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.

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