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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Critical South
- Sprache: Englisch
Recent decades of neoliberal rule have seen authoritarian turns in many governments, and these decades have also been marked by increasing violence against women. The systematic killing of women in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, has given way to a violent surge that is worldwide in its scope, concentrated in places where the state’s traditional, sovereign functions have broken down. Femicide is no longer just an intimate event: it has become anonymous and systematic, a crime of power. An intensified form of capitalism, the product of a colonial modernity that is still with us, now fuels new wars on women, which destroy society while targeting women’s bodies.
Understanding this new, violent turn within patriarchy—which Rita Segato considers the primal form of human domination—means moving patriarchy from the margins to the center of our social analysis. According to Segato, it is only by revitalizing community and repoliticizing domestic space that we can redirect history towards a different destiny. At stake is nothing less than the future of humanity.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Series Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Foreword – Jelke Boesten
Notes
Translator’s Preface
Prologue to the Second Edition
Introduction
Theme One: The Centrality of the Question of Gender
Theme Two: Patriarchal Pedagogy, Cruelty, and War Today
Theme Three: What Hides the Role of Patriarchy as the Pillar That Sustains All Powers
Theme Four: Toward Politics in a Feminine Key
Notes
1
The Writing on the Bodies of Murdered Women in Ciudad Juárez: Territory, Sovereignty, and Crimes of the Second State
Science and Life
The Femicides in Ciudad Juárez: A Criminological Wager
Setting: The Border, or The Great Divide
Aims
Meanings
Conditions of Possibility
Epilogue
What Is To Be Done?
Notes
2
Women’s Bodies and the New Forms of War
The Informalization of Contemporary Military Norms
Changes in the Territorial Paradigm
Changes in Political Culture, or The Factionalization of Politics
The
Mafialización
of Politics and the State Capture of Crime
Femigenocide: The Difficulty of Perceiving the Public Dimension of War Femicides
Notes
3
Patriarchy, from Margin to Center: On Discipline, Territoriality, and Cruelty in Capital’s Apocalyptic Phase
The History of the Public Sphere Is the History of Patriarchy
Discipline and the Pedagogy of Cruelty: The Role of High-Intensity, Colonial-Modern Patriarchy in the Historical Project of Capital in Its Apocalyptic Phase
History in Our Hands
Notes
4
Coloniality and Modern Patriarchy
Duality and Binarism: The “Egalitarian” Gender Relations of Colonial Modernity and Hierarchy in the Pre-Intrusion Social Order
Notes
5
Femigenocide as a Crime Under International Human Rights Law: The Struggle for Laws as a Discursive Conflict
The Struggle for Laws as a Discursive Conflict
Disputes Over Whether or Not to Name
The Struggle to Elevate Femicide to the Legal Status of Genocide Against Women
The Conditions for Writing Femicide into State Law and Femigenocide into Human Rights Law
Notes
6
Five Feminist Debates: Arguments for a Dissenting Reflection on Violence Against Women
Femicide and Femigenocide
The Victimization of Women in War
Unequal but Different
On the Role We Assign to the State
How Not to Ghettoize the Question of Gender
Notes
7
Power’s New Eloquence: A Conversation with Rita Segato
Notes
8
From Anti-Punitivist Feminism to Feminist Anti-Punitivism
For an Anti-Punitivist Feminism: “Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Right”
Presentation Before the National Senate, April 20, 2017, at the Hearing Called to Assess a Proposal to Impose Harsher Punishments in Response to the Killing of Micaela García on April 1, 2017
For a Feminist Anti-Punitivism: “Femicide and the Limits of Legal Education”
Notes
9
By Way of Conclusion: A Blueprint for Reading Gender Violence in Our Times
Conceptual Framework: Gender Asymmetry and What Sustains It
The Two Axes of Gender Aggression and the Masculine Mandate
Femicide and Femigenocide
Two Legal Categories Awaiting Recognition in International Human Rights Law
On the Importance of a Comparative, Transnational Approach
The Parastate, New Forms of War, and Femigenocide
On the Need to De-Libidinize Sexual Aggression and to See Acts of Gender Aggression as Fully Public Crimes
Expressive Violence: The Specificity of the Message, the Capacity for Cruelty, and Territorial Domination
Expressive Violence: The Spectacle of Impunity
A Watershed in the History of War
The Masculine Mandate and the Reproduction of Military Labor
Notes
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Series Title
Critical South
The publication of this series is supported by the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Series editors: Natalia Brizuela, Victoria J. Collis-Buthelezi and Leticia Sabsay
Leonor Arfuch,
Memory and Autobiography
Maurits van Bever Donker,
Texturing Difference
Paula Biglieri and Luciana Cadahia,
Seven Essays on Populism
Aimé Césaire,
Resolutely Black
Bolívar Echeverría,
Modernity and “Whiteness”
Diego Falconí Trávez,
From Ashes to Text
Celso Furtado,
The Myth of Economic Development
Eduardo Grüner,
The Haitian Revolution
Francisco-J. Hernández Adrián,
On Tropical Grounds
Ailton Krenak,
Life is Not Useful
Premesh Lalu,
Undoing Apartheid
Karima Lazali,
Colonial Trauma
María Pia López,
Not One Less
Achille Mbembe and Felwine Sarr,
The Politics of Time
Achille Mbembe and Felwine Sarr,
To Write the Africa World
Premesh Lalu,
Undoing Apartheid
Valentin-Yves Mudimbe,
The Scent of the Father
Pablo Oyarzun,
Doing Justice
Néstor Perlongher,
Plebeian Prose
Bento Prado Jr.,
Error, Illusion, Madness
Nelly Richard,
Eruptions of Memory
Suely Rolnik,
Spheres of Insurrection
Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui,
Ch’ixinakax utxiwa
Rita Segato,
The War Against Women
Tendayi Sithole,
The Black Register
Maboula Soumahoro,
Black is the Journey, Africana the Name
Dénètem Touam Bona,
Fugitive, Where Are You Running?
The War Against Women
Rita Segato
Translated by Ramsey McGlazer
polity
Copyright Page
First published in Spanish as La Guerra contra las mujeres by Traficantes de Sueños, 2016. Copyright © Rita Laura Segato 2016, 2025
This English translation © Polity Press, 2025
Polity Press
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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
111 River Street
Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6212-1 – hardback
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6213-8 – paperback
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2024934469
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Dedication
I dedicate this book to the students and recent collaborators in whose generous company, and thanks to whose conversation, I wrote the following pages: Aída Esther Bueno Sarduy, Paulina Alvarez, Marcelo Tadvald, Livia Vitenti, Elaine Moreira, Vicenzo Lauriola, Luciana Santos, Cesar Baldi, Luciana Oliveira, Larissa da Silva Araujo, Mariana Holanda, Daniela Gontijo, Wanderson Flor do Nascimento, Elisa Matos, Juliana Watson, Saúl Hernández, Aline Guedes, Irina Bacci, Priscila Godoy, Vanessa Rodrigues, Tarsila Flores, Nailah Veleci, Ariadne Oliveira, Lourival de Carvalho, Douglas Fernandes, Larissa Vieira Patrocinio de Araújo, Paulo Victor, Silva Pacheco, and Alejandra Rocío del Bello Urrego. I learned with all of them, and they inspired me, provoked me, and nourished my hope.
Foreword
The War Against Women first came out in 2016 as La guerra contra las mujeres. The #NiUnaMenos campaign – or #NotOneLess, similar to what came to be known as the #MeToo movement – was well underway in various Latin American cities following particularly high-profile and visible acts of violence against women. Feminist activism was reeling both on- and offline. Facebook pages and WhatsApp groups gathered thousands of supporters in mere hours across Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Bogotá, and Lima, collecting country- and city-specific testimony of women telling of their experiences with sexual harassment and gendered violence. Women shared names and places, and men in all kinds of professions were dragged before the courts of public opinion, and some before the judiciary. Segato’s book rode this global feminist wave of indignation and calls for justice. Her work was also an inspiration to the Chilean activist group LasTesis, who in late 2019 gained global visibility with a collective street performance, A Rapist in Your Path – since then performed in dozens of countries, languages, and contexts.
In Latin America, Rita Segato is a highly influential, widely known, and revered feminist theorist. I learned about Segato’s stardom in Latin American feminism in 2019 at Lima’s annual International Book Fair, where she was a guest of honor. Her appearance attracted hundreds of fans, young and old, activists and scholars alike, too many to fit into the room. Segato drew on her expertise to speak to the specificities of the Peruvian context, and a panel of Peruvian feminist activists and intellectuals responded. The mood was celebratory as well as rebellious; it felt like a new feminist era had arrived.
Segato’s work had of course been circulating widely before, mostly as PDFs shared among researchers, students, and activists alike. Paper copies of books don’t circulate much in Latin America, as distribution of books is often limited and prices are too high for the studious. This has never prevented anyone from reading, though; before online circulation, books were photocopied and circulated, pirated, and sold in street stalls. My first copy of La guerra contra las mujeres arrived in my inbox as a PDF in 2017, via a friend who drew solace from the theoretical clarity articulated in Segato’s work.
Clarity of thought, and a clear activist standpoint, are what make the work of Rita Segato so compelling and timely. In addition, Segato holds a systemic vision, theorizing how patriarchal violence is at the center of struggles for power over resources, votes, territory, and (racial, ethnic, class) status. Lastly, Segato connects different contexts and violences across Latin America with a keen eye for contemporary developments and contextual differences. Ultimately, she is a broad-stroke feminist theorist with a deep understanding of persistent colonial structures.
Segato was born in Buenos Aires in 1951. She trained and worked in ethnomusicology in Caracas in the 1970s, after which she continued in anthropology at Queens University Belfast, where she was awarded a Ph.D. in 1984. Her doctoral work focused on mythology and religion in Afro-Brazilian communities in Brazil. From Northern Ireland, she moved to Brazil, where she taught anthropology at the University of Brasília, and where she was first confronted with the issue of violence against women as the subject of research. It was in Brasília where she turned her gaze upon gender violence, and from an unusual starting point: in the mid-1990s, she did a series of interviews with convicted and imprisoned rapists. This research propelled her into the subject matter of patriarchal violence, her focus ever since.
The work with prisoners let Segato to understand sexual violence not as sex crimes, nor as individual crimes of certain men against certain women. Rather, she argued in the resulting book, Las estructuras elementales de la violencia (Segato 2003a; in English: The Elementary Structures of Violence), that sexual violence serves to produce and reproduce hierarchies between men; that is, that these are an integral part of the structures of power in contemporary society. Her understanding of sexual violence, then, focused (a) on its performative and public aspects, and (b) on power as its main driver. Considering the persistent attempts of media, politicians, and society at large to privatize gender violence as incidental and individual, more often than not blaming the victim rather than the perpetrator, Segato’s analysis was a welcome and necessary protest against mainstream understandings of violence against women.
While violence against women was and is a central theme in women’s lives throughout the continent, if not the world, in the 1990s much attention was focused on the astonishing scale and impunity of the rape and killing of young women on the Mexico–US border, in particular in and around Ciudad Juárez. Many young women of mestiza1 descent migrated to Ciudad Juárez, attracted by the city’s labor opportunities in so-called maquiladoras (sweatshops), which erupted after the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with the United States and Canada in 1994. These workers were low paid, with no benefits or social protection or urban infrastructure. This is the context in which women’s precarious lives became disposable, to be used and abused by the powers that be (Monárrez Fragoso 2010).
The South African-US scholar and activist Diana Russell coined and mainstreamed the term “femicide,” later translated and popularized in Mexico as feminicido, and in recent decades included in criminal codes across the Americas (Lagarde y de los Ríos 2010: xv). In Latin America, Ciudad Juárez is the center of what seems to be a very persistent increase in femicides. Together with family members of murdered women, Mexican feminists set up ongoing campaigns and protests to fight impunity and identify people and institutions to hold to account, and structures that might help explain these continuing atrocities (Fregoso and Bejarano 2010). None of this has resolved the femicides, though, and Ciudad Juárez continues to be one of the most dangerous places for women to live and work.
Segato visited Ciudad Juárez in 2004, and has written extensively about her observations since, including in The War Against Women. Theorizing the femicides in Ciudad Juárez affirmed Segato’s argument that these crimes were crimes of power rather than crimes of sex or intimacy, which is often the excuse that the authorities would give after another tortured and raped body was found. Crimes of power, in Segato’s view, link capital accumulation and dispossession in borderlands with criminal violence, institutional corruption, and the continual need to reproduce violent masculinities to hold onto power. In such a context, no perpetrators can be identified, as a complicit system closes its ranks and obscures all accountability, a system where violence has become a logic in itself.
Segato’s observations, leading from the femicides in Ciudad Juárez to the increasing levels of violence against women, femicides, and other forms of chronic violence and impunity in the region, led her to argue that there is a “parallel state,” a “second state,” which is the system behind the cycles of violence we observe when studying violence against women in Latin America. From this perspective, an illegal economy of territory for construction, extractive industries, and coca growing and drug production with strong links to politics and the legitimate economy through investment and capital for votes, arms, and political allies has completely undermined any serious institutional control. This “parastate,” or “second state,” can exist, Segato argues, because of the control over populations and land that criminal gangs and paramilitaries exercise, deploying gender violence as their tool. Thus, violence against women is an integral part of the functioning of a corrupt and violent system that benefits a few at the expense of the many. The (largely) young men who become victimizers are not necessarily the ones who benefit; they are cogs in a spiraling fight over power and control directed by an obscure parastate. Drawn from marginalized and impoverished masses, these young men are often the first to die, victims of, in Segato’s terms, the “mandate” of a violent masculinity.
From this perspective, criminal gangs – from Salvadoran maras to similar phenomena in urban centers across Central and South America, or paramilitaries serving urban and rural corporate and political interests – have become the tools by which contemporary violence, dispossession, and death are reproduced daily. It is here, in these all-male environments, that the norms of a violent masculinity are learned and enforced, breeding grounds for misogyny and cruelty in a context of precarity while others maintain power and produce wealth and misery. This analysis draws back to Segato’s work with Brazilian convicts, in which she saw that sexual violence was largely a performative exercise in determining a pecking order among men (with women being disposable therein), while these men seemed to be mandated to act this way by a system that functions only via a violent patriarchal logic.
The analysis of all-male environments that exacerbate and cultivate violent masculinities draws parallels to (para)militaries. Just like urban gangs, the frontlines of (para)militaries are largely made up of marginalized young men, who are trained to be and act as violent machos, where sex is a tool to show physical domination. In The War Against Women, Segato thus firmly argues that rape is not about sexual desire but about power, locating herself in a feminist tradition that has argued that rape is about power and domination, not about sex (Brownmiller 1975).2
Is there a war against women? Or are new wars raging that draw on colonial-patriarchal scripts of conquest of territory via the appropriation of bodies? The Argentinian feminist sociologist Veronica Gago (2020: 75) follows Segato when she argues that the war is not about women, but about property. Property lends authority, and it is the feminized body-territory that has become the battlefield. Segato’s analysis of the femicides in Ciudad Juárez leads her to speak of a “pedagogy of cruelty” via “expressive violence”: a war over power and control over territory that is played out via messages on the bodies of women. The phrase “women’s bodies are battlefields” springs to mind.
Segato was asked to act as an expert witness in the groundbreaking trial against two former military commanders accused of sexual slavery of fifteen indigenous women in Guatemala’s dirty war, which culminated in lengthy convictions in 2016. Segato, as an expert on the dynamics of male violence against women, argued that rape was used as a military strategy to subordinate and ultimately destroy the indigenous communities whose lands were being appropriated. Her statement affirmed that women’s bodies were used as the larger social body of the communities they were seen to represent (Abbott and Hartviksen 2016). This statement was incredibly important in the context of the trial and helped de-individualize the crimes committed against women’s bodies.
One of the things that Segato’s performance before the human rights court in Guatemala shows is her importance as a transnational expert: Segato never seems to keep to boundaries, either of places, disciplines, or intellectual conventions. This makes her work very accessible, and applicable across cases and contexts. Ultimately, her work is that of a scholar-activist, someone who theorizes based on sharp observation and making connections between persistent phenomena and processes, such as capitalism, democracy, patriarchy, extractivism, and colonialism.
Thinking through the ongoing consequences of colonialism has been part of Segato’s work since the beginning; after all, she started her career looking at religion in Afro-Brazilian communities, tracing customs and norms across time and space, and inequalities across histories of oppressions. Since then, as she narrates in The War Against Women, Segato has continued to work with Brazilian indigenous communities in what she calls the mundo aldea (village-world), the world of dispersed indigenous communities colonized, dispossessed, and re-colonized under post-dictatorship democratic rule. Segato’s gender analysis of the Latin American indigenous world is grounded in the difference between duality and binarism: whereas in contemporary (colonial) Western understandings gender is a hierarchical binary, in indigenous duality, gender roles are perceived as complementary. Hence, gendered hierarchies exist and existed in precolonial indigenous societies, albeit according to different logics than the racialized binary of Western gender regimes.
For Segato, this position allows for an indigenous feminism that may fight for women’s rights as well as indigenous rights. Not everyone agrees. For the Argentinian scholar María Lugones, whose work is more widely known among English-speaking audiences than Segato’s as she was located in the Global North, Segato’s position was not critical enough. In 2020, Lugones published a critique of Segato’s work in which she argued that Segato fails to properly decolonize her own biases: according to Lugones, even using a duality of gender and the framework of patriarchal inequality in discussing indigenous peoples is an imposition of colonial terminology, and hence structures. While Segato advocates for alliances between feminisms across ethnic and class divides, Lugones suggests we work “toward the recuperation of resistant historical tapestries that weave understandings of relations to and of the universe, of realities that are resistant to the logic of modernity and show us alternatives that enable a communal sense of the self in relation to what there is.” She proposes that we build on a “long memory” to return to precolonial values and practices of communal living, hence, an undoing of colonial histories, or of “Eurocentric modernity” (Lugones 2020: 37).
While theoretically interesting, it may be impossible to “return to” a way of perceiving the self and the collective that erases the influence of five hundred years of colonial and postcolonial history. We cannot know how indigenous gender relations, sexualities, and ways of communal living would have developed without the influence of colonial, capitalist, and patriarchal structures of oppression and struggles for liberation. Five hundred years is a long time. In that sense, it might not be that useful to focus on precolonial gender regimes as characteristics of today’s indigenous women’s struggles.
Contemporary feminist struggles for liberation in Latin America are multiple and diverse, and they intersect with struggles for land and environmental recuperation, for LGTBQ+ rights, and against racisms and class prejudice. Everyday violence, in both public and private spheres, is real and widespread, and comes from within communities as well as beyond. Arguably, many of the struggles of contemporary indigenous feminisms show similarities with the struggles of Westernized Latin American feminisms. The everyday violence in homes and communities in the rural Andes, or in the indigenous Amazon, or in mixed urban migrant communities in the neighborhoods and slums of Lima, Santiago, or Caracas, is not all embroiled in a parastate type of corruption and control; much of it is mundane, and related to everyday privilege and poverty, patriarchy, and institutional neglect. As Kimberlé Crenshaw (1990) has taught us, in their intersection, struggles of race and gender often clash and can leave women’s rights stuck between loyalty to the racialized community and the racism of white feminist movements. Therefore, white and/or Westernized3 feminist intentions of genuine alliance and collaboration and support for the struggle both for women’s rights and for indigenous rights might still work as a unifying factor. Indeed, much of contemporary Latin American feminist activism works explicitly from a horizontal democratic perspective, or “in assembly,” bridging divides through – sometimes endless or contentious – debate.
While Segato is mainly interested in understanding and explaining violence against women, her strength lies in her capacity to see the big picture, to link different systemic processes of dispossession over recent decades to explain the disconnect between the increase in laws, programs, and reporting mechanisms for violence against women, and the simultaneous increase in prevalence and cruelty of the same. The systemic links between different phenomena, culminating in heightened levels of violence, corruption, and dispossession across the continent, are what lead her to conclude that violence against women is the act not of an individual but of higher powers, of the state, the Church, the big international corporations – mafias that contrive to maintain and reproduce their power base. Or, in the words of LasTesis from A Rapist in Your Path, “It wasn’t my fault, neither where I was nor how I was dressed. The rapist is you: the judges, the police, the state, the president.”
Segato’s theoretically rich and sharp perspective on the nature and purpose of contemporary violence against women in Latin America has inspired and fueled a diverse and theoretically rich feminist movement throughout Latin America; her work underpins much of our current understanding of the persistent increase, visibility, and cruelty with which violence and death are inflicted upon women throughout the continent, for the sole reason that they are women.
Jelke Boesten
Notes
1
Mixed-race indigenous/white, or urbanized indigenous.
2
Recent debates are interrogating this position, not to dismiss the argument about power and domination, but to reassess the role of sex and desire therein (Baaz and Stern 2018). Research shows that the desire for power and violent domination is often sexualized, that is, sexual desire might be strongly linked to the desire to dominate, creating a mix in which violence and sex are not always easy to distinguish (see Boesten and Gavilán 2023). Discourses about men’s “innate sexual urges” likewise feed into myths around both sexual desire and power and domination, or what Segato calls the “masculine mandate.”
3
Crenshaw speaks of white feminists, referring to the struggles for women’s rights of African American women. In the context of Latin America, a similar division is apparent between urban educated feminists of European descent, such as Segato and Lugones, and indigenous women.
Translator’s Preface
In this book, Rita Segato studies the emergence of what she calls “new forms of war.” Unlike conventional wars, Segato argues in chapter 2, contemporary wars “are not guided by ends, and their aim is not the achievement of peace in any of that word’s senses. Today, for those who administer it, war is a long-term project without victories or conclusive defeats. We could almost say that, in many world regions, the plan is to make war into a way of life.” That claim, which has lost none of its relevance since Segato first made it in 2014, has important implications for her argument about violence against women. Repeatedly, Segato takes pains to emphasize that this violence is not only “instrumental” but also “expressive.” This means that women are not only the victims and targets of today’s lethal wars. They are also “surfaces” for inscription, such that feminine and feminized bodies become the bearers of messages addressed to entire communities and even, Segato insists, to “humanity as a whole.”
It follows that the femicides in Ciudad Juárez, for instance, are not matters of local or regional concern. On the contrary, they are, Segato writes pointedly at the end of chapter 1, “addressed to us,” even attacks “launched against us.” Here her “us” is inclusive, expansive. “The murders are designed to display before us the capacity to kill, an expertise in cruelty and sovereign domination. … We have to become their interlocutors and antagonists, critics of the crimes, at odds with them.” Notice what the careful wording of that last sentence implies: that we can only be the crimes’ antagonists if we are also their interlocutors, in other words, that in order to oppose the crimes, we have to allow ourselves to be interpellated by them, enter into painful dialogue with them. In this sense, the book’s original title, La guerra contra las mujeres, was already somewhat misleading, because, for Segato, the war was being waged against almost everyone.
The title that Segato and I had proposed for this translation was The War on Women. To my ear, that title, with its echo of the US “War on Drugs” or the “War on Terror,” now an integral part of what is called the “American way of life,” came closer to naming the ambient condition of diffuse and open-ended conflict that the book seeks to describe. By contrast, in my view, The War Against Women risks suggesting that the forms of violence discussed in this book have an objective, an aim. It risks treating violence against women as war’s end rather than the means by which war is fought at a moment when, according to Segato, women’s bodies have become the “documents” of domination and the very medium of armed conflict. The phrase “the war against women” also has a history of use among Anglophone feminists and thus activates associations that, as a translator, I had hoped to avoid. Although these associations are now unavoidable, I hope the translation that follows will let readers hear the call that Segato receives and make sense of the messages that she works to decipher.
Ramsey McGlazer
Prologue to the Second Edition
I have added two new chapters, written between 2017 and 2018, to this second edition. The first, chapter 8, “From Anti-Punitivist Feminism to Feminist Anti-Punitivism,” brings together the anti-punitivist argument that I made publicly before the National Senate of Argentina and a feminist argument that identifies and reveals the limits of legal education. It thus allows me to include in this volume a set of critical reflections on two sets of efforts in the legal field, punitivist and anti-punitivist, that seek to limit the damage done by a misunderstanding of gender and the violence that derives from it, an uncontained violence that is spreading throughout the Americas.
The chapter responds, first, to the attempt to make women, as victims of sexual and femicidal violence, responsible for justifying a governmental project that seeks to expand the construction of the concentration camps for poor and non-white people that are prisons. But the replication of a problem has never been a solution to it. The only real solution is understanding the roots of the problem. Without this understanding, it is impossible to act efficaciously. Without examining the problem deliberately and profoundly, we will not achieve the goal of containing the truly catastrophic forms of gender violence that are assailing us.
I decided to include, in the second part of the chapter, my response to a text by Eugenio Raúl Zaffaroni published in Página 12 on May 18, 2017, a text on what he calls the “epidemic of femicides,” because this text shows a surprising superficiality that I thought should be publicly contested and corrected. It is worth noting that what Zaffaroni, a distinguished jurist, ventures to say about femicide is glaringly wrong; this text of his has nothing of the acuteness or sophistication that characterize his writings on the selective application of criminal law along the axes of class and race (see, e.g., Zaffaroni 1993, 2006). When he thinks of femicide and sexual and gender crime, Zaffaroni finds himself caught in common sense. For this reason, in my critique of his work, writing with some impatience, I take the opportunity to clarify my positions on these questions. Conflict and tense conversation allow me to think with greater clarity, and force me to refine my vocabulary.
Chapter 9, “By Way of Conclusion: A Blueprint for Reading Gender Violence in Our Times,” is also newly added to this second edition. In this chapter, I elaborate and explain the categories that make up my analytic model throughout the book. This brief text is thus a compendium of the arguments that I have brought to bear on the analysis of gender violence during the last twenty-five years.
Introduction
Theme One: The Centrality of the Question of Gender
I write this introduction in a state of amazement. This volume gathers essays and lectures from the last decade (2006–16). Despite what I argue in these texts, the recent maneuvers of the powerful in the Americas – with their conservative return to moral discourse, used as a prop for their anti-democratic politics – have not ceased to surprise me. In 2016: Macri in Argentina, Temer in Brazil, the Uribe- and corporate-backed “No” vote in Colombia, the dismantling of citizens’ power in Mexico, and Trump in the United States. These figures and developments have irrefutably demonstrated the validity of the wager that runs through the following pages and gives coherence to the argument I make in them. The force of the familialist and patriarchal onslaught that is these figures’ strategy attests to this. Indeed, throughout the Americas, an emphasis on the ideal of the family, defined as the subject of rights to be defended at all costs, has galvanized efforts to demonize and punish what is called “the ideology of gender” or “gender ideology.”1 The spokesmen of the historical project of capital thus offer proof that, far from being residual, minor, or marginal, the question of gender is the cornerstone of and the center of gravity for all forms of power. Brazil is the country where the role of this moral discourse in the politics of the ruling class has become clearest, since the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, the democratically elected president, took place in that country’s National Congress, with a majority of votes made “in the name of God” or “of Jesus” or “for the sake of the family.” It is our enemies in history, then, who have ended up proving this book’s central thesis, by making the demonization of “the ideology of gender” the focal point of their discourse.
I have referred to a “conservative return to moral discourse” here, because we have seen a retreat from the bourgeois discourse of the post-Cold War period, characterized as it was by an “anodyne multiculturalism” that, as I have argued elsewhere (Segato 2007a), replaced the anti-systemic discourse of the preceding period with the inclusive discourse of human rights, at a time when Latin American post-dictatorship “democracies” were being constructed. The question that emerges now is: Why, and on the basis of what evidence, did the think tanks of the geopolitical North conclude that the current phase calls for a reorientation, a turn away from the path followed during the previous decade? During that decade, they supported a multiculturalism destined to create minority elites – black elites, women elites, Hispanic elites, LGBT elites, and so forth – without changing the processes that generate wealth or the patterns of accumulation or concentration. This multiculturalism thus left unaddressed the growing abyss separating the poor from the rich throughout the world. In other words, the benign decade of “multicultural democracy” did not alter the workings of the capitalist machine, but rather produced new elites and new consumers. But if this was the case, then why was it necessary to abolish this democracy and decree a new era of Christian, familialist moralism, dubiously aligned with the militarisms imposed by fundamentalist monotheisms in other parts of the world? Probably because, although multiculturalism did not erode the bases of capitalist accumulation, it did threaten to wear away at the foundation of gender relations, and the enemies of our historical project discovered, even before many of us did, that the pillar, cement, and pedagogy of all power is patriarchy.
Drawing on my work as an anthropologist and on the practice and methods of ethnographic listening, these pages constitute an ethnography of power in its foundational and persistent form: patriarchy. The masculine mandate emerges here as the first pedagogy of expropriation, a primal and persistent pedagogy that teaches the expropriation of value and the exercise of domination. But how to write an ethnography of power, given that the pact of silence – an agreement among peers that rarely fails in any of its iterations – is power’s classic strategy and one that appears in nearly every patriarchal, racial, imperial, or metropolitan context? We can only come to understand power by observing the recurrence and regularity of its effects, which allow us to approach the task of discerning where its historical project is headed (Segato 2015a/Eng.: Segato 2022). Patriarchal violence – that is, the misogynist, homophobic, and transphobic violence of our late modernity, our era of human rights and of the UN – is thus precisely a symptom of patriarchy’s unfettered expansion, even despite the significant victories that we have won in the intellectual realm, the field of discourse. This violence perfectly expresses the ascendancy of a world of ownership, or indeed one of lordship, a new form of domination resulting from the acceleration of the concentration and expansion of a parastate sphere of control over life (which I address in the second chapter included in this volume). In these crimes, capital in its contemporary form expresses the existence of an order ruled by arbitrary patriarchal impulse and exhibits the spectacle of inevitable institutional failure in the face of unprecedented levels of concentration of wealth. Observing the speed with which this phase of capital leads to increases in the concentration of wealth, I suggest in chapter 3 that it is no longer sufficient to refer to “inequality,” as we used to do in militant discourses in the context of the anti-systemic struggles of the Cold War. The problem today, again, has become one of ownership or lordship.
It has not been easy, after a period of multicultural sloganeering – a period when multicultural slogans seemed powerful – to understand why it has been so important, even indispensable, for the historical project of the owners to preach and reinstate a militaristic patriarchal fanaticism – one that seemed to be gone forever. In Latin America, the phrase “the ideology of gender” has appeared recently, a category in the service of accusations. In Brazil, there have even been several legislative proposals put forward by a movement called the Programa Escola sem Partido, or Program for a School without Party, or Non-Partisan School. One of these proposed laws, awaiting a vote in Brazil’s National Congress and already in force in some states, including the state of Alagoas, for example, seeks to prohibit “the application of the postulates of the theory or ideology of gender” in education, as well as “any practice that could compromise, hasten, or misguide the maturation and development of gender in harmony with the student’s biological sexual identity.” The extraordinary engagement with the field of “gender” on the part of the new right, represented by the most conservative factions in all churches – factions that are themselves representative of the recalcitrant interests of extractivist agribusiness and mining – is, at the very least, enigmatic. What is at stake in this effort to ensure obedience to a conservative morality of gender? Where is this strategy headed? After an episode involving attacks and threats against me when I took part in a conference at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica de Minas Gerais – attacks and threats made by a far-right group based in Spain2 – I suddenly understood with alarm that the truculent style and spirit of their arguments came close to something that I already knew, because they recalled the patrolling and persecutory avidity of Islamic fundamentalism, which I have discussed elsewhere (Segato 2008); that is, precisely the most Westernized version of Islam, one that emulates the modern West in its identitarian and racializing essentialism.
I then started to wonder: Are we not witnessing the intent to impose and spread a religious war like the one that has been destroying the Middle East, exactly at a time when, as I suggest in the second chapter, the political and economic decline of empire makes war its only terrain of uncontestable superiority?
Theme Two: Patriarchal Pedagogy, Cruelty, and War Today
In this volume, my initial formulations on gender and violence remain (Segato 2003a): (1) The phrase “sexual violence” is misleading, because although aggression is exercised by sexual means, the ends of this kind of violence are not of a sexual nature but rather are related to the order of power. (2) These are not acts of aggression that originate in a libidinal drive or a desire for sexual satisfaction. Here instead the libido seeks power and is guided by a mandate delivered by peers, by the members of a masculine fraternity that demands proof of belonging to the group. (3) What confirms one’s belonging to the group is the taking, the extortion, of a tribute, one that is transferred from the feminine to the masculine position and that constructs the latter in and through this transfer. (4) The hierarchically organized structure of the masculine mandate is analogous to the order of gangs. (5) Through this kind of violence, power expresses itself, displays itself, and consolidates itself in a truculent form. It exhibits itself to the public, and this violence is more expressive than instrumental.
Another feature of my work that remains relevant here, despite the recent debates on this issue, is the conviction that patriarchy, or a structure of gender relations based on inequality, is the most archaic and persistent of humanity’s political structures. This structure shapes the relations between positions in all differential configurations of prestige and power. It is captured, radically aggravated, and transformed in a colonial-modern order that is lethal for women, an order that has its beginnings in the process of conquest, which transforms low-intensity or low-impact patriarchy. The phrase “patriarchal-colonial modernity” describes the priority of patriarchy as an appropriator of women’s bodies and their status as the first colonies. The conquest itself would have been an impossible undertaking without the prior existence of this low-intensity patriarchy, which makes men docile before the example of triumphant, imperial masculinity. The men of the conquered communities would thus come to function as hinges between two worlds, divided in their loyalties: loyal to their people, on the one hand, and to the masculine mandate, on the other. In this analysis, gender is the basic historical form or configuration of all power in our species and, therefore, of all violence, since power is the result of an inevitably violent expropriation. Dismantling this structure very gradually will thus be the condition of possibility for any and every process capable of reorienting history in a direction that is in keeping with an ethics of dissatisfaction (Segato 2006a). Elsewhere (Segato 2003a), I have described this archaic, crystallized time, a deep and very slow time that is nevertheless fully historical, as the patriarchal prehistory of humanity. My claim for the precedence and universality of patriarchy is supported by the existence of myths, dispersed throughout the planet, that narrate a moment – certainly a historical moment, since if it were not historical it would not appear today in the form of a narrative – in which women are conquered, dominated, and disciplined, placed in a subordinate, obedient position. Not only the biblical story of Genesis but also countless indigenous origin myths recount the same recognizable story. In the case of Adam and Eve, the act of eating the apple led to their removal from the Edenic playground of unrestricted and incestuous pleasures, condemning them both … to conjugality. Myths found on all continents, among the Xerente, Ona, Baruya, Masai, and others – including the Lacanian claim that woman “is” the phallus that man “has,” read here as a history compressed into myth – speak to us of an event that is foundational, primal, common to numerous peoples (Segato 2003a). This may mark the transition to humanity, a moment in the phase when humanity as such is still emerging and still one, a moment prior to the dispersal of lineages and the proliferation of peoples. This would have been a moment during the era when the muscular prominence of males was transformed into political prominence: a moment during the long transition from the natural to the cultural – that is, the historical. Deep time has distilled what might be a historical account into a mythical synthesis.
This leads me to conclude that as long as we do not dismantle the patriarchal structure that founds all inequalities, underwrites all expropriations of value, and sustains the edifice of all forms of power – economic, political, intellectual, artistic, and so on – as long as we do not produce a definitive break in the hard rock crystal that has stabilized the patriarchal prehistory of humanity, no significant change in the structure of society will be possible. For this reason, the question of gender relations – of their structure, which has been nothing other than the structure of patriarchy founded in the beginning of history – has become more dramatic and more urgent than ever before, despite all the efforts that have been made in the modern legal and institutional fields. This leads us to the question of how this structure changed under colonization and how Latin America’s Creole-republican states remain colonial.
With the process of conquest and colonization, a change exacerbated gender hierarchies. I address this process in the fourth chapter of this volume especially. Lower-case man, with his particular role and space in the tribal world, became upper-case Man, synonymous with and paradigmatic of Humanity, subject of the colonial-modern public sphere. In keeping with the decolonial turn made in Aníbal Quijano’s contributions to sociology and history, I use the term “colonial-modern” to underscore that the “discovery” of America was the condition of possibility for modernity as well as capitalism (Segato 2015b/Eng.: Segato 2022). With this historical change in the structure of gender, the masculine subject became the model of the human and paradigmatic subject of speech in the public sphere; that is, he became paradigmatic of anyone and anything endowed with political capacity, general interest, and universal value. At the same time, women’s spaces, like everything related to the domestic sphere, were emptied of politics, deprived of bonds of solidarity, alliance, and cooperation that characterized communal life, recast as marginal, as the remainders of politics. The domestic sphere thus became associated with intimacy and privacy in a way that it had not been previously and still is not in communal contexts. As a result of this change, women’s lives acquire the fragility that we know today. Their vulnerability, once established, increases into the present.
Seen through this lens, the state discloses its masculine DNA; it can be seen as a product of the transformation of a particular space for men and for the performance of their specific role – politics in the communal and inter-communal context, and later at the colonial front and in the national state – into a sphere that encompasses all of reality and hijacks everything that aspires to be political. The genealogy of this all-encompassing “universal and public” sphere begins in a particular and specific space that belonged to men. This space was transformed through the imposition and expansion of colonial modernity. The dual matrix ruled by mutual reciprocity changes into the binary modern matrix, in which all alterity is a function of the One, and every Other has to be assimilated into a framework of universal reference.
This change in hierarchical relations between masculine and feminine is accompanied by a transformation in the field and meaning of sexuality, as I have argued previously (Segato 2015c/Eng.: Segato 2022) and as I argue in the third chapter of this book. Sexual access enters the universe of damage and cruelty and is contaminated; it becomes not only the appropriation of bodies and their annexation as territories, but also their condemnation, their damnation. Conquest, pillage, and rape are associated not just as forms of appropriation, but as forms of damnation, and their association persists. Their correlation continued after the founding of the republics, and it continues in the present. Masculine pedagogy and the masculine mandate become a pedagogy of cruelty that encourages expropriating greed through the repetition of violent scenes that normalize acts of cruelty. This pedagogy thus diminishes people’s capacity for empathy, and this is indispensable to predatory projects. As Andy Warhol said in one of his celebrated quips: “The more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away, and the better and emptier you feel.” Habitual cruelty is directly proportional to the isolation of citizens through desensitization.
As I argue in the third chapter of this book, the current, apocalyptic phase of capital, characterized by a great acceleration in the concentration of wealth, brings about the collapse of the institutional fictions that previously offered a stable grammar for social life. More than inequality, it is the idea of lordship that has the last common spaces left on the planet in its grip, in a re-feudalization of immense territories. And it is precisely the association of sexuality with injury that provides a language for the lucrative pacts hidden in what, in chapter 2, I call a second reality. Because the masculine mandate, if it does not legitimate, definitely safeguards and conceals all the other forms of domination and abuse that proliferate in its breeding grounds. What I have said about Ciudad Juárez is thus also applicable to the logic of sexual trafficking and the reduction of women to the status of sexual slaves elsewhere: in this bleak, asphyxiating atmosphere, the corporate state seals pacts of complicity with corporate organized crime, and keeps all the secrets that sustain accumulation today.
Trafficking and sexual slavery in our time – different in several ways from the traffic of women to countries with large male immigrant populations during the first decades of the twentieth century – illustrate this idea, because their efficacy does not follow from the rate of material profit that is derived from them, but rather from what they obscure, from the pacts of silence and complicity that are sealed in their shadow. These are at once material and symbolic economies, in which women’s bodies are a bridge between profit and the capacity to exercise jurisdictional domination. Sexual access secures the collusion of the owners and safeguards their right to injure with impunity. In trafficking and in femicides3 – and femigenocides – perpetrated by organized crime and in the parastate sphere that is expanding throughout the Americas, it is not just the materiality of women’s bodies that is dominated and sold, but also their functional role in sustaining the agreements of those in power. It is for this reason that the trade in women, material and symbolic, is so difficult to abolish.
Undoubtedly, this plays a role in today’s informal wars, in their “feminization” and the use of profanation, identified by various authors as a key method for waging the new forms of combat. As part of my work as an anthropologist expert witness in the case of Sepur Zarco, Guatemala, where a group of Q’eqchi’ Maya women had been subjected to sexual and domestic slavery, I showed how such a method for the destruction of the social through the profanation of the feminine body played an important role in the genocidal war waged by the authoritarian state in the 1980s (Segato 2016). This strategy was indeed derived from the instructions in a war manual, a strategy that therefore had nothing to do with the hierarchical order of the low-intensity patriarchy proper to indigenous and peasant homes. The expressive power of this morally lethal war – which targeted women’s bodies in a deliberate program, planned by strategists in their laboratories and surgically carried out through a series of orders – was evident. It sheds light on the role of the feminine position in gang wars and repressive wars, which expand the parastate’s sphere of control over populations.
In times of functional and pedagogical cruelty, it is the woman’s – or the child’s – body that cruelty targets and treats as a surface for inscription, because in the archaic imaginary, women and children are not the armed adversaries in war, but rather war’s third parties and “innocent” bystanders. This is why they serve as sacrificial victims, over whose dead bodies pacts of complicity are finalized, and power’s exhibitionist will is spectacularized. In the fifth chapter of this book, I propose the term femigenocide as a name for this kind of femicidal violence, which should not be conflated with intimate conflicts or referred to the realm of relationships. I would add here that, in order to acknowledge the intersections of various existing forms of oppression and discrimination, we could create a compound, combining femigenocide with the category of africanidade, proposed by the great, now-deceased black Brazilian thinker Lélia Gonzalez (1988), in order to refer to Amefricafemigenocide. We could also draw on the category juvenicide, used by Rossana Reguillo and other Mexican scholars (Reguillo 2015; Valenzuela Arce 2015), which would then give us Amefricajuvenifemigenocide, a term with which to designate a cruel and sacrificial form of execution, not utilitarian but rather expressive of sovereignty, an act in which power exhibits its will and its jurisdictional sovereignty.
To summarize, then, the crimes of patriarchy express contemporary forms of power, property owners’ power over life, as well as the power of a persistent, violating, and expropriating conquestiality. This term is more accurate than coloniality, given that examples ranging from the repressive war in Guatemala, the situation on the Pacific coast of Colombia, or the killing of the Kaiowa Guaraní people in Mato Grosso, Brazil, among other places on the continent, prove that it is wrong to assume that the Conquest simply ended one day.
To the question of how to end war, in the context of the informal wars that are spreading today throughout Latin America, I have responded: by dismantling the masculine mandate, with the collaboration of men and for their benefit, too. This means dismantling the patriarchy, because it is the pedagogy of masculinity that makes war possible, and without peace at the level of gender there will never be any true peace.
Theme Three: What Hides the Role of Patriarchy as the Pillar That Sustains All Powers
What hides the centrality of relations of gender in history is precisely the binary character of the structure in which the public sphere encompasses, totalizes, and engulfs its residual other: the domain of the private, the personal. I am referring, in other words, to the binarism that separates the political and the extra-political in colonial modernity. This binarism leads to the existence of a universe whose truths are endowed with universal value and general interest, and whose discourse is thought to emanate from a masculine figure, whereas this figure’s others are endowed with only particular, marginal, and minor significance. The immeasurable gap between the universal and central, on the one hand, and the residual and minoritized, on the other, creates a binary structure that is oppressive and inherently violent in a way that other hierarchical orders are not. I argue in the fifth chapter that it is precisely because of this mechanics of minoritization in the binary structure of modernity that crimes against women and the feminine position in the patriarchal, colonial-modern imaginary have not been addressed by the law and have never been fully recognized as public.
In this sense, we could even venture the idea that the burning of witches in medieval Europe is not equivalent to contemporary femicides, but rather has a genealogical relation to these killings: the earlier executions represented a public form of gendered punishment, while contemporary femicides, although they take place in the midst of the uproar, spectacle, and settling of scores that characterize parastate wars, never manage to emerge from the private realm in which they are confined in the imaginary of judges, prosecutors, the media, and public opinion in general.
This is why I argue that modernity is an enormous machine for producing minoritizing anomalies of every kind, anomalies that then have to be filtered in the sense of being processed through the grid of universal reference and, in the language of multiculturalism, reduced, typified, and classified in terms of iconized political identities, in order to be reintroduced into the public sphere in this form – and only in this form (Segato 2007a). Everything that cannot be adapted to this exercise or charade, that cannot be made to fit into the matrix of the existent – which works like a great digestive process – becomes a placeless anomaly and is subject to expulsion, banished from politics. It is in this way that modernity, with its state born from a patriarchal genealogy, offers a remedy for the evils that it has itself introduced: it gives back with one hand, and in a degraded form, what it has taken with the other, and at the same time it revokes what it seems to offer. In this context, radical difference, which can neither be typified nor be made to serve the colonial-modern-capitalist pact, cannot be negotiated with, whereas it is, in fact, constantly negotiated with in the communitarian worlds of the Amefrican peoples of the Americas.
With its colonial preconditions and its patriarchal public sphere, modernity is a machine for producing anomalies and organizing purges: it stabilizes norms, quantifies punishments, catalogs pain, privatizes culture, archives experience, monumentalizes memory, essentializes identities, commodifies life, mercantilizes the earth, and levels temporalities. (For a related set of critiques, see Gorbach and Rufer 2016.)
We must expose the binarism that emerges from the colonial-modern matrix, in order to undo it. This binarism is replicated in so many others, with the gender binary being the most often cited. We must give up our faith in a state that cannot be expected to break with its constitution; that is, with its tendency to capture politics, with its plurality of worlds and styles. This is especially true in Latin America, where the republican states founded by Creole elites represented not a break with the period of colonial administration, as the mythic historical narrative has made us believe, but rather a continuation, in which the government, now geographically proximate, set itself up to inherit the territories, goods, and people that had previously belonged to overseas administrative powers. So-called “independence” was thus nothing but the passing of these goods from there to here, while a fundamental aspect of the colonial state remained: the attitude or sentiment of the administrators was still external to what they administered. This exteriority, so typical of the colonial relation, persisted and led to an increase in the public sphere’s distance from the people. The governed became inexorably marginal and remote, separated by a gap from the state’s administration and thus rendered fragile.
Our states were designed so that the riches reclaimed from colonial powers could be appropriated by elite founders. Still today, this susceptibility to appropriation remains the state’s most characteristic feature, so that when someone who does not belong to the elites enters into the orbit of the state, they become a member of the elite, and this is an inexorable effect of being part of an administrative apparatus that is always exterior to and imposed on populations. The crisis of civic faith thus becomes inevitable. In fact, the founding subject of our republics – that is, the criollo
