“Patriarchy”: A Black Feminist Concept

"Patriarchy":A Black Feminist Concept Matty Hemming (bio) Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation by Imani Perry. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. Pp. 304. $104.95 cloth, $27.95 paper. The concept of patriarchy inhabits a fraught position within the history feminist thought. While recent years have seen resurgence term's use popular culture, with media coverage US-originated women's march producing headlines such as "The Twenty Best Protest Signs to Dismantle Patriarchy This Weekend," has not always held seemingly evident descriptive appeal.1 Women color feminists long decried single-issue focus on gender-based inequalities conceptualized US-based academy, suggesting that "patriarchy" offers little more radical, transnational, context-specific critique power's workings. Not so, according Perry's (2018). In this generative at times breathtakingly sharp work interdisciplinary theory, Perry argues only do we need analyses in order practice feminism, but term can be used precisely what it seemed foreclose: account for "layers domination" produced globalized systems inequality. Responding both she regards vagueness current usage concept, well problematic its universalizing potentiality, re-tools simultaneously specific [End Page 303] capacious, her methodologically historically ambitious project drawing citational energy from still undervalued, argues, corpus radical women theorists. Often choosing less "feminism" sometimes "liberation feminism" key terms, makes subtle argument: assumes, or rather implicitly asserts, "feminism," "liberation," even are concepts whose usefulness is vitally tied theoretical creative insights color, postcolonial, thinkers. claim builds upon, departs from, earlier critiques term, troubling "patriarchy's" conceptual prevalence exemplified influential postcolonial Hazel Carby Chandra Mohanty. Writing 1980s problematizing assumptions second wave predominantly white, western scholarship, argue imagines system subordination along binarized gender lines imposed cookie-cutter style onto divergent global contexts. For Mohanty, "the patriarchal family" (61) one many ethnocentric constructs discursively productive monolithic "third world woman."2 Carby, application experiences Britain fails extent which race, class, histories colonial domination contribute marginalization. If avoids pitfalls, then, patriarchy? What does allow us see others cannot? Seeking trace "a detailed architecture than commonplace understandings US offer, something complex binary Western bourgeois domesticity" (5), first five chapters Thing tell patriarchy's multifaceted workings, ranging sixteenthcentury European colonialism twenty-first-century neoliberalism. emerges densely reinvigorated term: here, simply describe social coerces humans into violently maintained categories masculine/feminine better understood constantly evolving racial capitalism produces subjects "patriarchs," "ladies" "lieges," or, most importantly concerns liberation "nonpersons." structure functions an analytic theorizing racialized personhood, asking who, legally discursively, access it, reading Enlightenment early capitalist thought approached through example, building Hortense 304] Spillers's argument genderbased analysis cannot "ungendering" slavery, returns writings John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith identify how theory personhood-through-patriarchy was formed dawn capitalism. For...