Overview
- Demonstrates that there is significant religious and linguistic evidence that Yorùbá society was not gendered in its original form
- Serves as a follow-up to The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (1997)
- Explores the intersections of gender, history, knowledge-making, and the role of intellectuals in the process
Part of the book series: Gender and Cultural Studies in Africa and the Diaspora (GCSAD)
Access this book
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Other ways to access
Table of contents (10 chapters)
-
Front Matter
-
Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
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.
Reviews
“Oyěwùmí continues to proffer formidable power-knowledge moves beyond gendered concepts of ‘woman’. She tasks us with radical, matripotent comprehensions of the institutions and practices of Ifá, motherhood, marriage, and family, as charted through Yorùbá categories of knowledge. Consequently, Oyěwùmí provides considerable contribution to critical feminist and womanist scholarship.” (Epifania A. Amoo-Adare, Center for Development Research (ZEF), University of Bonn, Germany)
“What Gender is Motherhood? is a beginning rather than an ending, as it poses an important challenge to feminist history and theory that projects the world in hegemonic ways. Oyěwùmí’s contemporary examples of the chilling effect, on scholarship, of widespread acceptance of a natural male-dominated ethos among the Yorùbá are disconcerting to say the least. Let's get thisbook out there and keep the discourse invigorated.” (Cheryl Johnson-Odim, Provost Emerita, Professor, History, Dominican University, USA)
“The central question asked in this book—‘what is the gender of motherhood?’—will set all readers thinking anew about sexuality, reproduction, and natality. Oyěwùmí’s original thinking about these issues will provoke reconsiderations of many axioms of knowing about the history of genders.” (Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́, Humanities Distinguished Professor, The Ohio State University, USA)
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.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: What Gender is Motherhood?
Book Subtitle: Changing Yorùbá Ideals of Power, Procreation, and Identity in the Age of Modernity
Authors: Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí
Series Title: Gender and Cultural Studies in Africa and the Diaspora
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137521255
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan New York
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-137-53877-2Published: 07 December 2015
Softcover ISBN: 978-1-349-58051-4Published: 09 December 2015
eBook ISBN: 978-1-137-52125-5Published: 29 April 2016
Series ISSN: 2946-3793
Series E-ISSN: 2946-3807
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIII, 262
Topics: African Culture, Gender Studies, Cultural and Media Studies, general, Ethnicity Studies, Cultural Studies, Sociology, general