Patriarchy from Margin to Center: Discipline, Territoriality, and Cruelty in the Apocalyptic Phase of Capital

Colonial intervention in what I have called the village world (Segato 2015) has minoritized everything regarding women. The term minoritization refers to women's representation and collective position in social thought: minoritizing women means relegating all issues related to them to the realm of the intimate, the private, the particular, that is, treating theirs as minority (and consequently minor) issues. Such minoritization of women is the result of a historical transition to colonial modernity. This transition was driven at first by the process of conquest and colonization led by the overseas metropolis and then later by the administration of the Criollo-elite constructed state. Therefore, this process can also be described as criollization. The transition to colonial-modernity—the current rapid expansion of the state-business-media-Christianity front—intrudes into the mode of existence of the village world and has a massive impact on interpersonal relationships and the organization of gender relations in societies that are still governed by communitarian or collectivist models of coexistence, or where a communitarian fabric can still be found that, if not unscathed, is at least recognizable and vital. In its wake, that transition integrates different peoples in the mass of the national “citizenry.” Considering transformations in the gender system, the history of the patriarchal structure is indispensable for understanding the social shift introduced by modernity. Correctly reading what this transition has meant and how intervention has readjusted and eroded preexisting hierarchies allows us to understand a number of current phenomena that affect society as a whole, phenomena that cannot be expressed or contained by the term the woman problem.