Relational Field Theory

The Pledge in STEAD

If you’ve ever wondered why people sometimes enforce harmful systems on each other even when those systems hurt them too, the answer isn’t personal failure. It’s structural design. Social systems don’t survive because they’re fair or natural. They survive because they recruit people to enforce the rules *in stead* — in the place of the system itself.

To understand this, it helps to revisit a foundational idea in feminist theory: the “patriarchal bargain.” Coined by scholar Deniz Kandiyoti in 1988, the term describes how people navigate patriarchal systems by accepting certain constraints in exchange for limited protection or advantage. It’s not a bargain for freedom. It’s a bargain for reduced harm inside an unequal structure.

When you translate that into the logic of the hostage‑pledge system, the picture becomes even clearer.

In this framework, the system sorts people into two roles: the **hostage**, whose body is held as collateral, and the **pledge**, whose loyalty the system depends on to maintain its own coherence. The patriarchal bargain is simply the moment a person accepts the role they’ve been assigned. The “deal” is: perform your role correctly, and the system will punish you less.

But here’s the twist: once someone accepts the pledge role, the system doesn’t just expect them to follow the rules. It expects them to enforce the rules on others. And not just on hostages — on other pledges too.

This is enforcement *in stead*.

Pledges enforce the system **in the stead of the system**, acting as its proxies, its extensions, its stand‑ins. They police boundaries the system can’t reach. They maintain binaries the system depends on. They uphold norms that were never natural but have been made to feel inevitable.

This isn’t because pledges are cruel or misguided. It’s because the system has convinced them that enforcing the rules is the only way to stay safe. The logic becomes: “If I don’t enforce this, the system will punish me for letting it slip.” The enforcement feels like survival, even when it harms everyone involved.

And this is why trans refusal is so destabilizing.

Trans women and trans men don’t just break gender norms. They break the hostage assignment itself. They refuse the roles the system tries to impose, whether it attempts to position them as captive or as captor. Their existence reveals that the binary isn’t a natural law — it’s a maintenance tool. And when someone refuses the assignment, the chain of in‑stead enforcement falters.

The system panics because its proxies stop working.

Understanding this doesn’t blame individuals. It names the architecture. It shows how systems recruit people to enforce roles they never chose, and how refusing those roles — or simply living outside them — exposes the machinery behind the curtain.

“In stead” enforcement is the system’s survival strategy.
Refusal is the beginning of its unraveling.