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+2 votes
What does it mean, and how can we get them to stop?
by (1.7k points)
Dude, just google it. There's a whole wikipedia entry for it.

I have never encountered that word before, for the record.
Why do you want them to stop using the term? Do you not agree with intersectionality, for example that a black womyn faces more and different oppression than a white womyn in the dominant society?
intersectionality makes sense, but if you wanted to describe the type of domination we live under, with some power being given out to broad groups of society to be expressed in certain directions, couldn't you just say "The dominant culture?" or "power-relations?"

if Kyrios means master, and archos means master, is a kyriarch, like, a double master?

And here is another thing that wikipedia told me that makes me suspicious of this term.  It was coined by a feminist theologian, and the root-word kyrios has a religious connotation, sometimes meaning god, lord, ruler, or master.  It seems kind of creepy to me to deify those with privilege and power.

I guess I can see using the term kyriarchy as a step forward from the limitations of the term patriarchy, but it seems to carry with it a sort of empty redundancy.  Was the term hierarchy not good enough?
Yes to the first paragraph.
Lol to the second paragraph.
"Hierarchy": hieros "sacred" + arkhein "to rule", from "archon" meaning "ruler/master". So a "hierarch" refers to a "sacred ruler", and a "hierarchy" refers to the organization thereof. Judeo-Christian mythology classifies "archons" as an order of angels. "Hierarchy" has its origin in the Bible's ranked order of angels, organized in a militaristic formation, i.e., with a top-down "chain of command" in three tiers, most commonly, by function: police (inner guard), governors, and soldiers/messengers (outer guard), with the Judeo-Christian god calling the shots from the top. (Interesting how a supposedly perfect entity requires so damned many servants.) "Hierarchy" also relates to the church structure of "a ruling body of clergy organized into orders or ranks each subordinate to the one above it", according to the etymology I've found. It all comes from religious background since the first masters arose with divine justification.
Agreed that kyriarchy as a term seems to have little value when we already have all these other words.

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