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.