [email protected]

No “initiating event” has been identified for patriarchy; that is, historians have not found conclusive evidence that something specific happened (like an environmental or demographic change) to push humans in this direction. The Second Wave Feminist Movement brought new attention to the idea of patriarchy, moving it from a technical term used by scholars to a more widely used term with which many Americans became familiar. Fighting patriarchy became an organizing goal of the Second Wave, which found evidence of patriarchy in virtually all major social institutions: family, religion, economy, politics, education, sports, arts and culture. Through consciousness raising (see last week’s lessons), the Second Wave helped women identify patterns of patriarchy in their own lives. Consciousness raising also worked to help women identify and stop their own internalized sexism, a type of internalized oppression through which girls and women internalize (or take on, accept, or believe) sexist ideologies and start enacting sexism and misogyny on themselves and other women and girls. Read about some examples of her own internalized sexism that one young woman notices here: https://feministcampus.org/ways-we-have-internalized- misogyny/ One of the goals of feminism has been to support people in unlearning patriarchy. That is, starting with the Second Wave feminist movement, feminism has worked to help all people rethink their own systems of knowledge and belief to identify, problematize, and ideally ultimately purge patriarchal ideologies. This is no easy feat, and undoing patriarchy can be a lifelong project. Read this blog post at Everyday Feminism to get some ideas about how to start unlearning patriarchy. https://everydayfeminism.com/2014/10/unlearning-patriarchal-lies/ In this recent column in UC Berkeley’s student newspaper, a fellow UC student discusses her experience trying to unlearn patriarchy: https://www.dailycal.org/2019/03/29/unlearning-the-patriarchy/ As the course progresses and we delve more into different expressions of gender inequality, try to keep patriarchy in mind. Think about what the rules and expectations are for girls and boys, women and men, and how they differ and what the consequences of those differences are.

As you contemplate patriarchy, also note how patriarchy is linked to homophobia: same-sex desire is problematic precisely because it violates patriarchal expectations of sexual relations in which a man dominates a woman and in which men’s pleasure/desire is most important. Further, there is no room in patriarchy for people who don’t fit clearly into one of the two gender categories on which patriarchy relies, man or woman—a topic we will talk about more in Weeks Three, Four, and beyond. In fact, some scholars of gender inequality have now replaced using the term patriarchy with either the term heteropatriarchy or even cisheteropatriarchy, in large part to emphasize how powerholders are cisgender, heterosexual men who, as a group, dominate cisgender women and sexual minorities (including gays and lesbians, trans, intersexual, and non-binary persons) as a group.

This content is protected and may not be shared, uploaded, or distributed without the express permission of the author. © 2020 Katja M. Guenther, University of California, Riverside [email protected]

Self-Assessment (not to be submitted, just for your own reflection; best completed after reading Johnson #2 and completing the first of the videos for Week Two)

1. Write your own definition of patriarchy, using your own words. 2. What has patriarchy meant in your own life? Identify 2-3 ways in which

patriarchy has shaped your opportunities, the expectations others have for you or that you have for yourself, and/or your beliefs.

3. Commit to trying to unlearn one patriarchal practice you engage in for a month. This could be something like changing something you say (such as committing to no longer use the term “you guys”), turning off any TV show that centers on violence against women and girls (when I tried doing this, I learned I had to give up the entire genre of detective/crime shows!), or letting go of a patriarchal belief you have about yourself or others (such as fatphobia). Stick to it and report back on Piazza how you are doing with your challenge.