By Carlos Mendoza Álvarez
“The patriarchy is a judge that judges us for being born | and our punishment is the violence you see […] And it wasn’t my fault, not how I walked, not how I dressed | and it wasn’t my fault, not how I walked, not how I dressed…” Thus began the performance by the Chilean collective Las Tesis at the height of the #MeToo movement, shortly before the Covid-19 pandemic that would later ravage humanity. I remember how, in 2020, protests spread across the world like a rising tide: gatherings in public squares, clotheslines denouncing sexual harassment in universities, companies, government offices, and public parks. A green-and-black wave of women’s collective action confronting patriarchy.
At that time, colleagues at Universidad Iberoamericana Mexico City denounced fellow students, professors, and administrators through the clothesline for acts of sexual harassment. Thanks to these protests, a formal institutional protocol for reporting harassment was later established at the university, managed by various institutional committees and commissions. A human rights culture was also promoted to combat gender violence, integrating this issue into the curriculum and establishing the Center for Critical Gender Studies and Feminisms. Years earlier, a doctoral program had been created to investigate this phenomenon in contemporary society from an interdisciplinary perspective, thus contributing to the strengthening of feminist and LGBTQ+ collectives, while also designing proposals for the establishment of public policies on gender equality. I was tasked, along with feminist and queer colleagues, with exploring the best ways to support this initiative from the Division of Humanities and Communication, where I worked as a divisional coordinator at that time with a formidable team of young colleagues, experts in philosophy, communication, graphic arts, administration, and academic management.
During those years, there was also a surge in denunciations from public figures emerging in diverse cultural spheres, such as the artistic, academic, and religious communities, expressing the outcry of more than half the world's population, fed up with gender-based violence, primarily against women, but also against queer individuals and groups. Thanks to this collective awakening, I discovered the admirable work of the Indian theologian Kochurani Abraham with women victims of gender-based violence inflicted against them by male leaders of three traditional Indian religions: Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity. Their work consisted of making this age-old violence visible and accompanying women on their path to liberation from the patriarchal burden by inventing new forms of belonging to their spiritual tradition, nurtured by mutual care and creativity in their commitment to intertwining spirituality with social justice and gender equality.
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But there were also excesses, such as cancel culture, which destroyed, with a click, the lives and careers of people accused without evidence, sometimes as a settling of scores, other times as the rotten fruit of rivalry, and still others with sufficient grounds for an anonymous denunciation out of fear of the corruption networks that kept the patriarchal pact intact, a political phenomenon analyzed by Rita Segato as a mandate of masculinity in her work Counter-pedagogies of cruelty.
The case of Boaventura de Sousa Santos touched me very personally because years earlier I had organized, together with my dear colleague and friend Pablo Reyna, a colloquium on his scientific and poetic work, to frame the Honorary Doctorate through which he was awarded five degrees from universities within the Jesuit University System of Mexico for his notable contributions to epistemologies of the South, the World Social Forum, and the ecology of knowledges. A group of colleagues from the Center for Social Studies (CES) at the University of Coimbra accused him of sexual harassment in a British publication, which was later retracted. The accusation abruptly ended his career. This crisis, at the same time, brought to light a hidden problem of rivalry within Portuguese academia and its global connections. Now, five years later, we know that the accusations have not been proven, although the damage has already been done, according to the recent account of the Brazilian philosopher Marilena Chaui. As part of this sad story, Maria Paula Meneses, the Mozambican academic, who was one of the people accused of covering up for the Portuguese author, has just passed away, and a farewell message she made public last July before her death can be read.
How to maintain the relevance of a colossal work like that of Boaventura, Maria Paula and Marilena, with their network of conversations about the world with decolonial and anticolonial colleagues such as Silvia Rivera-Cusicanqui and Gladys Tzul Tzul struggling from below, honoring first the memory of the victims of patriarchy, as well as those trapped in the spiral of resentment and hatred that expands in diverse human collectives, while continuing to call for the necessary accountability and the challenge of the communal discovery of truth?
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This week I participated in the Seminar on non-patriarchal practices led by our dear friend and fellow anthropologist Abraham Mena at Ecosur. It was a virtual session that allowed us to include critical theology in the academic conversation in this intercultural and Indigenous city, as an interlocutor with other social sciences and the humanities, in order to reflect on paths for overcoming patriarchy and its toxic masculinities.
In my presentation I emphasized the need for intersectionality as a method to connect the diverse forms of violence suffered by "the wretched of the earth," starting with women, but including people rendered disposable by a hegemonic, patriarchal, capitalist, classist, and white supremacist society.
I was surprised by the online questions that focused on best practices for dismantling patriarchy. My guiding thread in the dialogue was non-patriarchal loves like a compass to escape the entanglement of hegemonic power with its many heads, like the capitalist hydra the Zapatistas warned us about some years ago.
These non-patriarchal loves are dissident loves that dismantle the toxic way of affirming the human condition as power, control, and the mandate of masculinity. Diasporic loves of queer people, but also the love of cisgender people who embrace diversity in their own bodies, minds, and spirits. And as an expression of that love, I also emphasized the importance of ritual that collectives create in their diversity to celebrate life as survivors: the mothers of disappeared persons, the migrants facing the train of horror, not by chance named La Bestia, and the native peoples intertwining ancestral tradition with Christianities of diverse confessional tones.
I recounted, as a reference point for these new forms, the history of feminist liturgies that recreate their own sacramentality from the passage of divinity through lives, the bodies and the struggles of women, as she has explored Marilú Rojas in her research on the feminist ecotheology of liberation. She also brought to heart the queer/cuir liturgies of LGBTQ+ collectives, which never cease to celebrate the queer God as an incarnate divinity. As Ángel Méndez points out, there is nothing more queer than a humanized God.
Non-patriarchal loves are, ultimately, diasporic loves, that is to say, going out towards others in all their diversity. Gender-fluid loves that are constantly being reconceptualized, as analyzed by Sylvia Marcos in the case of Zapatista women. What matters are the people who risk living each human relationship and creature in the context of love that does not control, impose, or kill, but celebrates life in its amazing diversity.
Non-patriarchal loves that must be discovered in each story of those who dare to go out and encounter others (across differences and beyond them) as gift, offering, call, caress, cry, and communion.
San Cristóbal de Las Casas, February 14, 2026
Note: How do you weave together non-patriarchal loves?
