Public/Private Divide: A Patriarchal Fantasy

ICE murders and the re-imposition of tyrannical constructs

“Misogyny is not an incidental feature,” words written by Kate Manne in response to ICE’s recent murder of Renee Good, recalled to me a truth which Christine de Pizan understood in 1399.¹ A truth that compelled her to engage in a public debate with some of the most privileged men of Parisian society at the turn of the fifteenth-century in effort to combat the misogyny abundant within the popular literature of the time. Through her arguments; her attempts to disrupt the hegemony of patriarchal imposed biases, Christine sought to recreate the mnemonic foundations of society without the derogation of women;² without the presupposition of prejudice against certain sexed bodies and the narrowly defined performance of gender as a structural pillar of civilization.

Christine’s counter-assault against the patriarch-exclusive intellectual establishment was a corrective action to move women from object to subject, leveraging literary traditions to re-imagine a historiography rooted in Western-conventions that didn’t erase, minimize, or demonize women’s contribution to the development of civilization. Inspired by the dynamic women that populated the world around her, Christine felt driven to directly challenge the Aristotelian notion of women as passive creatures, ensuring preservation and proliferation of her own ideas through relentless patronage and physically demanding copy efforts—exemplum in and of itself.³

Christine understood the far-reaching power of the written word and hoped to curtail the ever-encouraged community tolerance of misogyny as a means of social control.

In an upcoming series launching at the end of the month that highlights the women of the hundred years war, I write in depth about Christine’s attempt to reposition women as public figures, but recent events have made me want to spoil the entire series and state my thesis plainly to counter the underlying messaging of ICE’s structurally-supported public abuses: The public/private divide is a patriarchal fantasy; a patriarchal phallusy; a tyrannical construct built to maintain and reproduce white men’s domination.⁴

Keith Porter, Renee Good, those being disappeared via detention centers, and the countless Black and brown humans that feature within ICE’s domination montages set to trending music seek to make explicit who may safely engage with the public sphere under the current regime’s idealized America.

The misogyny displayed by Renee Good’s murderer when he uttered “fucking bitch” and the ensuing threats of ‘have you learned nothing’ from his masked-brethren are meant to stoke women’s fear of public spaces. These actions—undertaken with support from an administration that positions family as a key institution—reinforce social conditions which encourage women’s exclusion from the public sphere to safeguard against harms perpetuated by the dominant group. As feminist Jalna Hanmer identified in 1984, “unchallenged public abuse reinforces fear,” and this fear perpetuates what she coined the ‘circular spiral of violence.’⁵ Forty years later in 2024, the UN estimated that sixty percent of all female homicides were committed by intimate partners or other family members.⁶

Undoubtedly, Trump has sought to raise the collective tolerance of misogyny through his own actions and of those he uplifts to positions of power. The intentional (and violent) disappearing from society of those not meant to be privileged under white-supremacist patriarchy reinforces a social order under which only white-men can take up the subject position in speech; in society; in the public sphere. The objectification of everyone outside of the dominant group is the point. After all, you can’t hurt an object.

I Hadn't Heard Shit About What They Did to Keith Porter

1. Renee Good’s Murder was Misogyny

2. Enders, Jody. “The Feminist Mnemonics of Christine De Pizan.” Modern Language Quarterly, Duke Univ Press, 1994.

3. Adams, Tracy. Christine de Pizan and the fight for France. Penn State Univ Press, 2014.

4. Patriarchal phallusy is language borrowed from the late, incredible Dr. Jenni Nuttall

5. Hanmer, Saunders. Well-founded Fear: A Community Study of Violence to Women. Hutchinson Educational, 1984.

6. https://www.unwomen.org/en/digital-library/publications/2024/11/femicides-in-2023-global-estimates-of-intimate-partner-family-member-femicides