Patriarchal Pyramid

While writing my review of Leslie Feinberg’s Transgender Warriors, I sketched a model of patriarchal ideology and society. It can be read top-to-bottom as a model of patriarchal relations as they descend logically from its atomic social categories (comparable to Marx’s logical derivation of the money form, which has little to do with the historical genesis of money as a unit of account which already implies a socialization and valuation of labor), and bottom-to-top as a model of how patriarchal ideology arises from material relations upon which it imposes increasingly abstract social notions.

1. Naturalization of sex as immutable essence.
2. Enforcement of gender roles and expressions on the basis of sex.
3. Institutionalization of sexism and heterosexuality.
4. Enclosure and exchange of women within and between families.
5. Assignment of women to domestic labor / social reproduction.

This is not new or insightful, but it helps me contextualize works I’ve read to understand on what level of abstraction they are viewing patriarchy (and how each level feeds up or down into more abstract or material dimensions). Imagine it as a pyramid. I have the following authors in mind:

• de Beauvoir, Simone. 1949. The Second Sex.
• Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.
• Davis, Angela. 1981. Race, Women and Class. 
• Feinberg, Leslie. 1996. Transgender Warriors.
• Irigaray, Luce. 1979. This Sex Which Is Not One.
• Lerner, Gerda. 1987. The Creation of Patriarchy.  
• Serano, Julia. 2007. Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity.

I don’t really want to point out the levels on which each author deals with patriarchy because, you know, dialectics etc. The levels don’t exist in isolation but constantly and mutually inform each other.