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 'Western gender discourse' through the annulus of Yorùbá (or Oyo) ways of living, challenges what we can take for granted of all 'we' know of gender. To be clear, at stake here is less woman as a biological category than as a sociological one: woman as a role, or as a principle for organizing social relations. Less 'what is a woman?' than 'who counts as a woman, for what purposes, in what situations?'. On this, Oyěwùmí is unequivocal: the category of woman "simply did not exist in Yorùbáland prior to its sustained contact with the West". While admitting anatomical distinctions, the point is that such distinctions were without sociological difference, never rising to the level of organizing life.

Giving this work its power is not only its 'negative' project - of busting the myth of the Yorùbáland woman - but also and equally, its 'positive' one: of showing, in place of gender, how the Oyo did in fact organize themselves. Where sociologists and anthropologists saw gender, what they should have sensed, rather, was lineage and rank (as an aside, the difference between sight and sense is one heavily insisted upon by Oyěwùmí, for whom the privilege of 'seeing' in the West must be contrasted to the Oyo appreciation of the senses more broadly; in fact it's sight that largely pegs gender to the (visible) body in the West in a way it doesn't among the Yorùbá). For it was by means of seniority that the Oyo largely understood themselves and each other, explaining, by means of it, who got to trade, to hunt, to cook, to rule and to do, well, most anything. 

But if this was the self-understanding of the Oyo from the 'inside', from the 'outside', scholars of the Yorùbá have tended instead to approach with a gender-shaped hammer just in order to find gender-shaped nails in every village. The framework of gender, carried in from without, not only distorted scholarship about the Oyo (distortions picked apart flesh from bone in Oyěwùmí's book), but more importantly, changed how the Oyo understood themselves too. This is the story of the 'invention of woman': of how Yorùbá society, 'woman free' to begin with, gradually internalized, though schooling, policy, religion, and commodification - the work of colonialism - the very categories that were read into them where they never existed.

While acerbic and cutting about much of the scholarship it examines (of Kwame Anthony Appiah: "Appiah's own unabashed and uncritical acceptance of the West and his dismissal of Africa are understandable given his matrilineal descent lines...") The Invention of Women is also largely nostalgia free, it should be said. That gender was an imposition never implies a kind of prelapsarian state of social 'equality', and indeed, it was precisely on account of various other social hierarchies (i.e. lineage) that gender failed to take root. Nevertheless, by dislocating the 'naturalness' of gender which remains stubbornly prevalent today, The Invention of Woman stands as a preeminent document in the dossier for the reinvention of gender in our time.