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(s): Imani Perry
Edition: ebook
Publisher: Duke University Press
Year: 2018
Language: English
City: Durham, North Carolina / London, England
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
