Patriarchy, violence, injustice: on the (im)possibilities of democracy

Abstract

What is the connection between patriarchy, capitalism, violence and (in)justice? How does violence against women translate into violence against politics in general, condemning a democratic project to failure? This article seeks to answer these questions by focusing on two different tasks: on the one hand, the descriptive task––essentially a representation of Brazilian society marked by a logic of violence against women based on a patriarchal model––and on the other, the prescriptive task of how this can be overcome by a genuine commitment to democracy, which necessarily involves offsetting the logics of domination and oppression, the gender issue assuming a central role in the quest for human emancipation.