Institutions of Patriarchy

Three separate stories in the last three weeks have turned my thinking to the ways in which institutions qua institutions are patriarchal. What I mean by this is that the institutions of democracy which are supposed to be free of prejudice and desire (as the partisans of the rule of law champion it in Aristotle's Politics, though we go on to learn from Aristotle that even the law is made by human beings and is so therefore infused with human desire and understanding) are not actually free of these prejudices. Rather, the institutions protect the status quo of society by encouraging the sense that women are unbalanced, not rational, not normal, hysterical, sexually exploitable and all in all, for the sake of the men who maintain the institutions, or even more, for the sake of the institutions. I say that this is patriarchal because it champions the elements that we associate with masculinity and the authority of men: rationality (which strangely comes to mean, having no response to pain or suffering), stability (which means remaining the same in the face of abuse), power (you are subordinate because you can be subordinated). What struck me by these three stories is how each relied on the apparent sanity and neutrality of institutions themselves. What I wonder is, what is it about maintaining community, or at least maintaining community as we understand it in the age of sovereignty, that repeats these situations? I do not yet have the answer, but my own work is aiming to present new accounts of community that do not rely on the concepts and logic of borders and rationality that lead to a hysterical and wandering feminine outside.

Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a story about a woman who is a guardian of the state because of her alleged instability. Spoiler alert. Her new guardian demands sexual acts in exchange for access to the woman's own money that he has control over. She takes revenge. The larger plot is about her involvement in an investigation of the disappearance of another woman who had been abused by family members as a teenager, family members who continue to abuse, rape, and kill women whom they think no one will miss. Partnered with a man who treats the woman as an equal, her ingenuity saves both of them from unfortunate ends. Another side plot is the abuse of the state's social net by a corporate officer of a large business who uses his power to control the women around him. What strikes me about the book is how the court system, the social institutions established to protect citizens, and the journalistic world are all ultimately in the service of those in power. The truth does not reign. It does not come to light. Money and power control others, and only the private acts of citizens bring to justice those who need to be brought to justice. A friend suggested to me that every male in the book is either someone who hates women or a feminist, but I am not convinced that any of them are feminists. The old man who searches for his lost niece didn't have the time to hear her serious life destroying concerns because he was making business decisions; the reporter investigating buries the truth because of how he might be implicated and out of loyalty. If the tenets of feminism involve and require speaking the truth against power since it requires challenging the patriarchal institutions, it isn't clear how they are feminists. But that seems to me to only point to what I think is Larsson's larger point (keep in mind, I haven't read the second book, The Girl Who Played With Fire which I understand to be more explicitly concerned with the oppression of institutions), that these institutions remaining as they are prevent us even with our best inclinations from being capable of fulfilling even our stated commitments.

The second story, "Iphigenia in Forest Hills," reported by Janet Malcolm in the May 3 issue of The New Yorker, is the story of the trial of Mazoltuv "Marina" Borukhova for the murder for hire of her husband. As Malcolm reports it, the entire story is a character assassination of Borukhova whose daughter had been taken from her because for the "rationale" that she was not encouraging a more fruitful relationship between her daughter and her husband, a man who abused Borukhova in front of her child as well as sexually abusing the child. Borukhova is a physician from Uzbekistan of the Bukharan Jewish sect who was regularly and rudely called "Miss" by the court instead of "Dr." Malcolm's 28-page article carefully documents the various accusations against Borukhova that seemed to add up to her-reactions-were-strange, she-is-strange, she-must-be-guilty. Jurors said things like, "She didn't show any emotion, That's kind of what did her in." She didn't act the way a mourning woman should. To document the harm that was being done to her child when she was taken away from her (which the prosecution argued was her motive for having her husband killed) Borukhova had the transfer to her husband videotaped. The wailing child who cried for a half an hour turned out to be evidence from the prosecution that the mother was heartless for taping this while it happened. No one it seems cares about the daughter. Perhaps this is why Malcolm refers to Greek tragedy in the title of her piece, reminding us of Clytemnestra who made Agamemnon pay for his sacrifice of Iphigenia. Having just read The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo, I was struck but how similar the story of the institutions who are expected to be impartial actually work against those who seek protection from them. It was precisely because Borukhova sought the protection of the state against her husband and for her daughter that she was eventually led to the position she was in (whether that's what led her to kill him or that's what led the court to wrongly convict her).

The final story was reported in the Philadelphia Daily News by Barbara Laker and Wendy Ruderman who received a Pulitzer Prize for their reporting. Terry Gross discussed the investigation on Fresh Air today. In this story, Philadelphia police take advantage of immigrants who own corner stores (as we call them in Philadelphia, even though most people refer to these neighborhood shops as "bodegas") and sale plastic bags. Plastic bags are illegal to sell if you as the owner know they are being sold to someone who will use them to distribute drugs. Police officers would come into these stores, shut them down, turn off the surveillance systems and then take merchandise from the stores. Laker and Ruderman's investigation led them to further corruption in the police department when they found women who went on record about how one police officer sexually assaulted the women he arrested. We have heard this story before, but it continues to be especially egregious when those who are trained and trusted to protect assault and abuse women, especially when it is women who as those charged with a crime, seem to have no recourse against the abuse. Such is the classic example of the institution's abuse of its power. We fight abuse of power, but my worry is that abuse of power is part of institutionally-based community.

I recently reread Rancière's Dis-Agreement and it seems to be that his inclination is to consider politics as the disruption of the domination that the structure of institutions seem to require by excluding some element by virtue of what they are. He writes:

The outrageous claim of the demos to be the whole of the community only satisfies in its own way – that of a party – the requirement of politics. Politics exists when the natural order of domination is interrupted by the institution of a part who have no part. This institution is the whole of politics as a specific form of connection. It defines the common of the community as a political community, in other words, as divided, as based on a wrong that escapes the arithmetic of exchange and reparation. Beyond this set-up there is no politics. There is only the order of domination or the disorder of revolt (DA, 11-12).

But my reading of Badiou makes me think that we can have a politics that is formed out of the faithfulness to this disruption and to its continued encouragement. I do not think that what we should seek is a new institution that won't have this problem, but rather a politics that encourages this disruption rather than resists it, the disruption that comes from those who are structurally excluded and dominated by the institutions that cannot protect them.