Misogynarchies

The concept-term misogynarchies is a large decolonial feminist and queer rubric under which to arrange an array of sexist, lesbophobic, queerphobic, and transphobic political, economic, cultural, social, psychic, affective, symbolic, and spiritual systems, structures, formations, assemblages, configurations, dimensions, and registers (Bacchetta 2020; Forthcoming 2025). Misogynarchies comes from the empirics of my field work and the experience of trying to make sense theoretically of how relations of power operate in distinct ways in multiple locations at once (India, France, the U.S., Brazil) and how dominant and subaltern gendered and sexed subjects are differentially caught in and impacted by them. Misogynarchies is simultaneously born from my political concerns about transnational, translocal, and intra-local decolonial feminist and queer alliances. Misogynarchies is a specifically decolonial, de-universalizing concept. It is not itself a system or structure but instead a large rubric that is comprised of many kinds of sexist, lesbophobic, queerphobic, and transphobic systems, structures, assemblage, formations, configurations, dimensions and registers. Among other things, the concept of misogynarchies radically provincializes the notion of patriarchy that was developed in and primarily for the global north, but which has been universalized as though it is somehow useful everywhere. Misogynarchies opens up the possibility of a more meticulous and grounded analytics of systematized sexism, lesbophobia, queerphobia, and transphobia. 

Misogynarchies is a hybrid concept that combines two ideas. The first is misogyny, a term understood here not simply as the hatred and fear of women – as is its definition in some contexts – but instead more broadly as the hatred and fear of women, femininity, and genders and sexualities outside colonial gender and sexuality binaries and normativities (i.e. outside the binaries man-woman, feminine-masculine, cisgenderism, and heterosexuality). Misogyny can materialize in multiple forms from sexist, lesbophobic, and transphobic jokes to forms of murder such as femicide, lesbicide, transcide, and more. The second part of misogynarchies is archies, which signals political and social systems, structures, organizations. The conjoined term misogynarchies expands each of its components to include multiplicities of hateful affect, modes of organization, and practices. 

Misogynarchies draws upon a foucaldian notion of power as a microphysics that is circulating throughout the social body and that can crystalize here and there in differential systems, structures, formations, assemblages, and configurations (Foucault 1976; 2001; 2004). Misogynarchies is designed to account for how gender, sexuality, and multiplicities of other inseparable relations of power (colonialism, capitalism, imperialism, racism, class, caste, etc.) are distinctly organized in-context, and how they are in-relationality across the planet. Instead of dismissing differences or presuming uniformity, misogynarchies can account for dimensions such as different kinship practices (such as matrilinearity, patrilinearity, matrifocality, patrifocality). Where the primary subjects of patriarchy are women and men, misogynarchies can specifically render visible subjects of subalternized genders and sexualities such as lesbians, queers, nonbinary gendered subjects, transgender peoples, and subjects who as yet have no name or who in their contexts simply do not need to be named.

Across different theoretical strands of feminist theory in the global north the term patriarchy (“rule of the father”) is generally used to describe systems and socialities of sexism everywhere. Misogynarchies opens a space to perceive and analyze precise distinctions in how sexisms, queerphobias, and transphobias are organized and manifest in different temporal and geographical contexts. Unfortunately, the notion of patriarchy has no inherent way of accounting for colonialism, capitalism, imperialism, racism, class relations, or conditions such as occupation, apartheid, and genocide. Yet, misogynarchies does not aim to eliminate the notion of patriarchy; instead, patriarchy can be included under the rubric of misogynarchies as one system or structure among many. Misogynarchies can even account for patriarchy’s variabilities or its densities and intensities of power, such as along the lines that Rita Segato (2021) calls “low intensity” or “high intensity.” The point is that misogynarchies does not limit us to fitting everything into patriarchy’s contours but instead makes perceptible yet other sexist, queerphobic, and transphobic systems, structures, formations, assemblages, and configurations. For instance, to think with Palestine is to consider pre-colonial-occupation social and political structures, the impact on Palestinian society and governance of the Zionist models for gender and sexuality that the colonial-occupying state of Israel violently imposed, the destructive effects of brutal discourses and practices by the colonial-occupying state of Israel against Palestinians, the weight of the sudden necessity for Palestinians to resist for survival, how the occupation, apartheid, and genocide force a complete blockage of social dynamism for Palestinian society including its discussions of gender and sexuality, ongoing Israeli pinkwashing, and more (Abboud 2024; alQaws 2020). These conditions together have created for Palestine a very complex gender and sexuality system that as yet has no name.

Misogynarchies can allow us to recognize and account for distinct but also variably combined sexist, queerphobic, transphobic systems, structures, formations, assemblages, and configurations. For example, in India, the extreme right Hindu nationalists – who currently hold state power – have long conceptualized themselves and now function politically as what I have called a combined filiarchy and fraternarchy at once (Bacchetta 2020; 2019; 2004).That is, they consider themselves to be sons of Bharatmata the territorial goddess (i.e. filial subjects together in filiarchy), and to be brothers of the same mother(land) (ie.e fraternal subjects together in fraternarchy). In practice, the Indian parliament is overwhelmingly comprised of cisgender heteronormative men and women, but unlike most other places around the world it increasingly includes some transgender representatives. Socially, India is dominantly composed of matrilinear, patrilinear, matrifocal and patrifocal kinship formations. However, Hijira (transgender) kinship is organized beyond blood relations, along experience and talent criteria. Historically, transgender peoples have a sacred place within Hinduism and an important function in Indian Islam. At the symbolic register multiple gender and sexual positionalities that were integral to South Asia were pathologized and criminalized in British colonial discourse and practice. Misogynarchies helps us consider how sexism and queerphobia operate disparately inside India during the pre-colonial and colonial periods, and today in-coloniality. To simply call any, let alone all, of these distinct temporal-spatialities “patriarchy” would radically reduce their historical and present complexities. For example, we would totally miss understanding why Hindu nationalists affectionately call Dr. Hedgevar, founder of the Hindu nationalist organization the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, Maa-Baap (mother-father) of the nation while across the global north there are only fathers of nations. In sum, in many places the notion of patriarchy functions colonially as yet another global northern self-universalized standard that eliminates important precisions in our analytics and resistances.

Misogynarchies also helps us question how universally relevant or irrelevant patriarchy is for the global north. For example, prior to the parité (equity) law in France which required equal numbers of women and men candidates in elections, the Moroccan sociologist Fatima Mernissi called the French parliament “a harem of men,” thus a kind of (white) fraternarchy (Ait Ben Lmamdani Forthcoming 2025). Today with its increasingly bi-gendered (still cisgendered) composition we might call it a (white) siblingarchy.

In sum, where patriarchy potentially reduces differential phenomena to a same model, misogynarchies can help us consider distinctions across (small to planetary) scales, in multiple dimensions and registers, and why they matter, while providing common ground for a decolonial conversation around gender, sexuality and their inseparabilities with other relations of power.