Intimate partner violence (IPV) can be a challenging topic, especially for people who have experienced it. If you have experienced IPV, please take time to create safety for yourself as you work through this material. For more research about intimate partner violence, you can explore the National Domestic Violence Hotline [Website].

This section contains a list of foundational key terms from the chapter. After reviewing them here, be on the lookout for them as you work through the rest of the book.

• capitalism: a complex competitive economic system of power in which limited resources are subject to private ownership and the accumulation of surplus is rewarded.
• decolonization: (multiple interrelated meanings from Cott 2000; Indigenous Corporate Training n.d.)

• • a political process that included a transfer of power back from a colonial government to an Indigenous one. For example, when India became independent from the British Empire in 1947.
  • For those who have benefited from colonization, decolonization has also come to mean a personal divestment of colonial power across structural, disciplinary, cultural, and interpersonal domains of power.
  • a cultural process of identifying and challenging cultural domains of colonial power so that pre-colonial ways of being and knowing can be reclaimed, recovered, and reimagined.

• heteropatriarchy: (a merging of the words heterosexual and patriarchy) is a system of power in which cisgender and heterosexual men have authority over everyone else. This term emphasizes that discrimination against women and LGBTQIA+ people is derived from the same sexist social principle (Valdes 1996).
• internalized oppression: a process of individuals within an oppressed group incorporating and accepting the prejudices of the dominant society (Pheterson 1986).
• intersectionality: describes how multiple social locations overlap and influence each other to create complex hierarchies of power and oppression, and that overlapping social identities produce unique inequities that influence the lives of people and groups (Crenshaw 1989).
• marginalization: a process of social exclusion in which individuals or groups are pushed to the outside of society by denying them economic and political power (Chandler & Munday 2011).
• meritocracy: a hypothetical system of power in which social status is determined by personal effort and merit (Conerly et al. 2021).
• microaggressions: are statements that indirectly reference stereotypes to assert the dominance of the aggressor.
• privilege: a right or immunity granted as a benefit, advantage, or favor. While privileges can be earned in some systems, privileges can also be unearned and based on social location. For the purpose of describing unequal power arrangements in systems of power we will be referring to those privileges that are “unearned advantages, exclusive to a particular group or social category, and socially conferred by others” (Johnson 2001).
• settler colonialism: is an unequal system of power that relies on white supremacy to justify removing established indigenous residents of colonized territory so that the land can be occupied by settlers and its resources used for the benefit of the occupying power.
• social identity: consists of the combination of social characteristics, roles, and group memberships with which a person identifies. Social identity can be described as “the sum total of who we think we are in relation to other people and social systems” (Johnson 2014, p. 178).
• social location: describes the relationship between social identity and social power.
• social movements: purposeful, organized groups that strive to work toward a common social goal.
• systems of power: socially constructed beliefs, practices, and cultural norms that produce and normalize power arrangements in social institutions.
• tokenism: the practice of making only a superficial or symbolic effort to diversify an organization by recruiting a small number of people from underrepresented groups to give the appearance of equality.
• The Matrix of Domination: a theoretical framework developed by Patricia Hill Collins (she/her) to describe how power is socially constructed. Hill Collins identifies four domains of socially constructed power, which arrange power and work together to create systems of power (Hill Collins 1990).
• White supremacy: a complex system of racist power that is based on discredited racist enlightenment-era social science and constructed through policies and practices that privileged white people over people of other races, based on the racist ideas that that there are meaningful differences between people in different racial categories, that White people are physically and culturally superior, and that they are therefore entitled to dominate other people in other racial categories.

After reading this chapter, you will be able to:

1. Explain how binary gender is embedded in unequal systems of power.
2. Describe how binary gender norms and unequal systems of power can impact individuals.
3. Describe the role of binary gender norms in the conquest and colonization of the global south.
4. Explain why successful social movements to dismantle unequal systems of power require the leadership of women, people who are LGBTQIA+, and People of the Global Majority.
5. Explain how violence reinforced heteropatriarchal gender norms.