The Reinvention of Women: Or, What Is Gender Anyway?

Page numbers for quotes from The Invention of Women are based on the 1997 University of Michigan Press edition.

You know the joke about "in [enlightened non-Western culture], they don't have trans women; instead..."? What if you could do that for all women?

Oyèrónké Oyěwùmí's 1997 book, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses, is a very ambitious project. In one sense, it is a basic demonstration of a common assumption of modern feminist theory: if gender is socially constructed, and its form varies from culture to culture, then there surely must be some culture somewhere at some point in time at which gender does not exist and women's subordination is universal. In her writings about her own Òyó-Yorùbá culture, Oyěwùmí hopes to locate such a culture. In another sense, it is an attempt to build a new, postcolonial feminism, that finds its truths not in the body and world-views but rather opens itself to indigenous world-senses and non-Western hemeneutics. But most importantly, it is a critique of Western feminism, a rejection of where some theorists, according to Oyěwùmí, have gone too far.

As Oyěwùmí rightfully points out -- referencing anthropologist Shelly Errington -- sex and gender in the Western tradition are really two sides of the same coin, as while sex is a property assigned to the physical body and gender to the social body, "in Western societies, physical bodies are always social bodies" (xii). She then claims, and indeed writes a book to attempt to demonstrate, that in precolonial Yorùbá society, this was not the case: while an anatomical distinction was made between "anamales" and "anafemales" -- which will be described in detail below -- this distinction was not the basis for human social organization. As Yorùbá society generally was less interested in locating social truths in the body, "anatomical sex," like height, weight, skin color, and hair length, simply was not used to rank people any further than was absolutely, directly relevant to reproduction.

I am not Òyó, nor Yorùbá: I am a white American, so I don't presume to correct Oyěwùmí on her own culture, or anything of that sort. There are plenty of other ethnographies and descriptions of the Yorùbá -- precolonial or otherwise -- but by this point I think we all recognize the dangers of basing an argument entirely on Western descriptions of a precolonial society. Therefore, I am not interested in fact-checking or going through Oyěwùmí's arguments line by line. For my purposes here, I will simply accept what she has described, and discuss what it means: how she represents it, how her biases affect it, and the seams in her picture of a genderless society.

The Issue of Kneeling

What does a genderless society entail, exactly? According to Oyěwùmí, "[i]n the Yoruba cultural logic, biology is limited to issues like pregnancy that directly concern reproduction" (page 36). So what does this look like? Here is her very first example:

The following is taken from pages 36-38. Emphasis is added.

Thus the distinction between obìnrin [anafemales] and okùnrin [anamales] is actually one of reproduction, not one of sexuality or gender, the emphasis being on the fact that the two cateogries play distinct roles in the reproductive process. This distinction does not extend beyond issues directly related to reproduction and does not overflow to other realms such as the farm or the oba's (ruler's) palace. I have called this a distinction without social difference. The distinction in Yorùbáland between the way in which anatomic females pay obeisance to their superiors and the way in which anatomic males do is useful in elaborating the distinct but ungendered consideration of pregnancy. Any casual observer would notice that in the contemporary period, obìnrin usually kúnlè (kneel down, with both hands touching the floor) when greeting a superior. Okùnrin are seen to dòbálè (prostrate themselves, lying flat on the ground and then raising their torsos with arms holding them up in a push-up pose). Some might assume that these two distinct forms of greeting are constructions of gender, yielding social valuations and difference. However, a simple association of anatomic females with kneeling and anatomic males with prostrating will not elucidate the cultural meanings of these acts...

When anatomic females pay obeisance to the oba (ruler), they have to yíìká -- in which case they lie on their sides, propping themselves up with one elbow at a time. In practice, íyíìká looks like an abbreviation of ìdòbálè. It appears that in the past, ìyíìká was the primary mode of female obeisance to superiors. But over time, kneeling has become dominant. Thus, it would seem that the preferred position for paying obeisance for all persons, whether obìnrin or okùnrin, is for the "greeter" to prostrate to the "greetee." I would assert that the contingencies of pregnancy led to the ìyíìká modification for anatomic obìnrin. It is obvious that even pregnant obìnrin can yíìká, but they cannot prostrate easily... Finally, ìkúnlè was the preferred position of giving birth in traditional society and is central to the construction of motherhood. This position, ìkúnlè abiyamo (the kneeling of a mother in labor), is elaborated as the ultimate moment of human submission to the will of the divine. Perhaps the fact that the mode and manner of acknowledging a superior does not depend on whether s/he is an anamale or anafemale indicates the nongendered cultural framework. A superior is a superior regardless of body-type.

Elided from this excerpt is Oyěwùmí's discussion of Yorùbá history and cosmology, in which she explains that okùnrin also kneel frequently: to address superiors in conversation, after prostrating themselves, to show submission to a certain anafemale religious palace official, the ìyámode, and "kneeling to choose" (àkúnlèyán) before the Creator.

(Let's just ignore that gendered profession there; that's what Oyěwùmí does, and pointing it out would be a bit of a cheap shot without more detailed cultural context.)

In any case, Oyěwùmí has made a very strange argument. Anafemales typically kneel before superiors while anamales typically prostrate themselves. This is connected to modes of obeisance before rulers and derives from contingencies of pregnancy. However, this distinction ultimately doesn't matter, because it does not reflect a cultural valuation (well, beyond the valuation that associates anafemales with pregnancy) and because it does not reflect the anasex of the superior in question (unlike in the West, where... it also generally doesn't).

This bears repeating: this is Oyěwùmí's first example in her book demonstrating that Old Òyó lacked gender, and it is a clear case of biological determinism. It is not as though only pregnant anafemales are exempt from prostration. A collection of people, grouped only by roughly similar anatomy, are assigned a social gesture to perform that represents their destiny of procreation. If that isn't gender, I don't know what is.

Oyěwùmí's (Bizarre) Conception of the Nature of Gender

So, why does Oyěwùmí not see things this way? I believe it is because of a fixation on hierarchy and a search for overt male supremacy.

To be clear before I continue, androcentrism is a key feature of the patriarchy, and if it is indeed completely absent, then the heterosexual regime and its gender/sex/sexuality schema are still bad, but for a slightly smaller number of reasons. However, it is very, very hard to truly separate people into rigid, essentialized catagories and have those categories ever be truly equal (as the United States Supreme Court once famously ruled!). However, Oyěwùmí's dedication to finding an explicit declaration of male supremacy in Yorùbá society seems mostly to be an analytical hindrance, and this is what I see problems with.

Oyěwùmí, in descriptions of Western systems of gender, constantly calls attention to the institution of hierarchy: gender is used as a primary basis for social hierarchy, women do not have power, and even sex has hierarchal connotations. By contrast, precolonial Yorùbá categories of obìnrin and okùnrin "did not connote social ranking." So therefore, Old Òyó was gender-free.

So reasons Oyěwùmí.

This is repeated throughout her book; it is a core foundation of her analysis. But this is not a good way of looking at gender. After all, one of her primary rationales for the importance of her work is the rejection of using gender categories a priori when looking for dynamics of inequality in African societies. But if we define gender as hierarchy, this becomes a completely circular argument, and in the process, she sneaks in the motte that (for example) Nigerians can't be classified by gender at all.

Instead, gender should be seen as the categories themselves: as Oyěwùmí herself points out (and she is in agreement with social constructionists all across the modern landscape here) what we call sex is really a culturally-reified epiphenomenon, a general vibe of a wide spectrum of human diversity, and gender and sexuality are built up in parallel with it as structures of power that constrain and define human experiences. It is these categories, these boxes that are the opponent -- and from inside a box, it is very difficult to be sure that they are all stacked at the same level.

But Oyěwùmí is not completely committed to the rejection of sex and the embrace of absolute social constructionism. She lets hereself have a little bioessentialism, as a treat, and this is the other key to understanding her perspective of gender:

The following is taken from pages 35-36. Emphasis is added.

The reaction of feminists to conservative, male-dominant discourse was to reject it totally as a vehicle of oppression. Feminists then went on to show that the existence of two sexes, which has been regarded as an "irreducible fact," is actually a social construction. In the process of challenging the essentialism of male-dominant discourses, many feminist writings treated all distinctions between men and women as fabrications. Thus the fact that women bear children is not given the attention it deserves; instead it is located on the continuum of what are called "gender differences." It is given the same degree of importance as the fact that women have less body hair than men. Thus despite the relentless feminist assault on mainstream essentialism, feminist constructionism contains within it the very problem it seeks to address. Like the traditional male-dominant discourses, feminism does not entertain the possibility that certain differences are more fundamental than others. That women bear children calls for a distinctive assessment. If Western conservative disources collapse the social world into biology by seeing all observed differences between men and women as natural, feminism maintains this lack of a boundary between the social and the biological by homogenizing men and women and insisting that all observed differences are social fabrications. This is the problem.

In other words: women and men are fundamentally different. Women can bear children, and men can't, and this is a difference of categorically greater importance than everything else (gender) built on top of it. This is a rejection of the constructionist view of sex: Oyěwùmí believes -- without feeling any need for justification -- that women really are destined for motherhood (note the language: "women bear children," no "can" to be found), something that she will later say is a core part of the Yorùbá conception of gender (see below).

All those people who can bear children (and those sufficiently anatomically similar to them) are therefore sorted together into a category: Oyěwùmí's anafemales. They then are assigned certain roles that tie them to the expectation of pregnancy, like kneeling instead of prostrating themselves. They are then, as I'll discuss in the next section, brought into male-controlled homes and assigned reproductive and domestic labor, justified by this connection to pregnancy.

Sound familiar? Oyěwùmí has reinvented the woman from first principles. Now let's talk about hierarchy.

Seniority and Gender: An Exercise in Intersectional Analysis

Instead of gender, Oyěwùmí claims that the omnipresent hierarchy in Old Òyó was the ìdílé (lineage) system. To summarize Oyěwùmí's description: all Yorùbá are born into a lineage. The lineage (precolonially) has its locus in an associated compound, a sort of large multigenerational household. The lineage grants power to people based on their seniority within the lineage, which is, generally, the amount of time for which a person has been part of the lineage. So for people who live their whole lives in one compound, this is simply their age, while those who move from one compound to another effectively start over from zero. In all social interactions between people, this seniority is crucial: it dictates forms of address, speaking etiquette, and so on.

Yorùbá society is patrilocal and exogenous, meaning that women anafemales usually marry and then live in the compound of an anamale of another lineage. These anafemales then become aya (wives) within their husband's lineage. Since their seniority within their lineage-of-marriage starts at zero at the time of marriage, they are ranked in order of marriage and categorically beneath the members by birth, the oko, who were, generally, anamales. Note, however, that this low status within their lineage-by-marriage does not take away from their status within their original lineage: as Oyěwùmí hastens to point out, when navigating their lineage-of-birth, and especially in the case of returning to it late in life, anafemeles can in principle have just as much seniority as any anamale, and attain all kinds of leadership positions semi-regularly.

So, what's the problem with all of this? It should be obvious, right? Women anafemales are seen as fundamentally reproductive assets to be traded among lineages according to rules which systematically strip power from them and benefit those with the luxury of being permitted to remain within their lineages-of-birth.

That's not to say that the ìdílé system is all an epiphenomenon, or that it doesn't matter, or that it's patriarchy in disguise. On the contrary, an account of the social structures and logics of the Yorùbá is of immense interest to any serious feminist project. However, what Oyěwùmí misses out on completely is the opportunity to analyze how the structures of seniority and gender interact. One particularly lucid review of The Invention of Women by Nigerian feminist Bibi Bakare-Yusuf makes this exact point:

The following is taken from pages 132-133 of Bakare-Yusuf's review . Due to format restrictions, the source does not contain diacritics. Emphasis is added.

Oyewumi's failure to take seriously the interwoven nature of power relations means that she cannot account for the complexity and nuances of seniority as it actually operates in the Yoruba context. For example, she cannot discuss the fact that the ideology of seniority is very often used as a way of masking other forms of power relationship. It is in this sense that her theorization of seniority may be seen as politically dangerous. The vocabulary of seniority often beccomes the very form in which sexual abuse and familial (especially for the aya/wife in a lineage) and symbolic violence are couched. When we take the example of a virulent abuse of power in the teacher-student relationship in the Nigerian education system, where victims are reluctant to challenge the abuser in the name of 'disrespecting their senior', Oyewumi's unwillingness to interrogate the workings of power becomes extremely alarming. Had she nuanced her analysis of seniority, she would uncover the myriad ways seniority often becomes the very institution for the exercise and legitimisation of pernicious forms of abuse. However, because Oyewumi wants seniority to stand alone as the dominant mode of power in the Yoruba social system, she simply cannot recognize the complexity of social relations. She therefore must avoid all work done by feminists and social theorists that stresses the complex interdependency of one form of power upon another, and the ways in which one explicitly manifested (and respected!) mode of power often conceals other more insidious ones. Her occlusive account of power resembles early first-wave forms of feminism that stressed the transcendent nature of patriarchal oppression (and bracketed out, at least initially, many other forms of power domination that women were and are subjected to), the difference being that she has replaced patriarchy with seniority.

Bakare-Yusuf makes many other very interesting arguments regarding The Invention of Women -- many of which are responses to arguments of Oyěwùmí's that I have decided not to focus on here at all -- and I would recommend reading her review in its entirety to anybody interested in this issue.

However, what is clear is that Oyěwùmí's bold stance that the woman simply does not exist in the Yorùbá cultural context is myopic. Instead of replacing gender with seniority, finding another hierarchy and immediately embracing it as the unique, all-consuming logic of the culture of interest, we can accept that both may be present, and analyze how they interact. After all, it's not as if we in the US have only one social logic of hierarchy in gender!

Conclusion: Seriously, What Is Gender?

In Oyěwùmí's account, reproduction is everything in Yorùbá culture. The very notion of adulthood and maturity is built on the expectation that "persons of a certain age should have had children" (41).

The following is taken from page 33. Unfortunately, it is only part of a paragraph, because the paragraph is really, really long. Emphasis is added.

The terms ako and abo are used for male and female animals, respectively. They are also applied to some fruit trees like the papaya and to the abstract idea of a period in time, that is, the year. Thus ako ìbépe is a papaya tree that does not bear fruit; and odún t'ó ya 'bo is a fruitful (good) year. "May your year be fruitful [yabo]" is a standard prayer and greeting at the beginning of the Yorùbá new year, which is signaled by the arrival of the "new yam." Because ako and abo are not oppositionally constructed, the opposite of a good (abo) year is not an ako year. A fruitless pawpaw tree is an ako tree. A fruitful pawpaw tree is not described as abo; rather, a fruitful tree is considered the norm; therefore, it is just referred to as a pawpaw tree. I cite these examples to show that these Yorùbá concepts, just like okùnrin and obìnrin, which are used for humans, are not equivalent to the English "male" and "female," respectively.

So ako really means "non-fruit-bearing" and abo "fruitful". But as we have seen, in Oyěwùmí's account of Yorùbá thought as a whole, the (ana)female and the fruit-bearing are really one and the same. All social consideration of those sexed female is based on the presumption of frequent pregnancy, as seen in the discussion of kneeling. Social structures are built on the treatment of women as reproductive assets, as is an unavoidable implication of the ìdílé system.

Is this what a genderless society looks like?

I am done writing "anafemale." These are female-sexed women. This reproductive logic is a core vector of the oppression of those sexed female at birth in the West, and if Oyěwùmí would put down her obsessive focus on explicit notions of inequality as a necessary feature of a gender system, she would recognize this immediately.

The Invention of Women is a remarkable balancing act. It is a gender-critical book, in the sense that it rejects the concept of gender in favor of a singularly biologically deterministic conception of sex. At the same time, though, Oyěwùmí is critical of what she sees as a uniquely Western bio-logic: Errington's Sex as the gender system of West. In the later chapters of her book, Oyěwùmí goes on to give an account of the epistemic erasure brought about by colonialism on the indigenous Yorùbá world-sense. But at no point does she resolve this basic tension that underlies her entire project: that between her own complete, uncritical acceptance of the bioessentialist logic of Sex, and her resolute rejection of it as a Western logic.

Hopefully this overview is nice for when The Invention of Women inevitably resurfaces as ammunition for the idea of patriarchy as a uniquely Western invention. I really do encourage you to read the book; it's not too rough, and there are lots of points I considered making here but ultimately cut, but that would probably stick out to you upon reading Oyěwùmí for yourself.

bye~ o/