Friday, 2 May 2008

A wonderful new word - kyriarchy

Cross-posted on In a Strange Land

After all the struggling and difficult arguing and talking and trying to understand each other, and sometimes trying not to understand each other, that has been going on in the feminist blogosphere of late, it's hard not to feel dispirited, to wonder where to go next.

But here's a post from Sudy, in which she talks about a word that was coined a few years ago by feminist theologian, Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, "kyriarchy".
a neologism coined by Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza and derived from the Greek words for "lord" or "master" (kyrios) and "to rule or dominate" (archein) which seeks to redefine the analytic category of patriarchy in terms of multiplicative intersecting structures of domination...Kyriarchy is best theorized as a complex pyramidal system of intersecting multiplicative social structures of superordination and subordination, of ruling and oppression.

Sudy has an excellent analysis of the word, and why it might be a much more useful concept to use than "patriarchy".

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hey Deborah- that's a very interesting post, because this is how I had always understood Patriarchy- an attempt to explain that oppression is built into many different types of human relationships, and that the male elements in those relationships tend to assert dominance- earned or otherwise- in most fields.

Kyriarchy definitely seems a useful term in that it refers to an oppression that's wider than just men and women, and engages race-positive and queer concerns in with feminism where they quite frankly belong. The only thing that worries me is that it doesn't have any common understanding yet, so it might not be clear from using it what it means without linking. Still, that means it's pretty cool for the internet. :)