Short Abstract

African epistemologies of gender go beyond Western ideas of male dominance/female subordination. Investigating matrifocality - rooted in logics of consanguinity, seeing women as sisters, daughters and mothers, rather than mainly as wives - cuts across kinship systems of patriliny/matriliny.

Long Abstract

From the colonial period onwards, gender epistemologies applied to African societies have been rooted in Western conceptions of gender. These approaches often assume a heterosexual matrix structured by hierarchical dichotomies of male dominance and female subordination.

Within this framework, ‘gender equality’ is frequently understood as women's access to domains previously associated with men, such as wage labour, political authority, and economic resources. As a result, female domains of power, including motherhood, often become invisible or are viewed as obstacles to gender equality.

Colonial anthropologists acknowledged matrilineal kinship systems in Africa but generally regarded them as remnants of an earlier stage of social evolution destined for extinction. Western-style patriliny was widely assumed to be the form of kinship most compatible with modernity.

Nevertheless, alternative gender epistemologies continue to shape social life in many African societies, as demonstrated by the work of African gender scholars (such as Amadiume 1987, 1997; Oyěwùmí 1997, 2000; Nzegwu 2006). They argue that the key issue is not kinship systems themselves, whether matrilineal or patrilineal, but the underlying epistemologies through which gender is understood and organised. Distinguishing between a ‘logic of conjugality’, centred on women as wives, characteristic of dominant Western gender ideologies, and a ‘logic of consanguinity’, centred on women as sisters and daughters, they also emphasize women as mothers, a perspective that may be conceptualised as matrifocality.

This panel investigates matrifocality in both patrilineal and matrilineal societies and seeks to develop a conceptual language for understanding gender power structures beyond the heterosexual matrix.

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