Gender and Sex in an African Society - Essay Example

 Gender and Sex in an African Society The invention of Women written by Oyeronke Oyewumi is based on western Africa's society in 1850 to 1920. (Oyewumi 1997). The book rethinks gender as a construction in West Africa and offers a new way to understand both Western and Yoruba cultures. The author reveals an ideology of biological determination in the hearts of Western social categories, the idea that biology can provide the rational organization of the social world. And yet, the writer's concept of a 'woman' is centralized to this ideology and to the discourses in Western gender roles, showing they simply did not exist in the Yoruba land where the body was not based on social roles. Oyewumi traces the misplacement of Western, body-oriented gender concepts through the history of discourses of gender in Yoruba studies. Her analysis reveals the paradoxical nature of two significant assumptions of feminist theory, that showing gender is constructed socially and that showing subordination of women has always been universal. The invention of women demonstrates, on the contrary, that gender was not constructed in the old society of Yoruba, and that organizations in the society were determined by relative age. A meticulous epistemological and historical account of an African culture embracing its own terms, this book makes an argument that is persuasive based on the culturally dependent context that interprets social reality. It calls for a gender discourse preconception and categories on which such studies can rely. Moreover, the book bares the hidden assumptions in thoughts of different cultures. It is a truly comparative sociology of the Western tradition and African culture that will change the way gender and African studies proceed. Oyewumi's analysis advances greatly into the postcolonial mapping of the European distinction that has been developing in the recent decades. It traces how Western visual privileging insures that biological determinism and social constructivism cannot be mutually exclusive in cultures of the West. Gender categories were one kind of new tradition that European colonialists institutionalized in many African cultures including the Yoruba culture. Contemporary Western feminism has continued to extend their empire. Oyewumi enables the reader to envision what is hard to imagine within Western feminism world after gender. The book makes a huge contribution to not only feminism and African studies but also to philosophy, social theory and sociology in general. In Male daughters and female husbands, Ifi Amadiume conducted a research within her own family to study sex and gender in the African society (Amadiume 1987). She challenges the social anthropology and orthodoxies arguing gender and sex did not necessarily coincide. In the book, she examines the structures enabling women to gain power showing that roles are neither rigidly feminine nor masculine. The study was performed in the only Igbo area that was studied in detail by anthropologists in between 1980 and 1982. In 1976, the local government reformed and divided Nigeria into 19 states with 299 local governments with Nnobi being one of the towns in the local government. Most of the people Igbo were also separated between the states. The book is based on the slavery of the Igbo men that enabled them to introduce new societies that were secret and excluded women while redefining performances of power in their society and masculinity. Both books show the resistance of women to secrets in the society limited to socio-political power and local influence. During the pre-colonial periods that these books are based on, the rule of the elders was to increasingly undermine the rule of wealth and power. There was never a significant political influence and women maintained superior political authority till the 1900. Examining expressions of female authority and power between 1850 and 1900, there were challenges that prevailed for women as subordinates to men in the pre-colonial period. Women maintained their enviable positions as the main breadwinners of their families till the first two decades in the 20th century. Women lost their significant socio-political power in between the two decade period in early 20th century. Colonialism, Western education and Christianity became new frontiers for the contesting of gender power. The incursion of the British colonial forces and Presbyterian missionaries in between 1897 and 1920 weakened the matrilineage structure in such a way that indigenous political and female religious institutions declined while the institutions that were male dominated remained vibrant. In those first two decades of the 20th century, British colonial reforms for African political systems entailed the substitutions of traditionally gendered political organizations with only male political institutions. Thus, the men gained legitimacy under the British colonial rule with the new exclusive male warranted chief system became the only recognized type of government within the society. In contrast, the two books appear to report an era when pro-male and anti-female colonial reforms in the society proved to be a\the foundation of the political administration. The Christian mission-run schools emerged that admitted girls till the 1940s when female exclusive educational institutions became established focusing on marriage thinking and domestic thinking. As a result, men emerged as the new colonial elite who filled the ranks of teachers, clerks, pastors, accountants and interpreters in the colonial economy. These politically powerful male breadwinners, emergent masculinities, of the colonial period used their new position and wealth to redefine gendered access to socio-political opportunities in their society. Therefore, the institutions of the public welfare of the society such as the age grade institutions and the union development institutions which hitherto provided gender inclusive assistance to African citizens where they were galvanized in this period to sponsor only male people in pursuit of higher education. Consequently, men came to replace women as the family breadwinners and increasingly performed masculinity during this period, the redefinition of political power in gender that moved from the public to the intimate home spaces. Both books greatly discuss gender inequality, economic and politics in the pre-colonial patriarchy. It has been observed that the important theoretical strand of work within the African feminist theory. Revisiting the pre-colonial period, women's roles are reassessed. Imperialists are challenged about the victimization of traditional women in the third-world. Many anthropologists and historians increasingly stress women's power during that period. In contrast to scholarship gender foregrounding hierarchicies in this period, both studies show that gender was a significant social category that affirmed women's secular and spiritual authorities, a situation changed with colonialism. Ifi Amadiume took this approach to the extreme to establish an influential paradigm and a prolific output from the eighties to today drawing on different evidence. Both Amadiume and Oyewumi reveal the drawing of similar conclusions in interpreting pre-colonial women in Africa. Their studies show ambitious discussions of Western conceptual, philosophical and linguistic traditions and argue the patterns of defining human bodies in cultural and social terms are not an African society feature. Although Oyewumi stresses that African society was a strong hierarchy, she insists that gender is a foreign concept to the pre-colonial world-view and it did not play any important role to determine subjectivity and power relations. The value of Oyewumi's book lies in its analysis of the cultural frame of gender and broad biases of culture that inevitably underpin feminist assumptions and terms. Therefore, her argument is based on the lengthy philosophical and linguistic analysis of subjectivity, power and relations between women and men in pre-colonial Africa. As a result, it acknowledges how complicated social relations and language reflect gender hierarchies including when those hierarchies vary in patterns manifested in other exclusive contexts of theory. Both Amadiume and Oyewumi speak strongly of gender at that time being un-African. Their common dismissal of gender as a 'Western thing' comes from a peculiar reliance on very intellectual traditions underpinning the social anthropological disciplines. Their academic language draws largely from the stock of traditional anthropological and ethnographical sense making which is mainly different when applying claims that since it is an African academic embracing these issues, the language should assume a different meaning. In deduction, it is imperative to note that the extent of Oyewumi and Amadiume's work appear to contest a Western-centric tradition of placing African women as stereotypes. Yet, they capitulate to a colonial tradition of exoticizing and mythologizing mysterious powers. Indeed, their mythic figures of powerful matriarchs in Africa are prominent. Their reliance to construct an alarming indication of the impact on Western inventions of African women where anthropological analysis units were used to demonstrate and inscribe the essential difference of Western from African societies. Arguments offered by both authors open to contest and create a suggestive conceptual space that reassesses the apparent universal concept that carry too long influential to central feminist research. Therefore, they should acknowledge that while power invested in African women may not completely reflect position of women in the pre-colonial era, the absence of gender in a linguistic term does not mean disproving the existence of power relations between women and men. Amadiume and Oyewumi's work is based on looking at various unsettling hypothesis and concepts that helped generate new research into the pre-colonial era of African women creating further work in the receptive field context. Work cited Amadiume, Ifi. Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society. London: Zed Books, 1987. Collins, Robert O, and Ruth Iyob. Problems in African History: The Precolonial Centuries. , 2014 Oyěwùmí, Oyèrónkẹ́. The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.  Read More