And in the beginning there was no gender: interdisciplinary assertions about the invention of gender

Abstract

Through her defense of the concept of gender as introduced to Yorubaland following colonization, Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, in The Invention of Women: Constructing an African Meaning for Western Gender Discourses (2021), argues that gender is a socially constructed category. She further argues that it was not an original part of any culture, exemplified by the political organic structure of her people, which was based on seniority and the absence of gendered relationships or what the author calls bio-logic. By pointing out that the Yoruba social structure has its social institutions grounded in cosmoperception within the pre-colonial socio-historical context, and that seniority is a fundamental principle within this system, the author mobilizes interdisciplinary bases such as language and epistemology to affirm that worldview is the epistemological practice based on the opposition between people through the distinction between man and woman. The relevance of the arguments coined by Oyěwùmí for thinking about unstructured ethical links within a gendered division is the starting point of this text, which has the general objective of addressing the arguments developed by the author, with the specific objective of addressing the arguments that relate ethics to cosmoperception.