Office Hours: By appointment
Phone Number:(631) 632-7747
Fax:(631) 632-8203 e-mail:oyeronke.oyewumi@sunysb.edu
In her award-winning book The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (University of Minnesota Press, 1997), Oyeronke Oyewumi makes the case that the narrative of gendered corporeality that dominates the Western interpretation of the social world is a cultural discourse and cannot be assumed uncritically for other cultures. She concludes that gender is not only socially constructed but is also historical. Furthermore, she points out that the current deployment of gender as a universal and timeless social category cannot be divorced from either the dominance of Euro/American cultures in the global system or the ideology of biological determinism which underpins Western systems of knowledge.
Born in Nigeria and educated at the University of Ibadan and the University of California at Berkeley, Oyewumi has been widely recognized for her work. The monograph Invention won the 1998 Distinguished Book Award of the American Sociological Association and was a finalist for the Herskovitts Prize of the African Studies Association in the same year.
She has garnered a number of research fellowships, including Rockefeller Fellowships, a Presidential fellowship, and a Ford Foundation grant. Oyewumi's most recent research support was a Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship on Human Security (2003/2004), managed by National Council for Research on Women. (NCRW).
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Sociology of Gender, Sociology of Knowledge, Sociology of Culture, Comparative Historical-Sociology, Feminist Theory, Transnational Feminisms, Social Theory, Social Inequalities in Local, Regional, and Global systems, African Studies, (Post )Colonial Studies and Modernities
PUBLICATIONS
BOOKS
African Gender Studies: Conceptual Issues/ Theoretical Questions (edited). Palgrave /Macmillan: New York (forthcoming 2005)
African Women and Feminism: Reflecting on the Politics of Sisterhood, edited. Africa World Press, Trenton: New Jersey (2003).
The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis: Minnesota (1997).
SELECTED JOURNAL ARTICLES
“Conceptualizing Gender: The Eurocentric Foundations of Feminist
Concepts and the Challenge of African Epistemologies in JENda: A Journal of Culture and African Women’s Studies, vol. 2, no. 1 (Fall 2002). An Online journal (www.jendajournal.com)
“Family bonds/Conceptual Binds: African Notes on Feminist Epistemologies” Feminism’s at a Millennium" in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society vol. 25 (1), no. 4 (1) Summer 2000
"DeConfounding Gender: Feminist Theorizing and Western Culture" in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society vol. 23 (1), no. 4 (1) Summer 1998.
"Making History, Creating Gender: Some Methodological and Interpretive Questions in the Writing of Yoruba Oral Traditions" in History in Africa Vol. 25 (1998)
SELECTED BOOK CHAPTERS
“Colonizing Bodies and Minds: Gender and Colonialism” in Postconialisms: An Anthology of Cultural Theory and Criticism, Gaurav Desai and Supriya Nair (eds). Rutgers University Press (forthcoming 2005).
“Translation of Cultures: Engendering Yoruba Language, Orature and World Sense” in Women, Gender and Religion: A Reader, Elizabeth Castelli (ed). Palgrave,: New York (2001)
“Multiculturalism or Multibodism: On the Impossible Intersections of Race and Gender in White Feminist and Black Nationalist Discourses” in Black Studies:
Current Issues, Enduring Questions, Claudine Michel and Jacqueline Bobo (eds). Kendal Hunt Publishing Company (2001).
De-confounding Gender: Feminist Theorizing and Western Culture in Provoking Feminisms, Carolyn Allen and Judith A. Howard (eds.) University of Chicago Press (2000).
“Inventing Gender: Questioning Gender in Pre-colonial Yorubaland," in Problems in African History, Robert O. Collins (ed.). 1993, Marcus Wiener Publishing, Inc.: New York.
“Alice in Motherland: Reading Alice Walker on Africa and Screening the Color Black,” in African Women and Feminism: Reflecting on the Politics of Sisterhood, Africa World Press, Trenton: New Jersey (2004)
RECENT GRADUATE COURSES TAUGHT
SOC 595 Gender and Globalization (Spring 2005)
SOC 591 Feminist Theory
