Introduction

Abstract

It has become axiomatic that gender is socially constructed: that the social differences between males and females are located in social practices, and not simply in biological facts. Gender differences cannot be reduced to nature. In my earlier work, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (Oyĕwùmí 1997), I documented the social construction of gender in Yorùbá society and emphasized that gender is not only socially constructed but also historical. The issue of the historicity of gender cannot be overstated, given that in the Western dominant discourses, gender is presented as transhistorical and therefore essentialist. Studies of Africa should not rely on Western-derived concepts to map the issue of gender in African societies, but instead must ask questions about the meaning of gender and how to apprehend it in particular times and places. Thus, the problem of gender in studies of Africa is fundamentally an epistemological one.