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 Oyeronke Oyewumi

Family Bonds/Conceptual Binds:

African Notes on Feminist Epistemologies

amily talk,if not familyvalues,is everywhere.The rhetoricof family

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, gen-
der, and nation and their interconnections in the United States. In her
perceptive critical review of Anthony Appiah'sInMy Father'sHouse (1992)
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 Euro-
American nuclear family that is privileged, at the expense of other family
forms. In this article my objective is twofold: to focus on feminism - spe-
cifically white feminism- as a particulardiscursive site from which to in-
vestigate 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 pri-
macy 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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1094 I Oyewumi

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 scholarship-
woman -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, Eliz-
abeth Spelman (1988) tries to account for the discrepancy between Si-
mone 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 method-
ology 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 conse-
quence 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. Beau-
voir and others theorize as if the world is a white middle-classnuclear fam-
ily. 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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 S IG N S Summer 2000 I 1095

is the only way they appear within the institution. The extent of the femi-
nist 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. Un-
consciously, 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 schol-
arship 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 femi-
nism 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 dis-
pensed 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 schol-
arship yields a flawed account even of gender, the category it claims as its
ground zero. Rather than construing the white nuclear family as a cultur-
ally specific form whose racial and class characteristicsare essential to un-
derstanding the gender configuration it houses, much feminist scholarship
continues to reproduce its distortions across space and time.

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1096 I Oyewumi

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 an-
thropologists 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 lin-
guistically, and husbandas a synonym for man, as demonstrated in the fol-
lowing 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 iden-
tifying themselves. (Although with the colonial imposition of the practice
of married women being labeled with the name of their conjugal part-
ners, 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 trans-
lated as wife is not gender specific but symbolizes relations of subordina-
tion 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
cherished self-identity of manyrAfrican women.
Furthermore,the predominant principle organizing Africanfamilies has
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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 S IG N S Summer 2000 I 1097

tively, then, wives are not considered members of the social arrangement
called "the family."The African family does not exist as a spatially bounded
entity coterminous with the household, since wives as a group belong to
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, mother-
hood 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 theo-
rists such as Chodorow (1978). In her account, there is no independent
meaning of motherhood outside the mother's primaryand sexualized iden-
tity 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 situa-
tion 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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1098 I Oyewumi

scholarship is that of"nuclear wife," her disappearancemay not be regret-

table. On the contrary, her demise may clear the way for "women" to be
all thev wrantto be.
BlackStudiesDepartment
Universityof California,Santa Barbara

References
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Collins, PatriciaHill. 1998. "It'sAll in the Family: Intersections of Gender, Race,
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Gilro!v Paul. 1992. "It's a Family Affair."In Black PopularCulture, a project by
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