Patriarchal Order Research Articles

AN EXAMINATION ON THE STATUS OF WOMEN IN SAUDI ARABIA WITHIN THE FRAMEWORK OF FEMINIST THEORY: THE PERFECT CANDIDATE

Religion and the traditions and customs that religion integrates into society often feed the patriarchy in the society. The geography where women suffer most from the relevant patriarchal order is the Middle East geography, where Islam and Islamic rules are concentrated. Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, is a country governed by sharia, where the isolation of women in society is intense, and where women lack many basic human rights besides their specific rights such as participation in social, economic and political life. In this respect, it constitutes the most unique example of the status of women in Islam. Cinema is a branch of art that has influenced and been influenced by the social view since its existence. From this point of view, cinema constantly reproduces the gender roles imposed by the dominant patriarchal ideology. In the 1970s, with the women's movements that gained momentum, cinema became acquainted with the feminine woman narrative. In this context, the film adaptation of gender discrimination and sharply defined gender roles in Saudi Arabia adds a more specific perspective to the narrative of cinema and women than other examples. In this article, the film The Perfect Candidate by Saudi female director Haifaa Al-Mansour, will be analyzed within the framework of feminist theory, in which the manifestation of gender roles in the country in social life.

On the Annunciation church in Snovitsy

The study of the Church of the Annunciation in Snovitsy was conducted in order to clarify the dating of the monument, to clarify its structural and decorative features, as well as to determine the place and significance of this building for the church architecture of the Vladimir region in the XVII century. For this purpose, a study of available sources, including archival ones, was undertaken. The most valuable source is the materials of the monument survey conducted by specialists of the Vladimir Restoration Workshop before the start of its restoration. In addition to the work carried out by the workshop staff, plans of the temple and its sections were drawn up, which are published for the first time in this work. In addition to studying the sources, a detailed analysis of the structural and decorative features of the monument was carried out for the first time, during which the fact of participation in the construction of a mixed artel of masters – metropolitan and from the Volga region. The features of the Volga architecture were reflected mainly in the decoration of the building, became obvious. However, in general, Moscow features prevail. Some architectural features are extremely rare, for example, the orientation of the main volume along the west – east axis. Unique features were also used in the decoration of the monument, such as decorative inserts in the tops of the window frames, exact analogies to the combination of which have not been revealed at the moment. After the analysis, it became possible to clarify the dating of the temple. The most appropriate date should be considered the 1670s-1680s. The paper also raises the question of the original appearance and the customer of the building. It is necessary to agree with the opinion of the restorers about the reconstruction of the bell tower, the northern gallery, as well as the initial absence of the stone southern gallery. Regarding the identity of the customer, it should be noted that the village of Snovitsy has long been a metropolitan, and in the XVII century it was part of the patriarchal region, which suggests the likely participation of the patriarch in the construction of a stone monastery church. A possible customer could be Patriarch Pitirim (1672-1673), but the main period of construction fell on the time of his successor – Patriarch Joachim (1674-1690), which was reflected not only in the nature of the decor of the temple and its construction, but also in a considerable amount of church utensils of this period. The article also notes the importance of the Annunciation Church for the architecture of the Vladimir region, which is due to the presence of unique features of the monument, the mixed nature of the artel of masters, as well as the assumption of a possible patriarchal order.

Margaret Atwood'Un Damızlık Kızın Öyküsü Romanında Ataerkil Yapı

Back in the old days, the hunting and gathering period shaped the division of labor between men and women, the former being hunters, and the latter gatherers. While men were engaged in battue, i.e. herd hunting, women mostly hunted small animals and gathered plants to share tasks in society. Considering that battue often ended in failure, this period was indeed a time when mostly women covered their family’s food supply. Since women took on the task of care as well as gathering, they essentially had the most critical tasks of society during this period. As a natural consequence of this situation, society had a matriarchal structure.
 With the transition to a sedentary life and the subsequent domestication of animals, men took over most of the farming and livestock work on themselves. Thus, the means of production came under the rule of men. This led women to take care of their family and home, and restricted women’s space. Therefore, society underwent a transformation from a matriarchal to a patriarchal structure.
 On the other hand, women started to take their place in production again with the effect of the Industrial Revolution. They endeavored to rebuild their identity in the patriarchal order, to create a change in the social structure and thinking of society, as well as to make room for themselves in working life. Yet, from the 18th century onwards, the patriarchal social structure has maintained its dominance. In this social order, women’s struggle for social, economic and legal rights has been continuing without interruption. In her dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood addresses women’s issues, gender and cultural dogmas in patriarchal social structure. The novel investigates the place of women in society in the Republic of Gilead, as well as the patriarchal structure in a critical manner. In this context, this study is designed to explore the type of role that patriarchy casts for women in Atwood’s work, The Handmaid’s Tale, and to elaborate on how women are pressured by cultural patterns in this patriarchal structure.

Una Carla Lonzi: a Feminist Critique to Sexual Difference in Hegel’s Ethical State

Within contemporary philosophical discourse we find different thinkers that, with the aim to criticize Western dominant thought, by them addressed as ‘phallocentric’, directly refer to Hegelian texts. This paper will present one author who have openly spoken out a feminist critique of Hegelian thought, and in particular of the sexual division described by the Stuttgart philosopher, culminating in the ethical state – representing the constitution of the modern state – with the confinement of the feminine within the domestic sphere and, conversely, the liberation of the masculine within community political life.
 The thinker who will be analyzed is the Italian activist and philosopher Carla Lonzi, author of the renowned Sputiamo su Hegel (Let’s Spit on Hegel) and precursor of the Italian sexual difference feminism. The author confronted the political division implemented by Hegel within the ethical state between the two sexes, trying to show how Hegel’s work strongly contributed to the constitution of the patriarchal symbolic order still in force in Western thought. The fundamental point of the author’s thought is, in fact, the conviction that the symbolic and linguistic structures of Western culture are something deeply rooted and, therefore, very complex to change. This helps us to understand why in Europe, despite the implementation of various legislative changes – such as, for example, the establishment of anti-violence centers, the recognition of gender violence at a legal level, the sanctions against gender discrimination in the workplace – the patriarchal dynamics typical of Western thought are changing too slowly (when they are): gender violence is the order of the day, the pay gap is far from being healed, and, above all, the division of gender roles between care work and productive work is still strongly present.
 This text, therefore, seeks to demonstrate that the philosophical scope that accompanied the formation of European thought also characterized its darker features, including the patriarchal perspective. Here, we will analyze a particular aspect of patriarchy, focusing on its elaboration within Hegelian political philosophy: the presumed ontological and biological/natural destination of the female to domestic work and the male to public life.
 To this end, the article is divided into two parts. In the first part, the concept of sexual difference as developed by Hegel will be presented, analyzing its development within the three parts of his philosophical system. In the second part, a part of Lonzi’s thought will be briefly analyzed, to then articulate her critique of the Hegelian division of gender roles.
 

Jacinda Ardern and the limits of gender on the Chinese-language Internet: a critical discourse analysis

ABSTRACT This article explores Chinese Internet users’ discussions about Jacinda Ardern’s maternity leave in the wake of her being elected as the Prime Minister of New Zealand, based on an analysis of postings retrieved from the most popular Chinese community question-answering (CQA) site—Zhihu. Drawing on critical discourse analysis (CDA), with the assistance of content analysis (CA), we reveal that Zhihu users’ assessments of Ardern’s electoral success are of a gendered divide in which women and men largely constitute the opposing opinion camps. In particular, male Internet users chiefly direct the discussion, attempting to rationalise the unsuitability of female politicians in Western-style democratic elections. In this process, they also legitimise the return of patriarchal orders to China, reflecting a domestic orientation of their engagement with international politics. The research findings shed light on the gender-politics nexus established in Chinese-language social media discourses.

Representation, Otherness and Fantastic Storyworlds: Breaking Gender Binaries and Reworking Identities in Game of Thrones

Game of Thrones’ (HBO, 2011-2019) fantastic storyworld incorporates narrative and representational arcs that interrogate its gendered social, cultural and political framework. Working from Schubart and Gjelsvik’s (2016:1) assertion that the show’s female characters are ‘key to the originality […], appeal and popularity of the GoT universe’, I argue that the show capitalizes on fantasy’s position outside the realities and limitations of the human condition. In doing so, it challenges representational binaries through characters like Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey) and Arya Stark (Maisie Williams) from their respective positions within and outside of the structures of power. They push back against the gendered expectations imposed on them by the patriarchal established order, reworking their own identities to forge their own paths. My analysis therefore reflects the scope for a multiplicity of complex identities to emerge within the show and for a deeper understanding of the representational possibilities in television.

Abjection in extremely gendered colonial organizations: Female military firefighter officers in Brazil

It is often suggested that some occupations are inherently more suited to men or to women. Such beliefs can become norms that can have powerful effects on those who inhabit, or wish to enter, such occupations. This article explores the discursive framing of gendered occupations by considering the experience of cis female military firefighter officers in the masculine world of the Corpo de Bombeiros Militar in the Brazilian state of Espírito Santo. We identify this Global South organization as extremely gendered but also profoundly colonial in its patriarchal order and its hierarchical culture and structure. We use Kristeva’s and Butler’s work on abjection to understand how these officers and their bodies are differentiated. Based on interviews and document analysis, we foreground their abjection using three examples: the organization’s physical entrance test, the maternal body and its masculine organizational grammar. Yet, just as they are targets of exclusion, these women and their bodies are also necessary to maintain the hypermasculinity of this organization. Our contribution is to analyse abjection in a specific hypergendered organizational context where masculinity is not only amplified by the co-presence of military service and firefighting, but also where gender relations, structure and culture have deep colonial roots.

The limitations of statues

Historical scholarship on the formation of the state in the United States has focused on the national and state governments and has searched for state power in courtrooms, barracks, and legislative chambers. This article reveals the growth of municipal state power in an unlikely place: the large urban train station, a crucial transportation chokepoint. Using nineteenth-century St. Louis as my primary example, I focus on how both police and non-state actors took advantage of an emergent place of constricted mobility. Rather than imprison people to punish criminality, subalterns caught in the railway panopticon were disciplined according to then-prevailing gender and racial norms. I argue that the intersection of networks there created a place where local police and their allies could surveil, check, and potentially stop more people than in any other place in the urban landscape. This article refocuses the history of state building on a more prosaic location than the halls of government and traces the history of police as enforcers of the racial norms and patriarchal order. Central railway stations became, unintentionally, key sites of state formation and carceral power. This research reveals the spatial heterogeneity of the state's strength, provides a genealogy for contemporary racially inequitable policing, and creates a framework to investigate other places where state and non-state actors can exercise particular power over everyday people.

Selling under stigma: The relational gender dynamics of becoming biolaborers in China

Existing studies have examined how economic and cultural factors affect individuals selling organs and human tissues. But how social interactions and community relationships shape individuals' decisions and experiences has received much less attention. This research focuses on the intersection between economic disparities and gendered lineage structures to explain why and how people engage in bodily commodification. Drawing on oral history interviews with 32 former plasma sellers in central rural China, I find that villagers entered collection stations in two ways: 1) individual recruitment through which migrant men and married women on the margin of local lineage hierarchies in richer villages sold plasma as individuals and 2) familial recruitment through which multiple men of dominant lineage groups in poorer villages sold plasma in groups. While individual sellers struggled with self-blame and shame, familial sellers were shielded from gendered stigma as their communities adapted lineage rules to align plasma sale with masculinity. The results highlight the utility of a relational framework of gender in highlighting commodification as a dynamic social process shaped by participants’ power locations in relation to not only each other but also the local patriarchal order.

Loss and Renewal Elena Ferrante’s Representation of Mourning in Days of Abandonment

Days of Abandonment, Ferrante’s most frequently read novel in English world before My Brilliant Friend, witnesses the establishment of Ferrante’s unique voice. It relates the psychological and physical turmoil of its female protagonist Olga who has been abandoned by her husband. By drawing on Freud’s theory of mourning and loss, as well as Judith Butler’s theorization of ungrievable loss, this paper seeks to lay bare the process of the reconstruction of female subjectivity in Days of Abandonment. It is argued that, by conducting a proper mourning process for the loss of her boundedness with the patriarchal order as represented by her husband Mario, Olga has managed to step out of the patriarchal order and reestablish her connection not only with other human subjects, but also with nonhuman actors as well. And in this posthuman intra-action with materiality of the world, she has rebuilt her identity that initiates her into a more rewarding life.

Ethics for the majority world: AI and the question of violence at scale

In this work, I argue that hegemonic AI is becoming a more powerful force capable of perpetrating global violence through three epistemic processes: datafication (extraction and dispossession), algorithmisation (mediation and governmentality) and automation (violence, inequality and displacement of responsibility). These articulated epistemic mechanisms lead to global classification orders and epistemic, economic, social, cultural and environmental inequality. Hegemonic AI can be thought of as a bio-necro-technopolitical machine that serves to maintain the capitalist, colonialist and patriarchal order of the world. To make this point, the proposed approach bridges the macro and micropolitical, building on Suely Rolnik’s call for understanding the effects of the macropolitical in the micropolitical, as well as what feminist black scholar Patricia Hill Collins made visible about oppressive systems operating at the structural, institutional and individual levels. A critical AI ethics is one that is concerned with the preservation of life and the coresponsibility of AI harms to the majority of the planet.

A Foucauldian and Feminist Reading of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Anne Brontë, in her novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, criticizes the power of the patriarchal society in the nineteenth century and the practices that legitimize the actions of men considered superior to women. Helen, the female protagonist of the novel, shows that by running away from home with her child due to her cruel and neglectful husband, she can both stand on her own feet and raise her child well without a father like Arthur, and thus opposes the patriarchal order and discourse of the period. In order to illustrate male oppression on women represented in the novel, this study employs critical theories of Michel Foucault as well as feminist criticism. In this respect, the study claims that the novel subverts patriarchal order while implying that women like Helen should be equal with men in social life and before the law. In the light of the protagonist’s portrayal as a rational, creative, hardworking and self-confident woman contrary to Victorian conceptions, this study reveals that the superiority of men over women stems from the patriarchal discourse created in the bourgeois society.

I Am a Child of Gods

I Am a Child of Gods

The railway panopticon: State formation, carceral power, and everyday policing in the late-nineteenth-century train station

Historical scholarship on the formation of the state in the United States has focused on the national and state governments and has searched for state power in courtrooms, barracks, and legislative chambers. This article reveals the growth of municipal state power in an unlikely place: the large urban train station, a crucial transportation chokepoint. Using nineteenth-century St. Louis as my primary example, I focus on how both police and non-state actors took advantage of an emergent place of constricted mobility. Rather than imprison people to punish criminality, subalterns caught in the railway panopticon were disciplined according to then-prevailing gender and racial norms. I argue that the intersection of networks there created a place where local police and their allies could surveil, check, and potentially stop more people than in any other place in the urban landscape. This article refocuses the history of state building on a more prosaic location than the halls of government and traces the history of police as enforcers of the racial norms and patriarchal order. Central railway stations became, unintentionally, key sites of state formation and carceral power. This research reveals the spatial heterogeneity of the state's strength, provides a genealogy for contemporary racially inequitable policing, and creates a framework to investigate other places where state and non-state actors can exercise particular power over everyday people.

He Zhen and the Decolonialization of Feminism

Abstract Culturally conditioned differences between women must be seen and theorized about in order to avoid essentialist generalizations about “women’s issues.” In this context, the idea of a universal patriarchal order is questioned, as is the idea of a general, universally equivalent type of feminism. Through analysis of the political philosophy of He Zhen (1884–circa 1920), this paper aims to present a Chinese alternative to liberal feminism based on the assumption that the Western feminist movement might not be a suitable means of abolishing women’s oppression in China, because it is culturally conditioned and rooted in the particulars of Western social history.

Constructing the National Body through Public Homophobia: A Discourse Analysis of Egyptian Media Coverage of the ‘Rainbow Flag Case’ in 2017

Since the revolution in 2011 and the reconstitution of authoritarian military rule under Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in 2013, various moral panics shook Egypt and were accompanied by the policing of bodies, sexuality and sexual identities. The so-called ‘Rainbow Flag case’ was a notable illustration of such policing. After youths waved a rainbow flag at a concert in Cairo in 2017, state-controlled media led a vicious campaign against homosexuality that was part of a massive state crackdown on LGBTIQ+ people. Building on previous feminist research on gendered nationalism, this paper uses a discourse analysis methodology to examine state-controlled media coverage after the event to explore the discursive repertoires that constitute LGBTIQ+ people, especially homosexuals, as others within the Egyptian nation. It becomes evident that the regime – needing to reconsolidate and strengthen its authoritarian rule – promotes and supports a self-legitimising gendered nationalism, generating power by re-establishing heteronormative identities. Furthermore, the crackdown, repression, and discourse aim to restore the patriarchal order after the revolution in 2011.

Anti-Christ in Egypt: Sexual Danger, Race, and Crime in a Narrative of Imperial Crisis

For a long time, women's crime has been quite a no-go area for feminist thinkers. With the lesser frequency of female crime seemingly encouraging quantitative-minded criminologists to dismiss a gendered approach as altogether irrelevant, theories of crime, in fact, have been mostly written by and tested on men. The emergence of a feminist perspective in criminology pluralized and decentered the disciplinary epistemology with important outcomes. On one side, it paved the way for the investigation of the distinctive ways in which individuals socialized as women commit crimes, deconstructing the die-hard stereotype of female criminals’ abnormality, that is, the idea that female offenders deviate from a female standard of nondelinquency. On the other, quoting Loraine Gelsthorpe, feminist criminology “has not only developed a critique of accumulated wisdom about female offenders and victims, but has illuminated institutionalized sexism within criminological theory, policy and practice.” Feminism has stimulated the production of criminological knowledge both empirically and theoretically. As far as empirical studies are concerned, historian Philippa Levine, in a seminal piece on prostitution, crime, and empire, remarked that prostitution, erroneously conceived as a quintessentially female crime, constituted an important exception to the unquestioned association of crime and masculinity, resulting in the neglect of serious gendered analysis of crime. Here the criminalization of commercial sex can be explained by the fact that prostitution is considered to defy the very norm at the core of the power gender system, that female sexuality has to be kept monogamous, reproductive, and conjugal to service the patriarchal social order. As Levine argues, prostitution “offers the prospect not only of women defined by their sexual nature but also of a more threatening vision of women actively putting that sexuality to work for their own benefit.” As a consequence, the agency of women exchanging sex for money promiscuously outside of wedlock has been conceptualized in two different apparently paradoxical ways: women prostitute themselves either because they are abnormal, so they act out of their deviancy, or because they are forced to do so, so they act under coercion. Completely lost to these split understandings, juxtaposing blame and compassion, was obviously the meaning of women's agency and rationality, especially when these were inscribed within a logic of survival and subsistence.

Poetic Attitude of Didactic Sijo and Significance of Boundary Building

본 연구는 교훈시조에서 경계짓기를 통해서 이루려고 하는 질서의 구도와 경계짓기의 시조적 의의가 무엇인지를고찰해 보려고 하였다. 이를 위하여 교훈시조의 시적 태도를 ‘옹호와 의지’, ‘권면과 교화’, ‘비판과 배척’ 등 세 가지로 나누어 따져 보았는데, 이 시적 태도의 유형들은 의도된 경계짓기의 결과로 파악되었다. 이를 바탕으로 교훈시조에 나타난 경계짓기의 방식과 구도를 살펴본 후 교훈시조에 나타난 경계짓기의 의의를 고찰해 보았는데 다음의 네 가지로 요약된다. 그 의의는 첫째, 경계짓기는 남성 양반 사대부 중심의 권력화 된 시선으로 말미암은 것이며, 둘째, 경계짓기는 계급사회의 가부장적 질서 확립에 이바지하며, 셋째, 경계짓기는 공동체의 일체감과 유대감을형성하고, 넷째, 경계짓기는 작시법적 패턴을 제공하고 장르관습을 형성케 한다는 등으로 간추려진다. 덧붙여 이의의들이 지니는 한계도 간략히 짚어 보았는데, 이는 문제의 점검을 통해 새로운 가능성을 열어두기 위함이다.This study attempted to examine the composition of the order to be achieved through boundary building in the didactic Sijo and the significance of boundary building. To this end, didactic Sijo’s poetic attitude was divided into three categories: ‘protection and will’, ‘recommendation and edification’, and ‘criticism and rejection’. These types of poetic attitudes were identified as a result of the boundary building. The significance of the Sijo’s boundary setting can be summarized into the following four. First, boundary building is caused by a powerful gaze centered on the male noblemen. Second, boundary building contributes to the establishment of patriarchal order in class society. Third, boundary building forms a sense of unity and bond in the community. Fourth, boundary building provides a pattern of writing poetry and forms genre customs.

Consent and Misogyny: Response to Sarah Baechle and Sara V. Torres

Consent and Misogyny:Response to Sarah Baechle and Sara V. Torres Suzanne M. Edwards Sarah Baechle's and Sara Torres's essays illuminate the relationship between medieval consent and misogyny. Misogyny, as Kate Manne describes it, enforces women's subordination in a patriarchal order, by punishing women who deviate from asymmetric gendered norms and rewarding those who affirm them.1 Often, according to Manne, misogyny compels the surrender of feminine-coded goods—such as deference, attention, sexual labor, and care—to powerful men. Normative expectations about women's responsiveness to men's demands structure the medieval texts that Baechle and Torres analyze. According to the knight in "Come over the woodes," "custome" demands the maiden's acquiescence to his sexual aggression, and in the Cruel Lady texts, fin'amors conventions dictate the Lady's pity for the lover's suffering. These texts make explicit that there may be consequences for a woman who does not provide the sexual satisfaction or affective care that social norms (not just the individual men in question) require from her. Such punishment, the pastourelle knight insists, isn't personal; it's simply what a patriarchal order requires. The pastourelle and the Cruel Lady texts code consent as both an individual choice and a coercive demand that, if refused, may result in violence. Consent is thus the switch-point between misogyny's carrot and stick. Affirm consent and gain praise (or at least avoid punishment); deny consent and suffer harm. Moreover, misogyny's coercive power doesn't require punishment to seem legitimate every time; the Cruel Lady is sometimes defended and sometimes condemned, and the pastourelle knight's appeal to manorial law is evidently bad faith. Still, the framing of both scenarios [End Page 335] follows from the premise that women do normatively owe men sexual or affective labor. The lady moved by a would-be lover's suffering won't find herself on trial, and neither will the maiden who assents to the knight (at least as long as they don't run afoul of their obligations to other men). In this sense, debate, between pastourelle knight and maiden, or between the Cruel Lady's detractors and her defenders, does not offer resistance to misogyny, but rather comprises its enforcement function. Androphilia (or "himpathy") reinforces misogyny by positioning privileged men as the most worthy recipients of sympathy. As both Baechle and Torres emphasize, feminine consent is often framed in relation to masculine suffering. The would-be lover demands the Cruel Lady's compassion, her willingness to feel his pain and then assuage it, and the pastourelle knight insists that he and the maiden are equally victims of laws that dictate what they must do. Baechle and Torres deftly expose how this appeal erases unequal social power and harm to "let historically dominant agents get away with murder vis-à-vis their historical subordinates."2 Ultimately, Baechle's and Torres's essays are important for our historical understanding of misogyny and for our theoretical understanding of how discourses of consent function as tools of misogynist enforcement. The repeated refusals of consent by the Cruel Lady and the pastourelle maiden become a locus of rhetorical coercion and anxious debate precisely because they expose the limits of masculine demands to structure feminine autonomy. [End Page 336] Suzanne M. Edwards Lehigh University Footnotes 1. Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 2. Ibid., 201. Copyright © 2022 The New Chaucer Society, University of Miami

Fennell's Promising Young Woman and Furious Women in Film

Emerald Fennell’s debut feature Promising Young Woman (2020) incisively examines sexual assault, misogyny, and the culture of complicity that continues to perpetuate `violence against women. This article will establish Fennell’s aptitude as a filmmaker in condemning the pervasive forces of patriarchal social order in harmony with Kate Manne’s account of structural misogyny analyzed in Down Girl (2017) and Entitled (2020). Fennell’s subversion of genre standards demonstrates how the actions of individuals, separate from the perpetrator, lead to additional acts of harm, and addresses the ever-present reality of male violence which the feminist-hero is, ultimately, unable to surmount. Despite arguments that Promising Young Woman has not met the expectations for change the me-too movement inspired, Fennell challenges conventions to expose misogyny and male violence asking that future feminist filmgoers consider a new way forward.