Family Bonds/Conceptual Binds: African Notes on Feminist Epistemologies Author(s): Oyeronke Oyewumi Source: Signs, Vol. 25, No.

4, Feminisms at a Millennium (Summer, 2000), pp. 1093-1098 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3175493 . Accessed: 06/09/2011 20:02
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Oyewumi

Family Bonds/Conceptual Binds: African Notes on Feminist Epistemologies The rhetoricof family amily talk,if not familyvalues,is everywhere. values has been useful in legitimizing oppression as well as in mounting oppositional movements against it. Lately, a number of scholars have focused renewed attention on the uses of family as trope and as ideology in the constitution of political projects, in academic discourses, and in policy formulation, even in arenas that appear to be only distantly related to this social institution. British sociologist Paul Gilroy (1992) draws attention to the ubiquity of family rhetoric and the misogynist and exclusivist ways it is deployed in "Americocentric"black nationalist discourses. In a recent paper titled "It'sAll in the Family,"PatriciaHill Collins (1998) documents the widespread use of the metaphor of the family and the endless readings this metaphor unleashes when employed to analyze discourses of race, gender, and nation and their interconnections in the United States. In her House (1992) perceptive critical review of Anthony Appiah'sInMy Father's African philosopher Nkiru Nzegwu (1996) invites us to read Appiah's grand philosophy of culture as a manifesto on the family and to focus on the way he privileges the European nuclear family even as he purports to be writing about Africa. Undoubtedly, family discourse is everywhere. But the question that is often left unasked and that is implicit in Nzegwu's critique of Appiah is, which family, whose family, are we talking about? Clearly, it is the EuroAmerican nuclear family that is privileged, at the expense of other family forms. In this article my objective is twofold: to focus on feminism - specifically white feminism- as a particulardiscursive site from which to investigate the scope and depth of family rhetoric and to articulate African family arrangements in order to show the limit of universals. I suggest that feminist discourse is rooted in the nuclear family and that this social organization constitutes the very grounds of feminist theory and a vehicle for the articulation of values such as the necessity of coupling and the primacy of conjugality in family life. This is in spite of the widespread belief among feminists that one important goal is to subvert this male dominant
[Signs:Journal of Womenin Cultureand Society2000, vol. 25, no. 4] ? 2000 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2000/2504-0017$02.00

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institution of the family and the belief among feminism's detractors that feminism is antifamily.Despite the fact that feminism has gone global, it is through the Euro-American nuclear family that many feminists think. Thus, I argue that the controlling concept of feminist scholarshipwoman -is actually a familial one because it functions as a synonym for wife. The woman at the heart of feminism is a wife. Once this subject's antecedents are known and her "residence"is exposed, the limitations of concepts such as gender and other terms in feminist scholarship become more intelligible.

Home gals In her thoughtful analysisof the "problem of exclusion" in feminism, Elizabeth Spelman (1988) tries to account for the discrepancy between Simone de Beauvoir's (1952) rich theoretical insights on the multiple forms of oppression and her practice of focusing on only white middle-class women and considering their experience universal. Spelman is quick to note that it is not enough to say that Beauvoir was merely exhibiting her own race and class privilege by using her experience to represent that of others. Rather, Spelman asks what might be in the language or methodology or theory employed by Beauvoir that allows her to disguise from herself the assertion of privilege she so keenly saw in other women of her own position (1988, 58). I agree. Spelman explains the tension as a consequence of feminism's political nature: Beauvoir may have ignored the differences among women because it was clear to her that a strong case for political change must be a universal one. This may well be true, but as an explanation for a theoretical lapse that continues to plague many feminist accounts even today, Spelman's interpretation is inadequate. It seems to me that the problem with Beauvoir's account, a problem that continues to plague feminist theory, is fully explained by recognizing that the woman in feminist theory is a wife -the subordinated half of a couple in a nuclear family-who is housed in a single-family home. Beauvoir and others theorize as if the world is a white middle-classnuclear family. It is not surprising that the woman who emerges from Euro-American feminism is defined as a wife. According to Miriam Johnson, "in the West the marriage relationship tends to be the core adult solidary relationship and as such makes the very definition of woman become that of wife" (1988, 40). Because race and class are not usually variablewithin a family, white feminism that is trapped in the nuclear family does not acknowledge race or class difference. Methodologically, the unit of analysisis the nuclear family, which construes women as (white middle-class) wives because this

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is the only way they appear within the institution. The extent of the feminist universe that takes her as its subject, then, is the home. The concept of "white solipsism"- the tendency to "think, imagine, and speak as if whiteness describes the world" (Spelman 1988, 116) -has been offered as one explanation for the inattention to race in much feminist research. However, the problem is also a perceptual one structured by the inability to see even the home as a bounded and limited place, one among many points from which to appreciate the world. The tendency of white feminists such as Beauvoir and Nancy Chodorow (1978), who universalize from their own experience, is not so much tunnel vision as it is truncated vision - a result of the fact that the world is not availablefor perusal from within one's home, CNN notwithstanding. The woman at the heart of feminist theory, the wife, never gets out of the conceptual household. Unconsciously, like a snail, she carriesthe house, along with the notion of one privileged white couple and their children, with her. The problem is not that feminism starts with the family but, rather,that it never leaves it and never leaves home. From the logic of the nuclear family follows a binary opposition that maps as private the world of the wife in contrast to the very public world of the man (not "husband,"for the man is not defined by the family). Her presence defines the private; his absence is key to its definition as private. This observation explains another vexing problem in feminist scholarship, namely, the problem of male absence as typified by the convention in scholarship of using the term gender as a synonym for women.The absence of men from the spatial structure of the nuclear family is reproduced when men's presence is not registered in feminist discourse. The woman in feminism is specifically a wife, for if she were a generic woman, she would have to be constructed in relation to some other thing every time she is mentioned. As wife, however, her position and location are always already configured and understood; thus the would-be other gender can be dispensed with. The spatial arrangement of the nuclear family as private space in which only the wife is in her element does not allow for gender as a duality. No wonder womenandgender are virtually synonymous terms in many studies that purport to be about gender relations (which should in fact include both men and women). The nuclear-familyorigin of much feminist scholarship yields a flawed account even of gender, the category it claims as its ground zero. Rather than construing the white nuclear family as a culturally specific form whose racial and class characteristicsare essential to understanding the gender configuration it houses, much feminist scholarship continues to reproduce its distortions across space and time.

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Going global

The idea that the woman in feminism is a wife is not a new one. A number of researcherson gender in African societies have shown that feminist anthropologists of Africa tend to focus on social categories that they perceive to be defined by men, equivalent to the category of wife in the West. What is new is the identification of its point of origin within the West. In my book The Invention of Women:Making an African Senseof WesternGender Discourses (Ovcwumi 1997), I argue that in much feminist anthropological research, woman is used as a synonym for wife both conceptually and linguistically, and husbandas a synonym for man, as demonstrated in the following comment on Yorubawomen: "In certain African societies like the Yoruba, women may control a good part of the food supply, accumulate cash, and trade in distant and important markets; vet when approaching their husbands, wives must feign ignorance and obedience kneeling to serve the men as they sit" (Rosaldo 1974, 19-20). The problem is that oko, the Yorubacategory rendered as husbandin English, is not gender specific; it encompasses both males and females. Females too assume the role of husband; thus some of the "husbands"alluded to in the quote are women. There is little understanding that African social arrangements,familial and otherwise, derive from a different conceptual base. In much of Africa, "wife"is a four-letter word. While not a vulgar term in itself, ivawo (as one example) is quintessentially a subordinate category. Consequentl, mlanywomen traditionally have not privileged it in identifying themselves. (Although with the colonial imposition of the practice of married women being labeled with the name of their conjugal partners, European-style, this Africanvalue is under serious assault.)Wifehood tends to function more as a role than as a deeply felt identity, and it is usually deployed strategically.Across Africa, the category generally translated as wife is not gender specific but symbolizes relations of subordination between any two people. Consequently, in the African conceptual scheme it is difficult to conflate woman and wife and articulate it as one categor.. Although wifehood in many African societies has traditionally been regarded as functional and necessary it is at the same time seen as a transitional phase on the road to motherhood. Mother is the preferredand African women. cherished self-identity of manyr the predominant principle organizing Africanfamilies has Furthermore, been consanguinal and not conjugal: blood relationships constitute the core of familv.Many brothers and sisters live together, along with the wives of brothers and the children of all. In this kind of familr system, kinship is forged primarilyon the basis of birth relations, not marriageties. Norma-

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tively, then, wives are not considered members of the social arrangement The African family does not exist as a spatially bounded called "the family." coterminous with the household, since wives as a group belong to entity their birth families, even though they do not necessarily reside with their kin groups. There are other African family arrangements that complicate the issue further.For example, in the Akan family system in Ghana, families are traditionally matrilineal and matrilocal. In all African family arrangements, the most important ties within the family flow from the mother, whatever the norms of marriage residence. These ties link the mother to the child and connect all children of the same mother in bonds that are conceived as natural and unbreakable. It is not surprising, then, that the most important and enduring identity and name that African women claim for themselves is "mother."However, motherhood is not constructed in tandem with fatherhood. The idea that mothers are powerful is very much a defining characteristicof the institution and its place in society. African constructions of motherhood are different in significant ways from the "nuclearmotherhood" that has been articulatedby feminist theorists such as Chodorow (1978). In her account, there is no independent meaning of motherhood outside the mother's primaryand sexualized identity as the patriarch'swife. The mother's sexual ties to her husband are privileged over her relationship to her child; she is not so much a woman as she is a wife. It is only within the context of an isolated nuclear family that Chodorow's arguments about the infant'sgendered identification with the mother make sense. This is the effect of an assumption that the mother appears as a wife (gendered relational being), even to the child. In a situation such as the African household arrangement, where there are many mothers, many fathers, many "husbands"of both sexes, it is impossible to present the relationship between mother and child in those terms. The five-centuries-long process of globalization has blurred all sorts of boundaries across the globe. At the turn of the millennium, therefore, one of the most important issues facing feminism is the fragmentation of the category woman - the subject of feminism. This is usually understood as a challenge posed by postmodernist accounts of social (un)reality. But, I am quick to point out that the historic challenges to a monolithic racial and cultural understanding of feminism's subject predate postmodernism. Black American feminists are notable pioneers in this regard. The feminist anxiety over the disappearanceof woman is unnecessary; she never existed as a unified subject in the first place. Moreover, if, as I have argued here, the taken-for-granted identity of the woman invoked in much feminist

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scholarship is that of"nuclear wife," her disappearancemay not be regrettable. On the contrary, her demise may clear the way for "women" to be all thev wrantto be. BlackStudiesDepartment University California,Santa Barbara of
References of Appiah, Kwame AnthonT. 1992. In My Father'sHouse:Africa in the Philosophy Culture. New York: Oxford University Press. Sex. New York:Vintage. Beauvoir, Simone de. 1952. TheSecond and Chodorow, Nancy. 1978. TheReproduction ofMothering:Psychoanalysis the SociGender.Berkeley: University of California Press. ologyof Collins, PatriciaHill. 1998. "It'sAll in the Family: Intersections of Gender, Race, and Nation." Hypatia 13(3):62-82. Gilro!v Paul. 1992. "It's a Family Affair."In Black PopularCulture, a project by Michele Wallace, ed. Gina Dent, 303-16. Seattle: Bar. WeakWives:TheSearchfor Johnson, Miriam. 1988. StrongMothers, GenderEquality. Berkelev: University of California Press. Nzegwu, Nkiru. 1996. "Questions of Identity and Inheritance:A Critical Review of Kwame Anthony Appiah'sIn My Father'sHouse." Hypatia 11(1): 175-201. Ovewumi, Overonke. 1997. The Invention of Women:Making an African Senseof Western GenderDiscourses. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rosaldo, Michelle Zimbalist, and Louise Lamphere, eds. 1974. Woman,Culture, and Society. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press. Spelman, Elizabeth. 1988. Inessential Woman: Problemsof Exclusionin Feminist Thought.Boston: Beacon.