Abstract:  In 2022, Judith Butler, the renowned Feminist Theorist and Philosopher, gave a keynote address at an International Conference Doing Global Gender. The title of her lecture was: Who is Afraid of Gender? Riffing off that important question, my lecture will ask: Who is Not Afraid of Gender? I will respond to critiques of the gender discourse, and Butler’s own Bundling of anti-colonial critique with garden variety misogynists. Identity matters will come to the fore as we interrogate the concept of gender itself, and its meanings  and impact depending on location.

Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí is a Professor of Sociology at Stony Brook University, New York, United States of America. In 2021, Professor Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí won the Distinguished Africanist Prize  of the African Studies Association; an award given to a member of the association who has made extraordinary contributions to the field. In her award-winning book The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (University of Minnesota Press, 1997), Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí 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. Oyěwùmí has published extensively and her most recent publication is Naming Africans: On the Epistemic Value of Names (Gender and Cultural Studies in Africa and the Diaspora). Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí and Hewan Girma (eds.), (2023).

The lecture was held as part of the lecture series ‘Kulturelle Pluralität in Feminismus sichtbar machen’ (‘Making Cultural Plurality Visible in Feminisms’), organised by Tomi Adeaga.