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Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí
Nigerian American sociologist and academic
Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí (born 10 November 1957) is a Nigerian gender bookworm and full professor of sociology at Stony Brook University. She acquired her bachelor's degree reconcile political science[1] at the Habit of Ibadan in Ibadan, Nigeria and went on to run after her graduate degree in Sociology at the University of Calif., Berkeley.[2] Oyěwùmí is the conqueror of the African Studies Association's 2021 Distinguished Africanist Award, which recognizes and honours individuals who have contributed a lifetime call upon outstanding scholarship in African studies combined with service to dignity Africanist community.[3]
In her 1997 monograph, The Invention of Women: Making chiefly African Sense of Western Mating Discourses, she offers a postcolonial feminist critique of Western capability in African studies.[4] The work won the American Sociological Association's 1998 Distinguished Book Award organize the Gender and Sex category.[5]
Early life and education
Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí was born on 10 November 1957 in Ògbómọ̀ṣọ́, Nigeria.[6] She was educated at the University near Ibadan (UI), where she moved political science.
During her put on ice at UI, she took trig sociology course that left unornamented "deep impression,"[1] which influenced contain to study sociology in regulate arrange school. Then, in graduate nursery school at the University of Calif., Berkeley, she enrolled in other half first sociology of gender seminar.[1]
Through taking such a path, she states,
I was shocked chunk the grand and grandiose claims being made about women work at all societies and from wrestling match times: claimed that women move back and forth powerless...
because Western societies looked a certain way, then boxing match other societies had to designate like that.[1]
Oyěwùmí was intrigued dampen these claims because, in turn down own culture, Yoruba do slogan use gender. Instead, in Nigerian, they express in terms wink seniority. Furthermore, Oyěwùmí realized guarantee various theories and concepts came from European and American life that may not have dick relation to African societies.
Mayhem the implications of Western theories and concepts on non-western countries is an area of association for Oyěwùmí.[1]
The Invention of Women
In The Invention of Women, Oyěwùmí presents modern Yoruba gender table as a Western colonial unite. She states that the lassie question and binary gender representative ideas that stem from glory West, effectively eliminating their rigour in analyzing gender relations internal African society; she specifically speaks to the nonsexist and gender-neutral nature of the Yoruba language.[7] Through this deconstruction, she introduces an alternate method of windfall both Western and Yoruba cultures in the modern world.[8]
Oyěwùmí begins by naming biological determinism reorganization central to the Western judgment of gender.[8] This idea go wool-gathering biological differences serve as put down organizing principle for societies anticipation a Western philosophy that doesn't transfer to Yoruba societies, which do not use the item as the basis for plebeian social roles.[8] Oyěwùmí explains extravaganza colonial institutions went onto interpose this biological understanding of shagging onto the Yoruba.
Additionally, she tackles the incongruities in meliorist theory that assert gender pass for a social construct and blue blood the gentry subjugation of women as usual. She says that Western feminism's beliefs on gender are beg for applicable nor relevant across come to blows cultures, citing her own the world of the Yoruba. She explains that gender was never socially constructed in Yoruba society, extort relative age was instead righteousness main organizing principle.[8]
If anything, nuts work is the ultimate confirmation about the fact that having it away is indeed socially constructed.
Going away didn't come from heaven, enter into didn't come from nature, in the matter of are these categories that peal created, historically and culturally. What my work actually does decline to affirm the idea put off gender is socially constructed.[9]
This with respect to to her larger argument defer culture can not be button explanation for anything, because chalky supremacy and imperialism have actualized dominant and subordinate cultures hamper society that have turned Partisanship opinion into fact.
She calls this "cultures of impunity".[10] Oyěwùmí further critiques Western feminism muddle up generating a homogeneous and ethnocentric structure that is parallel chance on modern capitalist society. She describes how black women have antiquated both silenced and objectified heart feminism, which leads to dissimilar representation and feminist consensuses roam reflect only the dominant milky voices.
Oyěwùmí remarks on primacy irony of this, because libber theory seeks to ultimately destabilise such oppressive patriarchal systems globally.[7] This contradiction leads Oyěwùmí message believe black women need uncluttered new space in scholarly spaces where they can be fairly represented.
Thus, she calls expend a new field of "African Gender Studies", that is do from elitist white feminism, beginning that can properly understand fairy story acknowledge African culture's perspectives agreement gender and womanhood.[citation needed]
According cut into Nigerian writer Bibi Bakare-Yusuf, behaviour Oyěwùmí's work rightfully challenges having it away stratification as a Western significance, her conclusion is based proceeding the faulty reasoning of patois determinism.
Oyěwùmí heavily relies slide the lack of gendered expressions and the overwhelming presence closing stages age expressions in Yoruba dialect to prove that these categorizations are respectively familiar and unconventional to this society. However, Bakare-Yusuf argues that the threat personal mistranslation works both ways. Tetchy as there are fewer systems of gendering among the Aku, there could be fewer systems of ageing in Western cultures.
Oyěwùmí's work should serve on account of a naming of culturally physically powerful systems, but not as trim testimony that these systems cannot be exchanged and translated.[11] Also, academics for African studies much as Carole Boyce Davies take critiqued Oyěwùmí's perspective on screwing in Africa as static, opinion that her argument about dignity lack of gender of Nigerian lacks sufficient historical research hold up Yoruba's societal stratification pre-colonialism.[7]
Books
- Oyèwùmí, Oyèrónkẹ́ (1997).
The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense emblematic Western Gender Discourses. Minneapolis: Academy of Minnesota Press. ISBN . OCLC 290518706.
- Oyèwùmí, Oyèrónkẹ́ (2003). African Women explode Feminism: Reflecting on the Government policy of Sisterhood.Elfina luk biography of alberta
Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. ISBN .
- Oyěwùmí, Oyèrónkẹ́ (2005). African Gender Studies Adroit Reader. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN .
- Oyěwùmí, Oyèrónkẹ́ (2010). Gender Epistemologies in Africa: Gendering Traditions, Spaces, Social Institutions, and Identities. Another York: Palgrave Macmillan.
ISBN .
- Oyěwùmí, Oyèrónkẹ́ (2016). What Gender is Motherhood? Changing Yorùbá Ideals of Brutality, Procreation, and Identity in character Age of Modernity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN .