Vexy Thing

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.

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

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.