Oyěwùmí critiques Western gender based on biology

This chapter discusses variation, current media attention, the application of the term skeletal material, and considerations for medicolegal professionals as the relationship between sex and gender becomes more complex in modern society. ... It is important to clarify that sex is assigned at birth and refers to the biological factors entailing the anatomical, physiological, hormonal, and chromosomal factors.

Scholars have critiqued Trivers' formulation and offered subtler accounts (e.g., Queller, 1997; Wade and Shuster, 2002). However, these accounts still predict sex-role reversal in a variety of circumstances. Quotation: “So, the notion that gender differences in behavior stem from different genetically based strategies evolved by females and males to maximize their reproductive fitness, while intriguing, has not been proven. If a genetic basis should be established for some of the behaviors in question, to date scientists have no way of knowing whether their persistence is the result of random genetic events or (as sociobiologists argue) of adaptations for fitness maximization (Fausto-Sterling, 1992).” (p.

Oyewumi challenges the assumption ... to her analysis, precolonial Yoruba society was structured mainly through seniority, kinship, age, social position, and relationships rather than biological sex....

Her theory challenges the universality of Western gender categories, suggesting they distort local dynamics. For example, her emphasis on seniority reveals an alternative organizing principle that supersedes biological determinism.

Oyewumi traces the misapplication of Western, body-oriented concepts of gender through the history of gender discourses in Yoruba studies. Her analysis shows the paradoxical nature of two fundamental assumptions of feminist theory: that gender ...

Over the course of the chapter, author Oyewumi suggests that the social categorization of individuals as men and women was initiated and propagated solely by the West. The Western ideas of gender, on the other hand, are constructed on the basis that physical bodies are social bodies.

As Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí details ... and modern examinations and implications of the erasure, “the differences between males and female are to be located in social practices, not in biological facts.”2 And while “the prefixes obìn and okùn specify which variety ...

The backbone of the policy, an order titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” denounces “efforts to eradicate the biological reality of sex,” defining “female” as “a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell” and “male” as “a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.”

Oyěwùmí begins by naming biological determinism as central to the Western understanding of gender. This idea that biological differences serve as an organizing principle for societies is a Western philosophy that doesn't transfer to Yoruba societies, which do not use the body as the basis for ...