Patriarchy

This is a twofold term: it refers to a particular historically-grounded gender-based socioeconomic arrangement of power relations, as well as the ideology that legitimates it. From the perspective of lived experience (which, in the final analysis, is the only thing that really counts, in this instance), at the core of patriarchal societies is male hegemony that seeks to exploita

tively control, at once, women’s bodies and time (expressed through labor power) by means of terror, and which is justified on the basis of an arrogant and illegitimate sense of entitlement rooted in a power-driven ignorance-based essentialist ideology. It is important to add further that patriarchy does not exist in isolation from other systems of oppression, such as racism/ethnicism and classism. (This simultaneous interweave of different systems of oppression, where individuals may simultaneously experience classism, racism, sexism, and so on, as they go about their daily lives, is usually referred to as intersectionality.1) At the same time, patriarchy very often involves, in some of its dimensions—especially at the level of familiality and other interpersonal relations—the collusion, tragically, of women themselves (primarily because of socialization). Among the many empirical expressions of patriarchy today that women face include: elimination of the right to choose or not to choose to carry a pregnancy through to its conclusion; a partially paid 24-hour work day imposed by a combination of household-chores and wage-earning employment; discrimination in matters of promotion, pay, etc. in the workplace; slavery (trafficking); sexual harassment in the work place and other public places; sexism in the entertainment industry (from objectification of women's bodies by means of voyeurism to the glorification of misogyny); sexist biases in the media; and gender-based terrorism, of which domestic violence, rape, and even murder inflicted on women by males are routine expressions.

NOTE: although there are some proponents of feminist theory (especially those of a cultural studies bent) who question the usefulness of this concept, it has value in providing a shorthand way of comprehending the political economy of gender-based social structural relations of power—especially in the context of discussions of other similar relations of power as class, race, and so on.Feminist theory, incidentally, refers to the interdisciplinary study of feminism from the perspective of theory. In other words, no matter what the discipline (economics, sociology, politics, philosophy, geography, history, anthropology, medicine, law, and so on) feminist theory seeks to subject it to theoretical analyses from the point of view of the feminist agenda. So what is feminism, then? It is the worldwide movement to establish gender equality in terms of human and civil rights. --------------------1. The theory behind intersectionality was first articulated by the African American legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in her article published in 1989 in the journal University of Chicago Legal Forum, titled "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics." She had written it as a criticism of white feminists who, quite often, remained naively (or even deliberately) insensitive to the racism that black women experienced in United Sates--a problem that continues to plague them to this day.