African Gender Studies: A Reader by Oyèrónké Oyěwùmí
Overview & Epistemological Paradigm Edited by decolonial feminist scholar Oyèrónké Oyěwùmí and published in 2005 by Palgrave Macmillan, African Gender Studies: A Reader is a landmark anthology in decolonial feminist epistemology. The collection is dedicated to Nobel Peace Laureate Wangari Maathai, who taught that “in order to make change, we must take charge”. Oyěwùmí’s foundational thesis asserts that the conceptual categories of gender and sexuality used in global academia are fundamentally Western cultural exports. In her preface, she demonstrates that Western gender categories are an outgrowth of “biological foundationalism”, an ideology where physical bodies provide the inevitable rationale for organizing the social world, a cultural logic she terms “bio-logic”. The book’s core objective is to challenge this uncritical imposition of Western, biologically deterministic concepts on African realities. It argues that Africa must be studied on its own terms and that endogenous African knowledge must be a foundational factor in global social theory. The text comprises twenty-two chapters divided into seven sections, with each section preceded by an analytical introduction. Section I: Transcending the Body of Knowledge Chapter 1: Visualizing the Body: Western Theories and African Subjects (Oyèrónké Oyěwùmí) Oyěwùmí traces the genealogy of somatocentrism (the visual prioritization of physical bodies) …