{"id":196,"date":"2020-06-24T19:43:16","date_gmt":"2020-06-25T02:43:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/virtualkoerners\/?p=196"},"modified":"2020-06-24T19:43:16","modified_gmt":"2020-06-25T02:43:16","slug":"patriarchy-from-the-margins-to-the-center","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/virtualkoerners\/patriarchy-from-the-margins-to-the-center\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cPatriarchy: From the Margins to the Center\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cross-posted from Posthegemony<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It has been observed that the higher up a corporate hierarchy you look, the more likely it is you will find a psychopath. Indeed, in an article in Forbes<\/em><\/a> (of all places) we read that \u201cRoughly 4% to as high as 12% of CEOs exhibit psychopathic traits, according to some expert estimates, many times more than the 1% rate found in the general population and more in line with the 15% rate found in prisons.\u201d The same article also reports that \u201cthe top four career choices for psychopaths are CEO, attorney, media personality and salesperson.\u201d In other words, there is a congruence between psychopathic personality traits and some of the key institutions of contemporary society: business, the Law, the media, and commerce. So much for psychopathy being an \u201cantisocial\u201d disorder. It is part of the very fabric of the world we live in.<\/p>\n

\"segato_guerra\"In her chapter, \u201cPatriarchy: From the Margins to the Center\u201d (from La guerra contra las mujeres<\/em> [2017]), Rita Segato goes further. We are all<\/em> trained to be psychopaths now, she tells us, as part of a \u201cpedagogy of cruelty\u201d that is the \u201cnursery for psychopathic personalities that are valorized by the spirit of the age and functional for this apocalyptic phase of capitalism\u201d (102). Segato presents a brief reading of Stanley Kubrick\u2019s A Clockwork Orange<\/em> to make her point, though what she sees as \u201cmost extraordinary\u201d about the film is that the shock with which it was received when it came out (in 1971) now seems to have almost totally dissipated. What was once taken as itself an almost psychopathic assault on the viewer\u2019s senses is now just another movie; this shift in our sensibility is \u201ca clear indication [. . .] of the naturalization of the psychopathic personality and of violence\u201d (102). The narcissistic \u201cultra-violence\u201d of the gang of dandies that the film portrays is now fully incorporated within the social order that it once seemed to threaten.<\/p>\n

For Segato, moreover, this psychopathic violence to which we are increasingly inured is ultimately gender violence: it both establishes and is grounded upon what she elsewhere terms a \u201cmandate of masculinity\u201d by which masculine identity and at the same time both the public sphere and the state is inscribed on and at the expense of women\u2019s bodies. Moreover, all this is folded into a \u201cdecolonial\u201d perspective that does not claim that indigenous social structure were free of sexism or patriarchy, but which argues that Western modernity transformed what were once gender relations characterized by reciprocity into a binary system from which empathy is absent and woman are treated as things on which male narcissism inscribes itself.<\/p>\n

In short, Segato offers a grand theory of human society and epochal history, at the root of which is (almost) always and everywhere violence against women. As she puts it: \u201cBuried down below, at the foundation, at the foot of the pyramid, sustaining the entire edifice, a woman\u2019s body\u201d (97). As even the reference to a pyramid suggests, confirmed by the frequent invocation of diverse folktales and origin narratives from wildly different contexts, all this adds up to a kind of mythic anthropology that (for all the glancing citations of contemporary theorists such as Judith Butler) has a nineteenth-century feel to it. Indeed, there is a tension between the universalizing gestures on the one hand (an appeal to transhistorical ways of knowing and being), and the attempt to periodize and draw out specificities and differences on the other. Are we all psychopaths now, or is there something psychopathic inherent to modernity? At times, Segato seems to want to have it both ways. Equally, I\u2019m not particularly convinced by her calls to feminine (and indigenous) empathy and reciprocity as modes of resistance to the increasingly violent structure of everyday life, not least because (despite her protests otherwise) all this does indeed sound very much like a form of essentialism.<\/p>\n

For me, the parts of Segato\u2019s analysis are very much more interesting and provocative than the whole. I don\u2019t think that we need buy into the (quasi) cosmic unity of her over-arching vision to appreciate the very important ways in which she contributes to our understanding of the mechanisms of gender violence, for instance, not least in her specific studies of cases such as the femicides in Northern Mexico. Even if we see society less as a pyramid (with its base and superstructure) and more as a network or web, Segato\u2019s analyses help us see in new ways how everything is connected, both to ensure the reproduction of forms of domination across many axes, and to offer hope that local resistances can have broad and unexpected repercussions throughout the system. The center has permeated the margins: there are few if any spaces of refuge, and certainly no pre-lapsarian community to which one might fantasize a return. But at the same time, the margins continue to haunt the center: multiplicity is everywhere.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cross-posted from Posthegemony. It has been observed that the higher up a corporate hierarchy you look, the more likely it is you will find a psychopath. Indeed, in an article in Forbes (of all places) we read that \u201cRoughly 4% to as high as 12% of CEOs exhibit psychopathic traits, according to some expert estimates, … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “\u201cPatriarchy: From the Margins to the Center\u201d”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":64,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[12,21,20],"class_list":["post-196","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-gender","tag-segato","tag-violence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/virtualkoerners\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/virtualkoerners\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/virtualkoerners\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/virtualkoerners\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/64"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/virtualkoerners\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=196"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/virtualkoerners\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":197,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/virtualkoerners\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196\/revisions\/197"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/virtualkoerners\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/virtualkoerners\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/virtualkoerners\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}