The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses

Front Cover
U of Minnesota Press, 1997 - 229 pages
The OC woman question, OCO this book asserts, is a Western one, and not a proper lens for viewing African society. A work that rethinks gender as a Western construction, The Invention of Women offers a new way of understanding both Yoruban and Western cultures. Author Oyeronke Oyewumi reveals an ideology of biological determinism at the heart of Western social categories-the idea that biology provides the rationale for organizing the social world. And yet, she writes, the concept of OC woman, OCO central to this ideology and to Western gender discourses, simply did not exist in Yorubaland, where the body was not the basis of social roles. Oyewumi traces the misapplication of Western, body-oriented concepts of gender through the history of gender discourses in Yoruba studies. Her analysis shows the paradoxical nature of two fundamental assumptions of feminist theory: that gender is socially constructed and that the subordination of women is universal. The Invention of Women demonstrates, to the contrary, that gender was not constructed in old Yoruba society, and that social organization was determined by relative age. A meticulous historical and epistemological account of an African culture on its own terms, this book makes a persuasive argument for a cultural, context-dependent interpretation of social reality. It calls for a reconception of gender discourse and the categories on which such study relies. More than that, the book lays bare the hidden assumptions in the ways these different cultures think. A truly comparative sociology of an African culture and the Western tradition, it will change the way African studies and gender studies proceed. "
 

Contents

Visualizing the Body Western Theories and African Subjects
5
Reconstituting the Cosmology and Sociocultural Institutions of OyoYoruba
35
Making History Creating Gender The Invention of Men and Kings in the Writing of Oyo Oral Traditions
84
Colonizing Bodies and Minds Gender and Colonialism
125
The Translation of Cultures Endangering Yoruba Language Orature and WorldSense
161
Notes
185
Bibliography
213
Index
227
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Page x - A man's body gives credibility to his utterance whereas a woman's body takes it away from hers (Ellman, 1968). A study done by Philip Goldberg which was concerned with finding out whether women were prejudiced against women demonstrates this effect very clearly (Goldberg, 1969). Here is Jo Freeman's description: 'He gave college girls sets of booklets containing six identical professional articles...

About the author (1997)

Oyeronke Oyewumi is assistant professor in the Department of Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

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