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Gender and Coloniality: From Low-Intensity Communal Patriarchy to High-Intensity Colonial-Modern Patriarchy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 December 2021

Rita Laura Segato  and
Pedro Monque
Rita Laura Segato
Affiliation:
Professor Emeritus, Graduate Program in Bioethics, University of Brasília, Campus Universitário, Darcy Ribeiro, Asa Norte, 70.910-000, Brasília - DF, Brazil and Chair of the Cátedra Rita Segato de Pensamiento Incómodo, Programa Lectura Mundi, Universidad Nacional de San Martín, Campus Miguelete, Provincia de Buenos Aires, Argentina
Pedro Monque*
Affiliation:
Translated by Pedro Monque, Philosophy Program, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY10016, USA
*
Corresponding author. [email protected]
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Abstract

This essay collects four decades of my own reflections, as an anthropologist and feminist, on gender and coloniality across various contexts in Latin America. It also highlights the decolonial methodology and vocabulary that I have had to develop in my various roles as scholar, public intellectual, and expert witness over the years. Briefly, what I present here is a decolonial feminist perspective that argues for the existence of a patriarchal political order in communal societies before colonization. Yet, in my view, precolonial gender has a dual structure that is plural in essence and differs markedly from the binary gender structure of colonial-modern societies, which works in terms of a One and its marginalized others. As I argue, the capturing and transformation of precolonial dual gender structures by the modern gender system exacerbates inequality, increases violence against women, and disempowers them politically. For that reason, I speak of “low-intensity” and “high-intensity” patriarchal systems.

Type
Translation
Information
Hypatia , Volume 36 , Issue 4 , Fall 2021 , pp. 781 - 799
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Hypatia, a Nonprofit Corporation

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