What Gender Is Motherhood? - (Gender and Cultural Studies in Africa and the Diaspora) by Oyèrónkẹ & ́ & Oyě & wùmí (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

In this book, Oyěwùmí extends her path-breaking thesis that in Yorùbá society, construction of gender is a colonial development since the culture exhibited no gender divisions in its original form. Taking seriously indigenous modes and categories of knowledge, she applies her finding of a non-gendered ontology to the social institutions of Ifá, motherhood, marriage, family and naming practices. Oyěwùmí insists that contemporary assertions of male dominance must be understood, in part, as the work of local intellectuals who took marching orders from Euro/American mentors and colleagues. In exposing the depth of the coloniality of power, Oyěwùmí challenges us to look at the worlds we inhabit, anew.

From the Back Cover

There is significant religious and linguistic evidence that Yoruba society was not gendered in its original form. In this follow-up to The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses, Oy?wumi explores the intersections of gender, history, knowledge-making, and the role of intellectuals in the process. She applies the finding of a non-gendered ontology to the institution of Ifa, the most important endogenous system of knowledge in Yoruba culture, and explores how gender is implicated in interpretations of the knowledge system, as social and ritual practice, and as a cultural institution in a changing world.

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About the Author

Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí is Associate Professor of Sociology at SUNY Stony Brook, USA. She was born in Nigeria and educated at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, and the University of California at Berkeley, USA. Her monograph, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses won the 1998 Distinguished Book Award of the Sex and Gender Section of the American Sociological Association, and was a finalist for the Herskovitts Prize of the African Studies Association in the same year.