"Male violence rather than magic realism, in fact, is the unsettling subtext of Tales From the Town of Widows, and the occasional moments of atrocity go off like land mines among the more frequent moments of sexual adventure and sexual ambiguity that decorate this otherwise comic account of the rise and fall of a
gynocratic utopia" (Washington Post).
But if women start to slowly enter the ranks - Theresa May, Angela Merkel in Germany, possibly Hillary Clinton in the United States - it's treated not as the normal course of democratic politics, but as some kind of
gynocratic coup d'Etat: a new "femokratie," as the German newspaper Die Welt put it; the "Dawn of a female world order," suggested Britain's Daily Express; or as The Telegraph warned, "The women are coming." Well, batten down the hatches.
"At Laguna, one of several of the ancient Keres
gynocratic societies of the region, your mother's identity is the key to your own identity" (209).
First, to succeed in the
gynocratic hive, men must, in effect, neuter themselves.
The presence of women in urban areas gave rise to survival behaviours or what Grace Musila (2009) terms "
gynocratic transgressions" that were soon to alienate and disempower them in the racist political economy of South Africa.
Essentially, the author claims that Allen's readings of Keres tales and her theories of early
gynocratic Native cultures essentializes Indianness by preventing "the signifier Indian from being freed from all the romantic entrapments that Euramerica has created for it for more than five hundred years" (35).
These feminist theories draw on the "modern tradition" of a "Neolithic great goddess," (4) a tradition which began with German Romanticism of the early 1800s, followed by Bachoffen,s (5) notion of an early
gynocratic stage of human history, to which Harrison (6) added a Great Goddess, whom E.
In chapter four, Jenkins floats the idea of
gynocratic feminist perspective in the light of Native American spiritual and anti-oppressive principles.
The climactic sequence of his early adventures concerns his successful rebellion against the
gynocratic order that first distinguishes him as royal consort for a year, then ordains his sacrifice.
Olympus responds with horror and disgust: Jupiter sends out signals that cause the natural world to recoil in horror at this threat of
gynocratic hegemony predicated upon female desire that will even go as far as to borrow the language of the authentic game of love (the quest for 'honneur') in order to establish its predominance.