Who is misogyny for?

Abstract

The recent resurgence of reactionary politics and right-wing authoritarianism, with its anti-feminist and anti-LGBTQIA+ policies, highlighted the urgency for understanding and resisting the oppression queer people and women face. Misogyny is one of the key mechanisms of patriarchy, in which this oppression is maintained. Kate Manne (2018) offered a unified, intersectional, and ameliorative feminist account in her seminal work Down Girl, which defines misogyny “as the ‘law enforcement’ branch of a patriarchal order, which has the overall function of policing and enforcing its governing ideology” (Manne, 2018, p. 63). The primary objective of this thesis is to analyse whether Manne’s framework for misogyny can live up to its goals of being unified and intersectional and whether it can accommodate the hostilities queer individuals face in navigating their social lives. By extension, if this account fails to accommodate queer experiences, what alternative framework can do the work? By drawing on insights from intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989, 1991; Collins, 2019; May, 2015), Nora Berenstain’s (2019, 2023) criticisms, and misandrogyny (Watson, 2020; Engelhardt, 2023), I argue that not only is Manne’s account fails in being intersectional and unified but also no existing framework can give a unified account of queer oppression. Ultimately, I suggest that it is necessary to develop a framework which can name and track the phenomenon that both actual and perceived queer people face daily.