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Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation. By Imani Perry. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. 304 pp. $26.95 (paperback), $99.95 (hardcover).
Imani Perry's Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation is a sophisticated mapping of patriarchy from the Enlightenment to the present. Perry focuses attention on the “structure of patriarchy…[and] its gaps, its failures, and its injustices when it comes to the treatment of those under patriarchal authority” (17). She divides the book into two sections: the first section is a historically based conceptual account of the foundations of patriarchy rooted in property, personhood, and sovereignty, and the second section is a mapping of the shifts in patriarchy during the hypermedia neoliberal age. Perry suggests that in the current neoliberal age there is a “doubling of inequality” as “[t]he old architecture of patriarch through property, personhood, and sovereignty remains, but there are fewer absolute exclusions yet more intensive competitive demands that disadvantage those who were once absolutely excluded” (104). Vexy Thing's dual focus—the historical and the contemporary—makes it an essential read for anyone who is interested in understanding gender and gendering in the current vexed political moment.
Vexy Thing uses stories and vignettes to focus attention on “the men who could not be patriarchs, the people who could be neither patriarch nor lady, the captured and the excluded” (6). Perry acknowledges that her...