Oyeronke Oyewumi

Oyěwùmí began her educational journey at the University of Ibadan (UI), where she studied political science. During her time at UI, she took a sociology course that left a "deep impression," [1] which influenced her to study sociology in graduate school. Then, in graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley, she enrolled in her first sociology of gender seminar.[1]

Through taking such a course, she states,

"I was shocked by the grand and grandiose claims being made about women of all societies and from all times: claimed that women are powerless... because Western societies looked a certain way, then all other societies had to be like that."[1]

Oyěwùmí was intrigued by these claims because, in her own culture, Yoruba do not use gender. Instead, in Yoruba, they express in terms of seniority. Furthermore, Oyěwùmí realized that various theories and concepts came from European and American experiences that may not have any relation to African societies. Understanding the implications of Western theories and concepts on non-western countries is an area of interest for Oyěwùmí.[1]

In The Invention of Women, Oyěwùmí presents modern Yoruba gender stratification as a Western colonial construct. She states that the woman question and binary gender are ideas that stem from the West, effectively eliminating their validity in analyzing gender relations within African society; she specifically speaks to the nonsexist and gender-neutral nature of the Yoruba language.[6] Through this deconstruction, she introduces an alternate method of understanding both Western and Yoruba cultures in the modern world.[7]

Oyěwùmí begins by naming biological determinism as central to the Western understanding of gender.[7] This idea that biological differences serve as an organizing principle for societies is a Western philosophy that doesn't transfer to Yoruba societies, which do not use the body as the basis for any social roles.[7] Oyěwùmí explains how colonial institutions went onto impose this biological understanding of gender onto the Yoruba. Additionally, she tackles the incongruities in feminist theory that assert gender as a social construct and the subjugation of women as universal. She says that Western feminism's beliefs on gender are not applicable nor relevant across all cultures, citing her own culture of the Yoruba. She explains that gender was never socially constructed in Yoruba society, and relative age was instead the main organizing principle.[7]

'If anything, my work is the ultimate evidence about the fact that gender is indeed socially constructed. It didn't come from heaven, it didn't come from nature, there are these categories that are created, historically and culturally. What my work actually does is to affirm the idea that gender is socially constructed'.[8]

This links to her larger argument that culture can not be an explanation for anything, because white supremacy and imperialism have created dominant and subordinate cultures in society that have turned Eurocentric opinion into fact. She calls this "cultures of impunity".[9] Oyěwùmí further critiques Western feminism for generating a homogeneous and ethnocentric structure that is parallel to modern capitalist society. She describes how black women have been both silenced and objectified within feminism, which leads to unequal representation and feminist consensuses that reflect only the dominant white voices. Oyěwùmí remarks on the irony of this, because feminist theory seeks to ultimately destabilize such oppressive patriarchal systems globally.[6] This contradiction leads Oyěwùmí to believe black women need a new space in scholarly spaces where they can be adequately represented. Thus, she calls for a new field of "African Gender Studies", that is separate from elitist white feminism, and that can properly understand and acknowledge African culture's perspectives on gender and womanhood.

• Oyèwùmí, Oyèrónkẹ́ (1997). The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 978-0-8166-2441-6. OCLC 290518706.
• Oyèwùmí, Oyèrónkẹ́ (2003). African Women and Feminism: Reflecting on the Politics of Sisterhood. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. ISBN 978-0-86543-628-2.
• Oyěwùmí, Oyèrónkẹ́ (2005). African Gender Studies A Reader. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-1-137-09009-6.
• Oyěwùmí, Oyèrónkẹ́ (2010). Gender Epistemologies in Africa: Gendering Traditions, Spaces, Social Institutions, and Identities. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-230-62345-3.
• Oyěwùmí, Oyèrónkẹ́ (2016). What Gender is Motherhood? Changing Yorùbá Ideals of Power, Procreation, and Identity in the Age of Modernity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-1-137-53877-2.

• 2003/2004 Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship on Human Security [11]
• 1998 Distinguished Book Award in the Gender and Sex Section of the American Sociological Association[5]
• 1998 Finalist for the Herskovits Prize of the African Studies Association.[12]
• 2021 Distinguished Africanist Award of the African Studies Association[11]

• Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí on the website of Stony Brook University.