Prefer our gendered framework for violence (floating PIK kind of)

“Violence” is both an act and an abstraction defined and determined by those with power, especially in societies built and structured around stable, organized patterns of violence, such as we see with patriarchy, imperialism, militarism, and policing. Violence is shaped and perpetuated by existing ideologies and social structures and its measure is a product of social processes that do not always constitute some objective, universal reality. How we come to understand, respond to, and think about violence is intimately tied to patriarchy, which is a system that has come to dominate global civilization, even though this was not a naturally occurring inevitability. In a piece on intersectionality and violence, Collins (1998) rightly observed that, “despite its ubiquitous nature, analyses of violence provide partial understanding of it” (p. 918), noting that this is attributable to their singular frameworks, such as gender-only or race-only approaches. These approaches often erase the experiences of certain groups, such as Black women in the United States, when race-only approaches emphasize institutionalized, state violence such as lynching, and genderonly approaches emphasize interpersonal violence and sexual violence, often in the private realm, and often focusing on White women. Violence not only enhances various social hierarchies such as nationality, race/ethnicity, social class, ability status, and sexuality, but also enhances intersections among social hierarchies (Collins, 1998). The purpose of this article was to propose a cohesive structural framework that addresses the nexuses between patriarchy, gender, and violence. The next step in comprehensive theorizing on violence, from our point of view, is for scholars to ask two questions: What commonalities can we identify across various hierarchy-facilitated and hierarchy-enhanced forms of violence in different cultures and across time? And what cultural specificities arise in different manifestations of race, gender, social class, and so forth and their intersections with relation to violence in particular contexts? The first attempts to highlight universal purposes and causes of violence across the span of human experience. The second emphasizes how hierarchies are socially produced and are neither static nor uniform nor inevitable and centers the lens away from ahistoricism. That said, the proposed theoretical framework in this article represents a step toward more comprehensive theorizing and terminology on gender systems and violence. Identifying commonalities in the patriarchal causes and consequences of violence helps keep these structural realities at the forefront of academic and public consciousness