Expulsion of Patriarchy from Gender Theory

Over the last decades, patriarchy has lost its prominence among Northern feminist theorists as a conceptual tool for theorizing and describing gender. “Out-sourced” to the global South, in the words of Inderpal Grewal, "patriarchy” circulates to explain violence to women done “elsewhere” while remaining undertheorized and devoid of temporal and cultural specificity in our literature. Yet patriarchy remains a critical and named prism through which women and men negotiate their self-making in a variety of contexts. Our failure to adequately theorize patriarchy thus limits our ability to richly voice the lived experiences of these subjects and their movements against patriarchy. With the rise of the intersectionality paradigm, the anaytical power of investigating how gender domination comes to be constituted, maintained and transformed in particular ways was diminished. In this paper I advocate a conceptual framework to address this missing domain of domination in gender theory and suggest that we must open a thread via gender domination that can provide the anaytical template to link theories produced in different locations that contextualize and particularize gender domination spatially and epistemologically. Empirical material for this paper comes from Turkey where melding neoliberalism with neoconservatism is remaking patriarchy under an authoritarian political regime and resistance to it by feminist and LGBQT movements . The Turkish case raises particular questions and new analytical openings for the concept of patriarchy in gender theory.