Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí

Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí is a Nigerian sociologist and gender theorist, born in Ogbomoso, who studied at the University of Ibadan and the University of California, Berkeley, and teaches at Stony Brook University. In The Invention of Women she argues that gender was not an organising principle of pre-colonial Yoruba society, where social rank depended mainly on seniority. The category 'woman', she claims, was imposed through colonialism and Western scholarship. Her work challenges the assumption that Western feminist categories apply everywhere.

Key ideas

• In pre-colonial Yoruba society social roles were organised mainly by seniority, not by gender.
• The Yoruba language does not mark gender in its pronouns or kinship terms in the way English does.
• Western thought relies on 'body-reasoning', reading social status from the body, which it wrongly treats as universal.
• Speaking of a 'world-sense' rather than a 'worldview' avoids privileging sight over the other senses.
• Colonialism created women as a subordinate social category in Yorubaland.

Major works

• The Invention of Women (1997)
• African Women and Feminism (2003)
• What Gender Is Motherhood? (2016)

In the Book corner

• The Invention of Women 1997 · Advanced
  A study by a Nigerian sociologist, subtitled Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses. Oyěwùmí argues that gender was not an…

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