"Patriarchy": A Black Feminist Concept

Criticism 63.3_05_Hemming.indd Page 303 12/07/21 6:01 pm Criticism Summer 2021, Vol. 63, No. 3, pp. 303–308. ISSN 0011-1589. doi: 10.13110/criticism.63.3.0303 © 2021 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309 The concept of patriarchy inhabits a fraught position within the history of feminist thought. While recent years have seen a resurgence of the term’s use within popular culture, with media coverage of the US-originated women’s march producing headlines such as “The Twenty Best Protest Signs to Dismantle the Patriarchy This Weekend,” the concept has not always held such seemingly evident descriptive appeal. Women of color feminists have long decried the term’s single-issue focus on gender-based inequalities conceptualized within a US-based academy, suggesting that “patriarchy” offers little of use to a more radical, transnational, and context-specific critique of power’s workings. Not so, according to Imani Perry’s Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation (2018). In this generative and at times breathtakingly sharp work of interdisciplinary Black feminist theory, Perry argues that not only do we need analyses of “patriarchy” in order to practice feminism, but that the term can be used to do precisely what it has seemed to foreclose: it can account for the “layers of domination” produced by globalized systems of inequality. Responding both to what she regards as the vagueness of current popular usage of the concept, as well as the fraught problematic of its universalizing potentiality, Perry re-tools the term to be simultaneously more specific and more “PATRIARCHY”: A BLACK FEMINIST CONCEPT Matty Hemming