Vexy Thing

On Gender and Liberation

De: Imani Perry

Narrado por: Jo Sands

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, re-centering 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 19th-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.

©2018 Duke University Press (P)2022 Audible, Inc.

This is a work of genius. A Gift to Humankind.

"Vexy Thing" by Imani Perry is a work of genius and humility. It enlightens the reader and coalesces together, in my view, many fields of understanding, scholarship, and study.

It seems to me that the positive social, scholarly, and ‘wisdom’ impact of this work on humankind may become wider than ever imagined. Perry illuminates well how 'always evolving', 'adaptable' and overbearing negative 'patriarchal' architectures have developed/grown like mega-cities within the neural matrix of our social behaviour patterns,

Further these negative aspects of patriarchal 'vexy' patterns have been passed down for the benefit of the 'few' over the invisible/unheard 'many' for generations. The outside appearances or paradigms & social memes may change outwardly but the power imbalances stay the same at the center of this patriarchal architecture.

The unhealthy patriarchy can distort and unhinge right relationships and increase the uneven yet sanctioned powers of patriarchy over too many people who are struggling in the modern world. That’s far too many of us. Perry observes how this vexy architecture has been evolving and ongoing for centuries, and how these vexy things have been all too 'negatively' impactful on humanity and unhelpfully successful.

I hope that one day future works by Perry will drill down even further on the vexy things, this patriarchy that has been imbedded into the architecture of our laws and societal ways of being.

Her work reveals that Plato's works and many other great works have always been incomplete, because they have never had Imani Perry's voice included in their thinking to help them be more balanced.

Thank you for writing this work, Imani Perry. May "Vexy Thing" be a deeply and seriously studied seminal global work of great scholarship for our modern times.