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

by Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí (Author)

There is significant religious and linguistic evidence that Yorùbá society was not gendered in its original form. In this follow-up to The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses, Oy?wùmí explores the intersections of gender, history, knowledge-making, and the role of intellectuals in the process.

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There is significant religious and linguistic evidence that Yoruba society was not gendered in its original form. In this follow-up to The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses, Oy?wumi explores the intersections of gender, history, knowledge-making, and the role of intellectuals in the process. She applies the finding of a non-gendered ontology to the institution of Ifa, the most important endogenous system of knowledge in Yoruba culture, and explores how gender is implicated in interpretations of the knowledge system, as social and ritual practice, and as a cultural institution in a changing world.

Author Biography

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.