What Gender is Motherhood?, 1st ed. 2016 Changing Yorùbá Ideals of Power, Procreation, and Identity in the Age of Modernity Gender and Cultural Studies in Africa and the Diaspora Series

In this book, Oy?wùmí extends her path-breaking thesis that in Yorùbá society, construction of gender is a colonial development since the culture exhibited no gender divisions in its original form. Taking seriously indigenous modes and categories of knowledge, she applies her finding of a non-gendered ontology to the social institutions of Ifá, motherhood, marriage, family and naming practices. Oy?wùmí insists that contemporary assertions of male dominance must be understood, in part, as the work of local intellectuals who took marching orders from Euro/American mentors and colleagues. In exposing the depth of the coloniality of power, Oy?wùmí challenges us to look at the worlds we inhabit, anew.

Introduction: Exhuming Subjugated Knowledge and Liberating Marginalized Epistemes
1. Divining knowledge: The Man Question in Ifá
2. (Re)Casting the Yorùbá World: Ifá, Ìyá and the Signification of Difference
3. Matripotency: Ìyá in Philosophical Concempts and Socio-Policial Institutions
4. Writing and Gendering the Past: Akwé and the Endogenous Production of History
5. The Gender Dictaters: Making Gender Attributions in Religion and Culture
6. Towards a Genealogy of Gender, Gendered Names, and Naming Practices
7. The Poetry of Weeping Brides: The Role and Impact of Marriage Residence in the Making of Praise Names
8. Changing Names: The Roles of Christianity and Islam in Making Yorùbá Names Kosher for the Modern World
Conclusion: Motherhood in the Quest for Social Transformation
Glossary

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.

Demonstrates that there is significant religious and linguistic evidence that Yorùbá society was not gendered in its original form

Serves as a follow-up to The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (1997)

Explores the intersections of gender, history, knowledge-making, and the role of intellectuals in the process