Oyeronke Oyewumi

Oyeronke Oyewumi

Oyeronke Oyewumi is a Nigerian gender scholar and full professor of sociology at Stony Brook University. She acquired her bachelor's degree at the University of Ibadan in Ibadan, Nigeria and went on to pursue her graduate degree in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Quotes

• So I think what African women as a group represent is an example a symbol of Africa’s vulnerability sixty years after independence. There’s violence against women as an offshoot of the general violence in the society.
  • what sixty years after first conference has meant for an African women

• The continent is in deep trouble and women must be at the vanguard of all of kinds of struggles. And we must document the ways in which women contribute.
  • How we address the contributions of women

• We must emphasise the pathology called the modern man. When you think of modern, it is women they associate it with but when you think of what has happened as a result of colonisation of this continent it is that men have garnered all sorts of resources that were not even traditionally in the hands of men or women, these were collectively owned things.
  • How the structure has changed

• Collectively as women we need to do something different, we need to support each other. Support the young ones, even as we transition and deal with the whole question of what sort of families do we want because the families are the most basic unit.
  • Advice for women who are increasingly self identifying as feminists

• For women scholars, the university is not a particularly user-friendly place. Because of this, for us to succeed, it is crucial to have structures in place such as affordable child care. This is not an individual problem that ought to be addressed by one person at a time.
  • Her advice for ladies who see her as role model
• The Yoruba terms obinrin and okunrin do express a distinction. Reproduction is, obviously, the basis of human existence, and given its import, and the primacy of anafemale [anatomical female] body-type, it is not surprising that the Yoruba language describes the two types of anatomy. The terms okunrin and obinrin, however, merely indicate the physiological differences between the two anatomies as they have to do with procreation and intercourse. They refer, then, to the physically marked and physiologically apparent differences between the two anatomies. They do not refer to gender categories that connote social privileges and disadvantages. Also, they do not express sexual dimorphism because the distinction they indicate is specific to issues of reproduction. To appreciate this point, it would be necessary to go back to the fundamental difference between the conception of the Yoruba social world and that of Western societies.
  • [1]
• … I argued that the biological determinism in much of Western thought stems from the application of biological explanations in accounting for social hierarchies. This in turn has led to the construction of the social world with biological building blocks. Thus the social and the biological are thoroughly intertwined. This worldview is manifested in male-dominant gender discourses, discourses in which female biological differences are used to explain female sociopolitical disadvantages. The conception of biology as being ‘everywhere’ makes it possible to use it as an explanation in any realm, whether it is directly implicated or not. Whether the question is why women should not vote or why they breast-feed babies, the explanation is one and the same: they are biologically predisposed.
  • [2]
• The upshot of this cultural logic is that men and women are perceived as essentially different creatures. Each category is defined by its own essence. Diane Fuss describes the notion that things have a ‘true essence … as a belief in the real, the invariable and fixed properties which define the whatness of an entity.’ Consequently, whether women are in the labor room or in the boardroom, their essence is said to determine their behavior. In both arenas, then, women’s behavior is by definition different from that of men. Essentialism makes it impossible to confine biology to one realm. The social world, therefore, cannot truly be socially constructed
  • [3]
• Essentialism makes it impossible to confine biology to one realm. The social world, therefore, cannot truly be socially constructed
  • page 35 (Re)constituting the Cosmology and Sociocultural Institutions of Oyo-Yoruba.
• the human submission to the will of the divine”
  • page 38 (Re)constituting the Cosmology and Sociocultural Institutions of Oyo-Yoruba.
• The frame of reference of any society is a function of the logic of its culture as a whole
  • page 39 (Re)constituting the Cosmology and Sociocultural Institutions of Oyo-Yoruba.