Event Type:
Book Talk

Location: 754 Schermerhorn Extension – Women & Gender Studies Seminar room - Columbia University

“VEXY THING: GENDER AND LIBERATION” BOOK PANEL DISCUSSION with author, Imani Perry, Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies- Princeton University and Panelists

  • George Aumoithe, Historian; Post-Doctoral Fellow-Princeton University
  • Lisa Del Sol, PhD Student , English & Comparative Literature -Columbia University
  • Elleza Kelley, PhD Student, , English & Comparative Literature -Columbia University
  • Tiana Reid, PhD Student, English & Comparative Literature -Columbia University
  • Anthony Urena, PhD Candidate, Sociology -Columbia University

Book Description

Compiled from Duke University Press 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, r-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 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 Bio

Imani Perry is the Hughes-Rogers professor of African American studies at Princeton University, where she is also affiliated with the Programs in Law and Public Affairs and Gender and Sexuality Studies. She is the author of “Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation”; “May We Forever Stand A History of the Black National Anthem”(2018); Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry (2018); More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States (2011) and Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop (2004) as well as numerous articles in the fields of law, cultural studies and African American Studies.. You can follow her on Twitter at @imaniperry