Growing up poor in Latin America at the end of the twentieth century before the internet, at the fragile dawn of NAFTA, meant that everything was far away. Distance was constitutive of my lived experience, and the future existed, but it was inaccessible, economically unavailable, linguistically out of reach. I came of age in a world where possibility had no physical form, and the only way to cross the divide was to treat every glimpse of another life, anything that resonated from whatever films, music, and literature I had access to, as proof that something could exist.
When you live like that, you become used to imagining the future as collage: brittle, contingent, requiring faith. I never paused to ask whether the possibilities I envisioned belonged to men or to women, if they were reserved for one gender or forbidden to another because to ask would mean accepting that such possibilities might be rationed. I only internalized that something could be done by someone; somebody out there, somewhere. In the barren landscape of scarcity, we held on to possibility itself as a whole, unsegmented, ungendered thing, or else the horizon risked collapsing entirely.
A generation of Mexican youth, myself among them, grew up like this: learning to imagine futures with almost no information other than what was available through second-hand images, while metabolizing the residue of 1970s leftist utopias. Back then, women and men—compañeras and compañeros—hoped together for visions of pan-American solidarity and social transformation, convinced that history was theirs to build. But those utopias crumbled, and we inherited a terrain littered with ruins: economic restructuring, neoliberal trade deals (like NAFTA), maquila factories, and the brutality of rapid globalization. Patriarchy, structural inequality, and precarity were embedded in those ruins, but not necessarily foregrounded as strictly gendered.
In this rubble of unrealized ideology, patriarchy was not even our first obstacle; the material and historical debris of hope was. What loomed above us was disillusionment. The early horizon of my life did not present feminism as a line of battle, nor the glass ceiling as a discrete barrier. The sky over us was not glass. It was stone. The entire world, with its promises and its exclusions, pressed down like architecture. I did not yet know the difference between a wall and patriarchy; I simply knew the weight of immobility. My personal ambition was not to claim space as a woman against men, but rather to survive, to reach beyond the scarcity, to breathe somewhere else.
When I later encountered philosophical, psychoanalytic, and political theories about gender and power, I recognized them immediately. They mapped onto fissures I had already physically climbed through. They named injustices I had experienced but not yet spoken. In this process, thinkers like Paul B. Preciado taught me that gender is not a natural fact, not a private identity, but a political technology that arranges bodies into systems of labor, visibility, and value, determining who is a subject and who is a structural tool.1 Masculinity, then, is not simply a way of being. It is an apparatus that doesn’t produce worlds, but administers them: a bureaucratic position in the distribution of value, autonomy, violence, and future.
“The stone is worldless, the animal is poor in world, man is world-forming.”2 Heidegger’s sentence draws a hierarchy: only humans, and implicitly only men, hold the capacity to form worlds; others (animals, objects, women) exist within these worlds or outside of them. But after decades of living with and tiptoeing around patriarchal violence, sexism, and structural inequality, I see that this hierarchy is deeply flawed. If I were to repurpose Heidegger today, I would write something like:
The stone is world.
The animal is world.
Women are world-producing.
Men are world-administering.
Therefore, man is poor in world.
This shift of perspective and explicit gendering of the statement attempts to reframe masculinity, not as the origin of worlds, but as the bureaucracy that keeps them under surveillance, often to prevent their expansion. Masculinity thus becomes a poverty of imagination disguised as authority. If women are world-producing—biologically, symbolically, socially—patriarchy responds by organizing a system to contain, manage, appropriate, and police that production.
Administration is not creation. It is control and artificial scarcity masquerading as law. Administration preserves or destroys worlds under the guise of stewardship. It defines boundaries, hoards resources, and polices freedoms. It is not accidental that patriarchy centers administration: control over reproduction, property, social mobility, violence, and memory.
Under patriarchal governance, the administration of life is called “husbandry”—a word that has only one gender—and women and children have been considered “chattels.” And if that word reminds you of “cattle,” you’re on the right track. Looking at history, as ownership came to be determined by law, women—much like cattle—could be sold and owned, and used as the thread with which to stitch alliances. This not only applied to European royal marriages, but was true for all social classes. In patriarchal societies, men are overwhelmingly assigned the role of gatekeepers for the distribution of resources, the enforcement of laws, the maintenance of order. They administer; rarely do they nurture.
The separation between producing and administering worlds is evident in psychoanalytic theory. Sigmund Freud, committed to the myth that femininity envies masculine power, proposed in 1908 that women suffer from “penis envy,” a psychological myth that reduced femininity to lack and deficit. This condition, according to Freud, resulted in women’s sense of their own castration as pivotal in their psychosexual development and was a source of their mental illness.
In 1926, Karen Horney, one of the earliest feminist psychoanalysts, countered that if gender envy exists, it is in the form of “womb envy”: a defensive panic against the biological and symbolic capacity to produce life that leads to structural misogyny. According to Horney’s idea, patriarchy’s response to female world-making has been to overvalue male work as a sort of intellectual “giving birth” to ideas, while claiming administration over that which the male cannot produce.3 Reproductive control, marriage as property exchange, inheritance laws, and even philosophical traditions become tools to manage what cannot be generated from within male bodies.
The violence against women in places like Ciudad Juárez offers one of the most harrowing illustrations of this dynamic. Since the early 1990s, the city has become emblematic of systemic gender violence. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of women disappeared, were abducted, tortured, or killed, their bodies often found in remote or brutal conditions, most (if not all) cases marked by impunity and state negligence. What began as isolated murders, sometimes attributed to intimate-partner violence or gang crime, mutated into what the feminist scholar Rita Segato calls “Juarización”: a process through which femicide becomes normalized as a structural feature of social order rather than an anomaly. Femicide becomes a tragic routine in the otherwise normal functioning of the system. Women’s bodies become part of a war economy as territories to be contested, claimed, and disposed of.4
In Ciudad Juárez, most victims are young, impoverished, working-class women, often maquila workers, migrants from rural areas in search of livelihoods. Their murders function as a brutal assertion of masculine administration: a message that certain bodies, certain lives, are disposable. Femicide, in this sense, is a kind of territorial policing that enforces a gendered geography: who may occupy public spaces, who may be visible, who may dream.
Even after formal recognition in 2012, when the Mexican federal government officially criminalized feminicidio (femicide) under the penal code, the killings have not stopped. According to recent analyses, despite this legal framework, femicides and disappearances of women have continued to rise in many states. This reveals a central problem: legislation alone cannot dismantle the architecture of gendered administration. When impunity is the norm, social violence becomes endemic, and the logic of disposability remains embedded in institutions and daily life. This is perhaps because, at least on the political terrain of northern Mexico, femicide is not an aberration of patriarchy, but rather one of its primary tools.
In spite of this, men may actually be the ones who suffer masculine violence most. The male gaze, we must remember, is directed primarily toward men. Men kill women, yes, but the primary casualties of masculinity and its logic of scarcity are to be found in the fantasy of war, in boys playing battle games, men craving apocalypse, and masculinity rehearsing its own destruction as the only imaginable form of freedom. Men do not simply produce violence; they desire its choreography, its aesthetic, its permission. If patriarchy fears women because women produce life, then war becomes its competing fantasy: the place where masculinity generates its own version of creation not through birth, but through death.
War becomes the black mirror of reproduction that administers the destruction of worlds. War serves as the masculine womb, the masculine spectacle of origin. Through war, men become “creators” by destroying: borders, bodies, futures. In the logic of patriarchy, death becomes a masculine form of world-making. The fantasy of war is not an accident. It is a compensation mechanism. War becomes a womb that births death. A brutal response to the fear that creation is not masculine. It is the only place where masculinity can pretend to “create” something original: borders, ruins, ecological collapse, bodies liquidated for glory.
In 1971, the art historian and critic Linda Nochlin published her influential essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?,” in which she challenged the very notion of “greatness” in art.5 Nochlin argued that the absence of recognized women artists in Western art history was not due to lack of talent, but to institutional barriers: lack of access to training, patronage, networks, time, and freedom to cultivate a sustained career. The gendered division of labor, especially domestic and reproductive labor, structurally barred women from the conditions necessary for the development of a sustained artistic oeuvre. Nochlin’s critique was a diagnosis of systemic exclusion. The traditional framework of “great art” has been constructed under masculine social rules: the bohemian genius, the male master-artist, the wandering painter, the independent studio, the public exhibition. These archetypes have been historically inaccessible to women, and the “absence of great women artists” was the result of persistent structural exclusion. Adding to this symbolic violence is the open denigration of women’s art by male artists and critics. In doing so, they not only deny women access to recognition but also delegitimize their production. As Georg Baselitz was quoted as saying in 2015: “If women are ambitious enough to succeed, they can do so, thank you very much. But up until now, they have failed to prove that they want to. Normally, women sell themselves well, but not as painters.”6
And perhaps the cruelest aspect of this structural cognitive dissonance is the position that the art world has towards women’s reproduction. When I was pondering becoming a mother, it took quite a bit of effort to put aside the fear of ruining my career, and the words of Marina Abramovic, rang heavy in my head: “I had three abortions because I was certain that it would be a disaster for my work … In my opinion [children are] the reason why women aren’t as successful as men in the art world. There’s plenty of talented women. Why do men take over the important positions? It’s simple. Love, family, children—a woman doesn’t want to sacrifice all of that.”7
I refused to feed the patriarchal machine that seemed to demand that, in order to play with the boys, I should voluntarily renounce my biological reproduction—such a demand is never made of men. I went on to have a child. And I remember clearly the moment I was told by my doctor that I was expecting a son. I cried deeply—not out of joy, nor out of the fear of having destroyed my career because of my reproductive choices, but because I feared the masculinity that he would inherit. I feared the possibility that he might believe that his assigned gender conferred on him an innate superiority, and that to be a man is to guard, to command, to own; I worried that he would internalize that vulnerability is weakness, that empathy is betrayal. But the story need not end in despair. Because I believe, deeply and politically, that masculinities can evolve. That new forms of being, of relating, of world-making are possible.
If life, as Lynn Margulis theorized, evolves through cooperation, symbiosis, and entanglement, this is something masculinity could learn from.8 Darwin described life evolving through competition; Margulis described it evolving through symbiogenesis, through bacteria merging, sharing information, and cocreating new species. The idea is that Life advances not by killing, not by “survival of the fittest,” but by radical collaboration. What would masculinity look like if it embraced symbiogenesis? If, instead of producing war—the activity that men historically excel at and die most frequently from—and existing in a zero-sum paradigm where power must be guarded, wealth hoarded, and dominance asserted, masculinity produced worlds alongside others? If masculinity learned to expand instead of defend its borders?
Imagine masculinities that are nonhierarchical. Not modes of administration, but avenues of world-making. Masculinities that do not fear dissolution into relation, but instead seek relation as enrichment. Masculinities that grow more powerful through shared life, not through exclusion. Masculinities that do not measure themselves against women or against other men, but measure themselves by the worlds they help generate. To imagine masculinities this way would not be to soften men. It would be to widen the world so that men no longer need to guard it like territory. It is to insist that men are capable of producing worlds too—if they would only stop trying to own them.
Paul B. Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era, trans. Bruce Benderson (Feminist Press, 2013).
Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Indiana University Press, 1995), 177.
Karen Horney, Feminine Psychology (Norton, 1967).
Rita Laura Segato, La guerra contra las mujeres (Prometeo Libros, 2016).
Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” ArtNews 69, no. 9 (January 1971).
Quoted in Kate Connolly, “Georg Baselitz: Why Art’s Great Shock Merchant Has Set His Sights on Opera,” The Guardian, May 19, 2015 →.
Quoted in Guelda Voien, “Marina Abramovic: I Had Three Abortions Because Children Hold Female Artists Back,” The Observer, July 26, 2016 →.
Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origins of Species (Basic Books, 2002).