What Gender is Motherhood?

Changing Yorùbá Ideals of Power, Procreation, and Identity in the Age of Modernity

  • Authors
  • Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí
Book

Part of the Gender and Cultural Studies in Africa and the Diaspora book series (GCSAD)

Table of contents

About this book

Introduction

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. She applies the finding of a non-gendered ontology to the institution of Ifa, the most important endogenous system of knowledge in Yorùbá 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.

Keywords

Gender Motherhood Feminism Yoruba Africa Coloniality Knowledge Modernity culture feminism gender identity Institution philosophy religion society transformation women

Bibliographic information

  • DOI https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137521255
  • Copyright Information The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016
  • Publisher Name Palgrave Macmillan, New York
  • eBook Packages Literature, Cultural and Media Studies
  • Print ISBN 978-1-349-58051-4
  • Online ISBN 978-1-137-52125-5
  • About this book