marxismNL

Doing Gender Lecture – Rita Segato

Monday June 8, 2026
Lecture: Gender and Coloniality: From Communitarian to Colonial Modern Patriarchy
Time: 17:15 – 19:00 hrs.
Location: Utrecht – Janskerkhof 2-3, room 0.13
Chair: Ana Miranda Mora
Respondent: Sofia Forchieri
Registration: registration is appreciated. Send an email to nog@uu.nl with your name and affiliation.

On Monday June 8, 2026, Professor Rita Segato will give a Doing Gender Lecture entitled Gender and Coloniality: From Communitarian to Colonial Modern Patriarchy.

This lecture is jointly organized by the IOS-platform In/equality (UU), the Graduate Gender Programme GGeP and the NOG.

Lecture Gender and Coloniality: From Communitarian to Colonial Modern Patriarchy
In this talk, I examine the intersection of coloniality and patriarchy, arguing that contemporary gender violence must be understood through the ways colonial power reconfigured and intensified pre-existing gender hierarchies. In dialogue with María Lugones, I develop a critical position that, while acknowledging the colonial imposition of gender, insists that certain pre-colonial patriarchal structures enabled the consolidation of colonial domination. I introduce my distinction between “low-intensity” patriarchy—more diffuse, community-based forms of gender organization—and “high-intensity” patriarchy, which emerges with colonial modernity as a more violent, rigidly hierarchical regime. Finally, I elaborate my concept of “dual society,” contrasting it with the binary logic of colonial modernity, in order to foreground the coexistence of alternative normative orders and the persistence of non-hierarchical forms of life.

Biography
Rita Segato (born in Argentina in 1951) is Professor Emerita of Anthropology and Bioethics at the University of Brasília, Brazil, and one of the most renowned contemporary theorists of gendered violence, coloniality, and power.
Segato has been awarded multiple honorary doctorates across Latin America and Europe and has published extensively, with her work translated into numerous languages. Several of her key texts are available in English, including Black Oedipus (1968 Press, 2026), War Against Women (Polity 2025), and The Critique of Coloniality: Eight Essays (Routledge 2022), where she develops her influential analysis of feminicide as a form of expressive and pedagogical violence.
Alongside her academic work, Segato has been actively involved in human rights advocacy, feminist movements, and international tribunals addressing gender-based violence.
Her work continues to shape critical debates on sexual violence, the “mandate of masculinity,” and the transformation of patriarchal orders under conditions of colonial modernity.

Background reading: (PDF available upon request):

Rita Segato, Chapter 2 ‘Gender and Coloniality’. In: The Critique of Coloniality: Eight Essays (Routledge, 2022)

Rita Segato, Chapter 3 ‘Sex and the Norm’. In: The Critique of Coloniality: Eight Essays (Routledge, 2022)