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

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.

Author: Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí
Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
Published: 12/09/2015
Pages: 262
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.72lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.50w x 0.59d
ISBN: 9781349580514

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.