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

"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." — Julianne Escobedo Shepherd, Jezebel

"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." — Katelan Dunn, LSE Review of Books

"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." —Julianne Escobedo Shepherd, Jezebel

"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." —Katelan Dunn, LSE Review of Books

“Imani Perry’s Vexy Thing is a strong and confidently argued statement for a kind of feminism that attends in new ways to how logics of gender domination are part of wider logics of domination—how regimes of gender must be considered under a lens that also makes visible austerity and neoliberalism, hypermedia and the security state. Vexy Thing expands our notions of what a feminist critic can do while giving the reader a real sense of an important intellectual at work.” — Sara Ahmed, author of, Living a Feminist Life

“Given the political turn in the United States in November of 2016, Imani Perry’s Vexy Thing will become a central text for those involved in discussions of that thing called ‘the patriarchy.’ By thinking of patriarchy as a single phenomenon across different registers, Perry guides readers into their own sense of its stronghold on American, if not global, iterations of self and other, state and nation. This is a powerful statement about feminism for the here and now.” — Sharon Patricia Holland, author of, The Erotic Life of Racism

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