Post-gender patriarchy

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In the rather privileged and isolated world of academe, a binary and rigid gender system is seemingly a thing of the past.  Decades of feminism and feminist scholarship have shaped students’ ideas about what they can and cannot do.  Women can be scientists; men can be stay-at-home parents.  Women can play rugby; men can decide not to play sports.

In addition to feminism, a growing transgender movement on campus means that things like gender neutral bathrooms and getting to choose what name and what gender signifiers are on your transcript are increasingly commonplace.

It’s not that college campuses feel “post-gender,” but they definitely feel post-gender-binary.

And yet loosening our ties to gender might mean we can no longer respond to patriarchy when we see it. No longer feeling “solidarity with our sisters,” most women (and men) don’t know what to make of news stories like these.  After all, words like “patriarchy” fell out of fashion with 3rd wave feminism’s insistence on giving women subjectivity and a role in creating the systems in which they live.  Patriarchy also seemed increasingly difficult to pin down given post-modernist ideas about the lack of a fixed and stable gender subject.

But surely patriarchy is a word we must revive- even if we say it is not about men per se – when confronted with the misogyny mixed with male privilege that seems to be running rampant off of college campuses.  For instance, in Iran “bad” women are being blamed for causing earthquakes. According to a CNN report,

The prayer leader, Hojatoleslam Kazim Sadeghi, says women and girls who “don’t dress appropriately” spread “promiscuity in society… When promiscuity spreads, earthquakes increase,” he says in a video posted Monday on YouTube, apparently of him leading Friday prayers in Tehran, Iran, last week.

In Mexico, a pregnant 10-year old, who was raped by her stepfather, is being forced to give birth to the child despite serious risks to her health.  Because of the Catholic Church’s vocal opposition to abortion in Mexico and the rise of conservative groups, this is hardly the only case of forced pregnancy on a child.

This girl is much more than an isolated case,” said Adriana Ortiz-Ortega, a researcher at Mexico’s National Autonomous University who has written two books on abortion in Mexico, “and there is much more influence now from conservative groups that are trying to prevent the legalization of abortion.”

As I wrote back in February, similar forced pregnancies are happening in Nicaragua as a result of state-Church alliances that define “real Nicaraguans” as opposed to abortion and abortion-rights activists as “foreign.”

Meanwhile, back on the post-gender campuses that I inhabit, sexual assault is a constant threat and is nearly always committed by a particular gendered and sexed body and most of the time on a differently gendered and sexed body.  At a nearby university, there are details coming out about a particularly brutal assault on a young woman by two men, the 9th reported on the campus this year.  On my own campus, a variety of stories of sexual (and gendered) assault float in and out of public discussion, although few are reported to police. The underreporting of sexual violence on college campuses is a national problem.  Why so few sexual assaults on campus are reported to police is unclear- partly it is an effort to protect the survivors of such assaults from a judicial system that is, for lack of a better word, patriarchal and partly it is because sexual assault is not seen as fully a crime because of what can only be called patriarchal attitudes by campus administrators.

Living in a post-gender world that is simultaneously patriarchal may seem impossible, an oxymoron written on the body and lives of academic sorts like me. But I think post-gender might be the correct response to patriarchy- an absolute refusal to locate ourselves on either side of the gender binary so that humans with any sort of body parts and any gender expression can join together to say that bodies- of whatever gender- deserve protection from state interference in the form of forced pregnancy, hate speech in the form of blaming “women,” and violence.

In this post-gender world, we must all be “sisters” against patriarchy, even if we have a penis.