What Gender is Motherhood?

Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí is Associate Professor of Sociology at SUNY Stony Brook, USA. She was born in Nigeria and educated at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, and the University of California at Berkeley, USA. Her monograph, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses won the 1998 Distinguished Book Award of the Sex and Gender Section of the American Sociological Association, and was a finalist for the Herskovitts Prize of the African Studies Association in the same year.

"Oy?wumi continues to proffer formidable power-knowledge moves beyond gendered concepts of 'woman'. She tasks us with radical, matripotent comprehensions of the institutions and practices of Ifa, motherhood, marriage, and family, as charted through Yoruba categories of knowledge. Consequently, Oy?wumi provides considerable contribution to critical feminist and womanist scholarship" - Epifania A. Amoo-Adare, Center for Development Research (ZEF), University of Bonn, Germany "What Gender is Motherhood? is a beginning rather than an ending, as it poses an important challenge to feminist history and theory that projects the world in hegemonic ways. Oy?wumi's contemporary examples of the chilling effect, on scholarship, of widespread acceptance of a natural male-dominated ethos among the Yoruba are disconcerting to say the least. Let's get this book out there and keep the discourse invigorated." - Cheryl Johnson-Odim, Provost Emerita, Professor, History, Dominican University, USA "The central question asked in this book - 'what is the gender of motherhood?' - will set all readers thinking anew about sexuality, reproduction, and natality. Oy?wumi's original thinking about these issues will provoke reconsiderations of many axioms of knowing about the history of genders." - Ade?le?ke? Ade?e??ko??, Humanities Distinguished Professor, The Ohio State University, USA

• Introduction: Exhuming Subjugated Knowledge and Liberating Marginalized Epistemes 1. Divining knowledge: The Man Question in Ifá 2. (Re)Casting the Yorùbá World: Ifá, Ìyá and the Signification of Difference 3. Matripotency: Ìyá in Philosophical Concempts and Socio-Policial Institutions 4. Writing and Gendering the Past: Akwé and the Endogenous Production of History 5. The Gender Dictaters: Making Gender Attributions in Religion and Culture6. Towards a Genealogy of Gender, Gendered Names, and Naming Practices 7. The Poetry of Weeping Brides: The Role and Impact of Marriage Residence in the Making of Praise Names8. Changing Names: The Roles of Christianity and Islam in Making Yorùbá Names Kosher for the Modern WorldConclusion: Motherhood in the Quest for Social Transformation Glossary