Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí

Agora

Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí

b. c. 1957

A first way ina deliberate simplification – the portrait says more

She argues that before colonialism Yoruba society was ordered by age, not by gender – and that the category of woman was imposed by Western thinking about bodies.

Placement

African & Africana Philosophy · Africa south of the Sahara · Society & History, Epistemology, Gender & Feminism

Nigerian sociologist: “The Invention of Women” argues that pre-colonial Yoruba society was organised by seniority, not gender – Western “body-reasoning” imposed the category of woman.

Key ideas

Invention of women
Seniority instead of gender
Critique of Western body-reasoning

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Influence

Influenced 1

María Lugones

influenced
Lugones drew on Oyěwùmí’s thesis that precolonial Yoruba society was not organised by gender to argue colonialism imposed a gender system (‘Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System’, 2007). M. Lugones, “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System”, Hypatia 22 (2007); O. Oyěwùmí, The Invention of Women (1997)
Evidence: AI draft
María Lugones › 1944–2020

Works

1997The Invention of Women
Oyěwùmí argues that in Yoruba society seniority rather than gender organised social life, and that “woman” as a category arrived with colonialism and Western scholarship – a much-debated thesis.

Position

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.

Life & context

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.