Situated Patriarchies: Organizing Feminist Solidarity to Contest Impunity in Gender-Based Violence

This paper introduces the concept of situated patriarchies as an epistemic and methodological intervention into the theorization of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) in organizational, legal, and transnational contexts. Against the grain of universalizing frameworks that treat “patriarchy” as a singular or totalizing explanatory category, I propose a matrix of situated patriarchies that is historically embedded, intersectionally attuned, and institutionally grounded. This intervention arises from the urgent need to contest how hegemonic feminist discourses, especially within global organizational settings often erase caste, race, coloniality, and institutional complicity in their projects of social justice. Theoretically anchored in Donna Haraway's “situated knowledges,” this work dialogs with Black, anticaste, decolonial, and transnational feminist frameworks to argue that different patriarchal regimes produce differential vulnerabilities rendering some bodies rapeable, disposable, or unintelligible within organizational and legal terrains. Methodologically, I develop a six-point analytical matrix designed to assess how violence, impunity, and resistance are differently structured across geopolitical and institutional contexts. Empirically, I examine four legal cases of SGBV from India, Mexico, and France. Each case—including an “upper”-caste medical resident who was raped and murdered with her family receiving justice, a Dalit farm worker in Bihar, who was raped and murdered, and her family denied justice, an Indigenous survivor criminalized for self-defense, and a white French woman abused by her husband and the abuse ignored for a decade—demonstrates the failure of “patriarchy” as a singular analytic. In doing so, I resist the flattening tendencies of transnational feminist solidarity and instead foreground the political potential of difference, partiality, and context.