Violence and patriarchy

Violence and patriarchy are two of the most commonly addressed and contested concepts and phenomena in historical and
contemporary feminist work. They are intimately connected: violence perpetuates patriarchy and patriarchy perpetuates violence, but neither saturates the other. There are many different understandings of violence, from acts of direct physical injury to a continuum of different forms of violence, structural violence, and violence as illegitimate economic and political power. Violence can also be understood as a domain, constituting one of several domains within/of patriarchy , or violence can be understood as a regime, constituted by patriarchy, capitalism, sociotechnologies, and other hegemons. While patriarchy, and the many (contested) terms used to denote the concept, has remained at the core of feminist theorizing, either as the explanans or the explanandum, until relatively recently, violence appear to have moved from a former central position in (radical) feminist theorizing from the 1960s onwards, to a more peripheral position and addressed as specific subforms of violence in s
pecific subfields, with different focus within different disciplines, for example, violence between people in criminology, violence between states/societies and people/individuals in sociology, and violence between states in political science and international relations. Having said that, the last couple of years have witnessed a reemergence of violence studies, perhaps as a response to the #metoo movement. One of the key observations in this article is that feminist projects and their intersectional alliances and coalitions have much to gain by bringing violence back in to the center of feminist theory, in order to challenge/destabilize patriarchy.