what I'm reading #10
Pauline Schloesser's "The Fair Sex: White Women and Racial Patriarchy in the Early American Republic" (2002)
the term patriarchy is only a useful concept in a certain context for me because, due to the influence of feminist theory and its dissemination into the mainstream, patriarchy is often deracinated and taken to mean that males universally hold power over females and children in society. this has often been used to dismiss the racial-sexual power that white females hold over nonwhite males. it has been used by western(ized) feminists to further imperialism globally and domestically. Paula Schloesser's The Fair Sex theorizes racial patriarchy in an attempt to bring racial and sexual/gender analyses together.
here are some links to definitions of patriarchy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriarchy
https://www.britannica.com/topic/patriarchy
nothing specifically for me to cite, but ive spent the past 20 years connecting a through line from european fairytales to to Romanticism to nationalism to white supremacy and the ways privileges are assigned/denied and how those assignments influence how we protest: white suffrage/feminism is not a protest to patriarchy just an expansion to how privileges are divvied in whiteness; black civil rights is more a fight for access to privileges than liberation or freedom. few actually want an end to white patriarchy, the marginalized just seem to want access to the societal tiers we've been denied.
but what i meant to say was: thank you for your scholarship!