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Author: Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452903255
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257
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Book Description
The "woman question", this book asserts, is a Western one, and not a proper lens for viewing African society. A work that rethinks gender as a Western contruction, The Invention of Women offers a new way of understanding both Yoruban and Western cultures. Oyewumi traces the misapplication of Western, body-oriented concepts of gender through the history of gender discourses in Yoruba studies. Her analysis shows the paradoxical nature of two fundamental assumptions of feminist theory: that gender is socially constructed in old Yoruba society, and that social organization was determined by relative age.
Author: Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452903255
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257
Get Book Here
Book Description
The "woman question", this book asserts, is a Western one, and not a proper lens for viewing African society. A work that rethinks gender as a Western contruction, The Invention of Women offers a new way of understanding both Yoruban and Western cultures. Oyewumi traces the misapplication of Western, body-oriented concepts of gender through the history of gender discourses in Yoruba studies. Her analysis shows the paradoxical nature of two fundamental assumptions of feminist theory: that gender is socially constructed in old Yoruba society, and that social organization was determined by relative age.
Author: Professor Ifi Amadiume
Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.
ISBN: 1783603348
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 296
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Book Description
In 1987, more than a decade before the dawn of queer theory, Ifi Amadiume wrote Male Daughters, Female Husbands, to critical acclaim. This compelling and highly original book frees the subject position of 'husband' from its affiliation with men, and goes on to do the same for other masculine attributes, dislocating sex, gender and sexual orientation. Boldly arguing that the notion of gender, as constructed in Western feminist discourse, did not exist in Africa before the colonial imposition of a dichotomous understanding of sexual difference, Male Daughters, Female Husbands examines the structures in African society that enabled people to achieve power, showing that roles were not rigidly masculinized nor feminized. At a time when gender and queer theory are viewed by some as being stuck in an identity-politics rut, this outstanding study not only warns against the danger of projecting a very specific, Western notion of difference onto other cultures, but calls us to question the very concept of gender itself.
Author: Obioma Nnaemeka
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313068747
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 297
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Book Description
Heated debates about and insurgencies against female circumcision are symptoms of a disease emanating from a mindset that produced hierarchies of humans, conquered colonies, and built empires. The loss of colonies and empires does not in any way mitigate the ideological underpinnings of empire-building and the knowledge construction that subtends it. The mindset finds its articulation at points of coalescence. Female circumcision provided a point of coalescence and impetus for this articulation. Insisting that the hierarchy on which the imperialist project rests is not bipolar but multi-layered and more complex, the contributions in this volume demonstrate how imperialist discourses complicate issues of gender, race, and history. Nnaemeka gives voice to the silenced and marginalized, and creates space for them to participate in knowledge construction and theory making. The authors in this volume trace the travels of imperial and colonial discourses from antecedents in anthropology, travel writings, and missionary discourse, to modern configurations in films, literature, and popular culture. The contributors interrogate foreign, or Western, modus operandi and interventions in the so-called Third World and show how the resistance they generate can impede development work and undermine the true collaboration and partnership necessary to promote a transnational feminist agenda. With great clarity and in simple, accessible language, the contributors present complex ideas and arguments which hold significant implications for transnational feminism and development.
Author: Stephen O. Murray
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438484119
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 283
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Book Description
Among the many myths created about Africa, the claim that homosexuality and gender diversity are absent or incidental is one of the oldest and most enduring. Historians, anthropologists, and many contemporary Africans alike have denied or overlooked African same-sex patterns or claimed that such patterns were introduced by Europeans or Arabs. In fact, same-sex love and nonbinary genders were and are widespread in Africa. Boy-Wives and Female Husbands documents the presence of this diversity in some fifty societies in every region of the continent south of the Sahara. Essays by scholars from a variety of disciplines explore institutionalized marriages between women, same-sex relations between men and boys in colonial work settings, mixed gender roles in east and west Africa, and the emergence of LGBTQ activism in South Africa, which became the first nation in the world to constitutionally ban discrimination based on sexual orientation. Also included are oral histories, folklore, and translations of early ethnographic reports by German and French observers. Boy-Wives and Female Husbands was the first serious study of same-sex sexuality and gender diversity in Africa, and this edition includes a new foreword by Marc Epprecht that underscores the significance of the book for a new generation of African scholars, as well as reflections on the book's genesis by the late Stephen O. Murray. This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to the generous support of the Murray Hong Family Trust. Access the book online at the SUNY Open Access Repository at http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12648/1714.
Author: Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9783030280987
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
This definitive handbook is the first reference of its kind bringing together knowledge, scholarship, and debates on themes and issues concerning African women everywhere. It unearths, critiques, reviews, analyses, theorizes, synthesizes and evaluates African women’s historical, social, political, economic, local and global lives and experiences with a view to decolonizing the corpus. This Handbook questions the gendered roles and positions of African women and the structures, institutions, and processes of policy, politics, and knowledge production that continually construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct African women and the study of them. Contributors offer a consistent emphasis on debunking erroneous and misleading myths about African women's roles and positions, bringing their previously marginalized stories to relief, and ultimately re-writing their histories. Thus, this Handbook enlarges the scope of the field, challenges its orthodoxies, and engenders new subjects, theories, and approaches. This reference work includes, to the greatest extent possible, the voices of African women themselves as writers of their own stories. The detailed, rigorous and up-to-date analyses in the work represent a variety of theoretical, methodological, and transdisciplinary approaches. This reference work will prove vital in charting new directions for the study of African women, and will reverberate in future studies, generating new debates and engendering further interest.
Author: Oyeronke Oyewumi
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 113709009X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 429
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Book Description
This is the first comprehensive reader that brings African experiences to bear on the ongoing global discussions of women, gender, and society. Bringing together the essential writing on this topic from the last 25 years, these essays discuss gender in Africa from a multi-disciplinary perspective.
Author: Lilian Lem Atanga
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027218749
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 344
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Book Description
Gender and Language in Sub-Saharan Africa: Tradition, Struggle and Change is the first book to bring together the topics of language and gender, African languages, and gender in African contexts, and it does so in a descriptive, explanatory and critical way. Including fascinating new work and new, often challenging data from Botswana, Chad, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa, this collection looks at some 'traditional' uses of language in relation to the gender of its speakers and the gendered nature of the languages themselves; it also identifies and explores social change in terms of both gender and sexuality, as reflected in and constructed by language and discourse. The contributions to this volume are accessibly written and will be of interest to students and established academics working on African sociolinguistics and discourse, as well as those whose interest is language, gender and sexuality.
Author: Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816624416
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 260
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Book Description
The author traces the misapplication of Western, body-oriented concepts of gender through the history of gender discourses in Yoruba studies. THE INVENTION OF WOMEN demonstrates that biology as a rationale for organizing the social world is a Western construction not applicable in Yoruban culture where social organization was determined by relative age.
Author: Teun A Van Dijk
Publisher: SAGE Publications
ISBN: 1848606494
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 433
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Book Description
Covers contemporary debates and research literature; covers everything from grammar, narrative, argumentation, cognition and pragmatics to social, political and critical approaches; adds two wholly new chapters on ideology and identity; and, puts the student at the centre.
Author: Maria José Canelo
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443853283
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 299
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Book Description
How can English and American Studies be instrumental to conceptualizing the deep instability we are presently facing? How can they address the coordinates of this instability, such as war, terrorism, the current economic and financial crisis, and the consequent myriad forms of deprivation and fear? How can they tackle the strategies of de-humanization, invisibility, and the naturalization of inequality and injustice entailed in contemporary discourses? This anthology grew out of an awareness of the need to debate the role of English and American Studies both in the present context and in relation to the so-called demise of the Humanities. Drawing on Judith Butler’s rethinking of materiality as the effect of power, in her study Bodies That Matter (1993), we locate this collection of essays at the crossroads of discourse and power, while we expect the work collected here to highlight the ability of discourses to materialize in, or as, truth, and as such to support or decry particular constituencies. Discourses therefore matter to us as products and vehicles of power relations that can be subject to the analytical and interpretative tools of English and American Studies. Our idea was to challenge especially young scholars to position their research concerning the ability of their fields to be discourses that matter; in the case in point, to be critical practices that make an active intervention in current debates. By focusing on matters such as language as witness to the world, representations of gender, race, and ethnicity, performative discourses, exceptionalism and power, and interculturality, these essays pursue the chance to deepen, enlarge, and question both literary and cultural phenomena, their established critical readings, and the strategies deployed in representations. Finally, English and American Studies in the present collection demonstrate their affiliation to the Humanities by exploring the numerous possibilities offered by their discourses: their ability to foster critical thought, allowing us to think for (and outside) ourselves, their capacity to test, argue, and question, and their profound imaginative potential.
