أويرونكي أويوومي

الأعمال

• 1997اختراع النساء (The Invention of Women)

  تجادل أويوومي بأن الأقدمية لا الجنس هي ما نظّم الحياة الاجتماعية في مجتمع اليوروبا، وأن «المرأة» فئةً جاءت مع الاستعمار والعلم الغربي – أطروحة كثيرة الجدل.

الموقف

In “The Invention of Women” Oyěwùmí argues that pre-colonial Yoruba society was organised mainly by seniority – relative age – rather than gender. Yoruba pronouns and kinship terms do not mark sex, and social roles were not tied to anatomy. Western thought, by contrast, practises “body-reasoning”: it reads social position from the visible body. Colonial rule and Western scholarship, feminist scholarship included, imposed this logic and created “woman” as a subordinated category. She calls instead for concepts drawn from African ways of life. Her thesis shaped decolonial feminism, including María Lugones’ idea of the coloniality of gender, but is disputed: Bibi Bakare-Yusuf, among others, criticised her readings of language and historical evidence.

الحياة والسياق

Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí is a Nigerian sociologist of Yoruba background. She studied at the University of Ibadan and earned her doctorate in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. She has taught for many years at Stony Brook University in New York, working on gender, African societies and the sociology of knowledge, and has edited volumes on African women and gender studies.

أعمال رئيسة أخرى

• African Women and Feminism (ed., 2003)
• African Gender Studies: A Reader (ed., 2005)
• What Gender Is Motherhood? (2016)

يرد في

• رحلة «الفلسفة الأفريقية» · المحطة 10 من 10
• نقاش «تفكيك الاستعمار في الفكر»