Review of Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí's The Invention of Women: Making African Sense of Western Gender Discourses
Been a while since I've done one of these! So here's a bit of a review of Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí's The Invention of Women: Making African Sense of Western Gender Discourses: If feminism at large has taught us anything, it has taught us to look for the woman: the woman in history, the woman in art, the woman in society. In each case where women have been erased, the work of feminism has laboured to put her back into the picture, picking her out from the depths of patriarchal overwriting, and returning her to the light where she belongs. But what if, in our zeal, we've begun to look for woman where she never existed? What if the woman - as we know her - has been an invention all along, an imposition even, not only from the West (onto the Rest), but on the West itself, and anything but a naturally given category from which analysis and action would flow? That, at least, is the argument given here in this tremendous work of sociology, which, by running 'We...