Literally the rule of the law of the father, patriarchy designates structural dominance of women by men in all aspects of life, including the political, social, economic and legal realms. The early critical work on patriarchy has been largely the effort of feminist critics, who traced its origins to social constructions of masculinity and femininity, a division based upon biological differences that valorised male physical strength. Since the family is considered patriarchy’s main paradigm, feminist theories have especially relied on the contributions of Sigmund Freud, in whose work paternity is at the centre of a power axis.
More recently, studies of masculinity also consider patriarchy as a power structure, calling attention to the limitations of the concept in defining masculinity and in defining patriarchal male identity as dominant masculinity. While patriarchy presents male dominance as historical, the idea of the father as a powerful cultural symbol and site of contestation has remained throughout historical and social conflicts and textual productions. This idea is already present in myth and religious tradition. Abraham’s story in the Bible centres on paternity, on Abraham’s desire to have a son. Even the name of Abraham etymologically denotes fatherhood (‘father of a multitude’) to a varied (and conflicting) collectivity (Genesis 17:5). This religious myth has been significant in the construction of patriarchal masculinity in the Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions.
Writers and critics—from Kafka to Darwish, and from Benjamin to Schwartz—have expressed the need to textually re-envision the inherited figure of Abraham, since his story combines nationalist and religious constructions of identity and forges collective identity by way of submission to the authority of the father and exclusion of the other. In the Old Testament, paternity guarantees inheritance of home and identity, but through the dispossession of others (Genesis 12:1–7). The critics suggest that this long literary heritage speaks of dispossession and exclusion and enacts those predicaments historically through repeated readings of such inherited myths. According to Schwartz, Abraham ultimately promotes dissension rather than community (Schwartz 1997). The critics reconsider early forms of these monotheistic myths in order to explore new ways of thinking about identity. Some, like Djebar, invoke the memory of Abraham to recall Hagar’s repudiation and the overall exclusion of women, while others such as Darwish invoke the father who exiles, who sacrifices the future for the past.
Abraham is henceforth seen as a figure of the double bind who marks the conflict between divine commands and communal duties. His paternity is already in question in the biblical story, even as it is being consolidated. Abraham furthermore emerges as a figure of ambivalence—as father and as rebelling son destroying the idols worshipped by his forefathers—who will become in Islamic readings the father of submission to divine will (The Koran 37:109).
As the Abraham story and studies on masculinities illustrate, the foundation upon which the claim to paternity is made is never secure. The valorisation of paternity creates a certain family order out of unstable elements: the father’s claim to paternity has to be shared with another being; the mother is rendered absent; and the future of the son is offered to the past—that is, to God. This is the heritage of paternity received as social (and political order) from the myth of Abraham filtered through various traditional accounts.
Lacan, in his lecture ‘Les noms du pere’, reconsiders the father as origin. Instead, the father is revealed as both absent and plural: the absence of the father is ultimately an indication of an absence of authority. The father is incapable of preventing the sacrifice of the son, which is the source of the son’s trauma. The invocation of the father will henceforth be an attribution of responsibility. The father is also plural, where alongside Abraham other fathers of the Old Testament continue to live. It is noteworthy that the ending of Genesis 22 establishes the patriarchal lineage through Abraham’s brother Nahor, ‘as if Isaac had ceased to exist’ (Delaney 1998:124).
While patriarchy as a cultural system is contradictory and far from monolithic, as recent masculinity (and feminist) studies suggest, historically it has represented for many feminist theorists the systematic dominance of men over women. Such an approach, critics such as Shepard contend, does not place enough emphasis on other dimensions of patriarchy, such as generational domination.
While some critics have posed the question as to whether patriarchy is still relevant, others consider patriarchy useful in revealing ‘the masculine intent to dominate through the creation of law, the military, marriage, family, and other institutions’ (Petergrew 2003:141).
Recent work by anthropologist Joseph has called into question even the primacy of the father—son power axis in patriarchy, arguing instead that ‘the real foundation of patriarchy in Arab societies comes not from the relationship of children to their parents, but from the socialisation of brothers and sisters, in which siblings of the opposite sex learn their sexual roles by ‘rehearsing’ for each other’ (cited in Armburst 2000:214).
References and further reading
Armburst, W. (2000) ‘Farid Shauqi’, in M.Ghassoub and E.Sinclair-Webb (eds) Imagined Masculinities, London: Saqi.
Delaney, C. (1998) Abraham on Trial, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Joseph, S. (1994) ‘Brother/sister relationships’, American Ethnologist, 21 (1):50–73.
Lacan, J. (1963) (Seance) ‘Les noms du pere’, 20 Novembre, Montreal: Ecole Lacanienne de Montreal; available at http://www.elm.qc.ca
Petergrew, J. (2003) ‘Deepening the history of masculinity and the sexes’, American History 31 (1):135–42.
Schwartz, R.M. (1997) The Curse of Cain, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Schwenger, P. (1994) ‘Barthelme, Freud, and the killing of Kafka’s father’, in P.F.Murphy (ed.) Fictions of Masculinity, New York: New York University Press.
Shepard, A. (2003) Meaning ofManhood in Early Modern England, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Walby, S. (1990) Theorizing Patriarchy, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
