The word was coined by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza in 1992 to describe her theory of interconnected, interacting, and self-extending systems of domination and submission, in which a single individual might be oppressed in some relationships and privileged in others.
[1] Kyriarchy encompasses sexism, racism, ableism, ageism (including adultism), antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-Catholicism, homophobia, transphobia, fatphobia, classism, xenophobia, economic injustice, the prison-industrial complex, colonialism, militarism, ethnocentrism, speciesism, linguicism and other forms of dominating hierarchies in which the subordination of one person or group to another is internalized and institutionalized.
[2][3] Whenever the term is taken to encompass topics that were not and could not be addressed by the original theory, the kyriarchic aspects in emerging fields of study such as mononormativity, allonormativity, and chrononormativity are likewise included.
The term was originally developed in the context of feminist theological discourse, and has been used in some other areas of academia as a non–gender-based descriptor of systems of power, as opposed to patriarchy.
Schüssler Fiorenza describes interdependent "stratifications of gender, race, class, religion, heterosexualism, and age" as structural positions [5] assigned at birth.