In this lecture, emerging from my book Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation, I will describe how the figure of the patriarch emerged as part and parcel of modernity, the nation-state, the Industrial Revolution, and globalization. Moving from this analysis of the root of patriarchy, I outline 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, I describe how its mechanisms of domination are a necessary precursor to dismantling it.
Lecturer
2019—Imani Perry
Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University