Re: Sept. 18th discussion

I had a similar reaction to Sujean to Oyewumi's "Family Bonds/Conceptual Binds: African Notes on Feminist Epistemologies." Oyewumi criticizes Western feminists for "white soipsism" and the universalization of the western white middle class female experience, but she merely replaces one generalization with another. She begins with some sense of specificity in her discussion of the language and primary maternal identity of Yoruba women, but then extends these characteristics of identity to "many African women" and then just "african women" (1096, 1097). When she makes sweeping statements about "all African family arrangements" or "The African family," she falls into the same trap of generalization that Mohanty talked about in last week's reading, creating a "unified subject" even as she claims one does not exist.