ABOUT THIS BOOK

Even as feminism has become increasingly central to our ideas about institutions, relationships, and everyday life, the term used to diagnose the problem—“patriarchy”—is used so loosely that it has lost its meaning. In Vexy Thing Imani Perry resurrects patriarchy as a target of critique, recentering it to contemporary discussions of feminism through a social and literary analysis of cultural artifacts from the Enlightenment to the present. Drawing on a rich array of sources—from nineteenth-century slavery court cases and historical vignettes to writings by Toni Morrison and Audre Lorde and art by Kara Walker and Wangechi Mutu—Perry shows how the figure of the patriarch emerged as part and parcel of modernity, the nation-state, the Industrial Revolution, and globalization. She also outlines how digital media and technology, neoliberalism, and the security state continue to prop up patriarchy. By exploring the past and present of patriarchy in the world we have inherited and are building for the future, Perry exposes its mechanisms of domination as a necessary precursor to dismantling it.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Imani Perry is Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and author of Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop, also published by Duke University Press, and More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States.

REVIEWS

"Vexy Thing recontextualizes feminism and patriarchy in an era when both terms have been systemically emptied by market forces; she reminds us that the patriarch is an institutional concept and reminds us of its insidiousness in our everyday life through a devastatingly sharp historical critique, necessarily centering black women as the locus of her conversation."

-- Julianne Escobedo Shepherd Jezebel

"Using historical examples, narrative vignettes, and meditative interludes, Perry pushes the conventions of academic writing in part to advocate for feminism as critical reading practice rather than doctrine. . . . [She] invite[s] the reader to consider patriarchy not as a parallel structure repeating itself across cultures but rather an iterative and changeable force constituted through its interactions with race, empire, geographic location, and other intersections. Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates and above."

-- S. L. Vandermeade Choice

"Perry presents a feminist reading praxis that examines history, theory and academic scholarship to provide the basis for understanding how patriarchy informs our individual and collective selves. This book should be on the shelf of any graduate student working in the fields of feminist scholarship and critical race theory."

-- Katelan Dunn LSE Review of Books

"What is patriarchy? This question is at the heart of Vexy Thing, but Perry does more than define patriarchy. She names it, identifies it, locates its global reach, examines its historical construction, and explores its present-day impact. Vexy Thing does a lot and in a good way. It is a capacious work of black feminist theory that works through patriarchy’s violence to imagine personhood, livability, and a more just world."

-- Annette Joseph-Gabriel Public Books

"Vexy Thing is a sophisticated mapping of patriarchy from the Enlightenment to the present."

-- Natasha Behl Politics & Gender

"Vexy Thing is an immense scholarly undertaking, reviewing theory and research spanning multiple disciplines. It is also a call for the reader—students, scholars, theorists, activists—to challenge the patriarchal doctrines built into our own lives and to bring the voices of those on the margins to the center."

-- Wendy M. Christensen Ethnic and Racial Studies

“This is the sort of book that initially draws you in with its witty title and beautiful cover (despite attempts not to judge a book…). I soon found myself recommending it to everyone I met even before I had even reached the end. Its breadth and scope [are] breathtaking. It spirals out in all directions and the content encompasses film, literature, historical documents, philosophy and policy…. I would argue that reading this book is as good a start as any for developing a new feminist praxis.”

-- Rosie Buckland Women's Studies International Forum

"Vexy Thing is not just a timely history lesson. In this text we are shown how to read as liberation feminists who take seriously the task of tracing patriarchy as a foundational architecture of gender domination, while imagining and enacting the possibilities of engendered freedom. Through the stylistic strategies of vignette, story, description, theorization, and analysis, Perry forces us to shift our praxis and to ‘read through the layers of gender forms of domination’…. [W]hen reading Vexy Thing, one would do well to give herself ample time and room to delight in the experience."

-- LeRhonda S. Manigault-Bryant Journal of American History

"Vexy Thing is a groundbreaking work of Black feminist scholarship. Both generously worldbuilding and rigorously deconstructive, it offers a challenging vision of liberation that will be of value to scholars, students, and activists alike, a vital text for anyone seeking creative, critical, and always personal tools for getting out from under the hold of patriarchy's racial logics."

-- Matty Hemming Criticism

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1. Seafaring, Sovereignty, and the Self: Of Patriarchy and the Conditions of Modernity 14
2. Producing Personhood: The Rise of Capitalism and the Western Subject 42
Interlude 1. How Did We Get Here? Nobody's Supposed to Be Here 86
3. In the Ether: Neoliberalism and Entrepreneurial Woman 98
4. Simulacra Child: Hypermedia and the Mediated Subject 129
5. Sticks Broken at the River: The Security State and the Violence of Manhood 151
Interlude 2. Returning to the Witches 171
6. Unmaking the Territory and Remapping the Landscape 177
7. The Utterance of My Name: Invitation and the Disorder of Desire 199
8. The Vicar of Liberation 226
Notes 255
Bibliography 273
Index 283

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