Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí

Who is Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí?

Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí is a feminist scholar and associate professor of sociology at Stony Brook University. She was born in Nigeria and attended the University of Ibadan and the University of California at Berkeley.

Her 1997 monograph, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses, won the American Sociological Association's 1998 Distinguished Book Award in the Gender and Sex category. In the book, she offers a postcolonial feminist critique of Western dominance in African studies, writing for instance that "despite voluminous scholarship to the contrary, gender was not an organizing principle in Yoruba society prior to colonization by the West."