Abstract
Written by an academic and longtime activist for men’s engagement in feminist anti-violence, Facing Patriarchy: From a Violent Gender Order to a Culture of Peace is the summary and synthesis of a line of thought that seeks to re-center patriarchy as both a fundamental conceptual framework and the essential target of feminist political action. Across four parts composed of twelve chapters, Bob Pease reviews a variety of scholarship on masculinity and gender-based violence and arranges it into a reconception of patriarchy. When contrasted with dominant neoliberal approaches to gender violence, the political possibilities of a return to a focus on patriarchy laid out in the book are compelling; but as a work of theory-building the book is often unwieldly and incongruous.
The central argument is most acutely rendered in Part One, which contrasts a focus on patriarchy against both the localizing “ecological” approach taken in public health and the depoliticized liberal frame of gender equity work. The arguments here are crisp, immediate, and grounded by Pease’s own experience, which he recounts in detail in the introduction. The contrast is clear: a focus on patriarchy compels a response to oppression and thus enables radical politics, whereas the dominant approaches flatten and bureaucratize, making men’s violence a problem to be addressed by programs and funding, disconnected from a longer intellectual and political project.
Later chapters struggle to hold a focus, as Pease sets out on a colossal task to reconstruct a theory of patriarchy that incorporates decades of varied and at times contradictory scholarship into men’s violence carried out against women, other men, and the environment. Though presented at times as a game-changing challenge to conventional wisdom, little covered in these sections will be surprising to those familiar with feminist thinking on violence and masculinity. This is a testament to nearly five decades of political and scholarly work that stretches well beyond Pease. For activists and practitioners who may be less familiar with this rich body of thought, the sensation is likely to be dizzying: a collage of studies and theoretical approaches—at one point pulling from Foucault, Gramsci, Sedgwick, and Kimmel in the span of a few pages—that doesn’t always make clear how its ideas connect or even which ones it agrees with.
Part Two steps into the decades-old debate about the benefits and drawbacks of using the term “patriarchy” as opposed to “gender.” The terms carry different moral and political weight to be sure, and in Chapter Four, Pease draws on a varied body of research to show the depoliticizing effects of a focus on gender and “gender-based” violence. However, the book does not sufficiently grapple with critiques of patriarchy as an all-encompassing and binary concept. Nor does it reckon with the paradox at the core of its project: men are less likely to engage in a movement built around dismantling patriarchy, and yet men’s involvement in such a movement is necessary.
Part Three considers men’s uses of violence against other men both directly and indirectly, reviewing scholarship on youth violence, war and the military, climate change, and more. Here, the book relies on a straightforward binary conception of sex and gender, though it briefly gestures “beyond dualism” (p. 162). In doing so, the book collapses a robust collection of theoretical approaches and empirical cases into an uncomplicated story about dominant masculinity and violence.
Across Parts Two and Three, the book is most useful as a sweeping guide to the ways scholars have debated, refined, and elaborated on the meaning and functioning of masculinity, men’s violence, and patriarchy. However, these chapters downplay and exclude vital thought coming out of queer, trans, and intersectional approaches, often engaging with them just enough to push them aside and reaffirm Pease’s contention that patriarchy deserves primacy of attention as the central system of oppression. This is a missed opportunity, as these approaches also pose serious challenges to the neoliberal order of anti-violence that Pease critiques.
In Part Four, Pease moves away from academic review to argue against the dominant approaches to engaging men in feminist anti-violence work, yet only gestures toward an alternative anti-violence politics. Here, the book draws nascent links to anti-racist thought, suggesting that men should push to see how they themselves are complicit in a patriarchal system. It also makes a call for an ethic of care in men’s anti-violence. However, it neglects to develop any concrete notion of what those practices might look like, even though these ideas have been elaborated on in feminist scholarship. With few specific examples, Pease leaves little sense of the practical implications of his call to “first disengage them from their complicity in the pillars of patriarchy” (p. 167).
The book struggles with questions of audience and representation. The reader is often presumed to be a white man, made evident by the blurbs on the back cover and Pease’s slips into “we” language (p. 192). This makes the cover image of the face of a Black woman draped in shadow confusing, especially as Black women’s scholarship rarely appears in the book, despite their constant political and academic work facing patriarchy. In a deeply ironic error, Pease credits Tristan Bridges alone with developing Hybrid Masculinities theory, leaving C. J. Pascoe, one of the most significant thinkers about masculinity today, erased from her coauthored paper. That Pascoe is not cited anywhere else in the book makes a confounding mistake into a looming question mark.
When not bogged down by efforts to build a theory, Facing Patriarchy offers a useful and varied review of the concept of patriarchy and makes a compelling case for the continued use of the concept in theory and practice. However, for a book that makes an urgent call to action, it offers little clarity on what to do next.