This article examines the general shift in feminist scholarship from the use of the concept of patriarchy to the concept of intersectionality from a transnational feminist perspective. It argues that unrecognized problems with the concept of patriarchy continue to haunt contemporary intersectional applications.
The intersectional scholarship tends to suffer from the ongoing legacy of patriarchy’s reification of nation-state borders and its failure to interrogate the significance of cross-border processes for shaping gender relations and identities. In doing so, it demonstrates the cross-border dimensions of these patriarchies, particularly their importance for imperial and colonial processes. It also discusses contemporary patriarchies in the anticolonial and postcolonial world in similar transnational perspective. It argues that many of the patriarchies that are today discussed as domestic patriarchies, often in quite complex ways, via the language of intersectionality, are actually embedded within deep transnational histories that must be recognized and interrogated.
Resource: Vrushali Patil, "From Patriarchy to Intersectionality: A Transnational Feminist Assessment of How Far We've Really Come," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 38, no. 4 (Summer 2013): 847-867.
Pseudonym: Alexis
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