What Gender is Motherhood?: Changing Yorùbá Ideals of Power, Procreation, and Identity in the Age of Modernity

by Oyèrónk?? Oyewùmí

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781137538772
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan US
Publication date:	12/07/2015
Series:	Gender and Cultural Studies in Africa and the Diaspora , #14996
Edition description:	1st ed. 2015
Pages:	262
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.03(d)

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.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Exhuming Subjugated Knowledge and Liberating Marginalized Epistemes
1. Divining knowledge: The Man Question in Ifá
2. (Re)Casting the Yorùbá World: Ifá, Ìyá and the Signification of Difference
3. Matripotency: Ìyá in Philosophical Concempts and Socio-Policial Institutions
4. Writing and Gendering the Past: Akwé and the Endogenous Production of History
5. The Gender Dictaters: Making Gender Attributions in Religion and Culture
6. Towards a Genealogy of Gender, Gendered Names, and Naming Practices
7. The Poetry of Weeping Brides: The Role and Impact of Marriage Residence in the Making of Praise Names
8. Changing Names: The Roles of Christianity and Islam in Making Yorùbá Names Kosher for the Modern World
Conclusion: Motherhood in the Quest for Social Transformation
Glossary

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“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)

Editorial Reviews

"Oy?wùmí 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 Ifa, motherhood, marriage, and family, as charted through Yorùbá categories of knowledge. Consequently, Oy?wùmí 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. Oy?wùmí'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 this book 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. Oy?wùmí's original thinking about these issues will provoke reconsiderations of many axioms of knowing about the history of genders." - Ade?le?ke? Ade?e??ko??, Humanities Distinguished Professor, The Ohio State University, USA

From the Publisher