This he/she thing, it holds no meaning where we come from

March 1, 2020 3:52 PM

Fuck your gender norms: how Western colonisation brought unwanted binaries to Igbo culture “The concept of women as market sellers, political leaders and successful entrepreneurs was foreign to the British colonisers. With their arrival, they brought a rigid gender binary which was deeply embedded into the fabric of the colonial empire [...] In examining sex and gender in Igbo society today, it is evident that colonisation was not just an event. Colonisation is a structure, an unhealed wound that remains open to this day, in the form of Western gender norms among multiple other manifestations. In examining this structure, we must not forget about the indigenous system, the values and the agency that came before. There are many lessons to be learned in the rich history of gender and sex in African society. Notably, the value of considering human beings for their true authentic selves and not the labels society ascribes to them."
posted by Anonymous (3 comments total)

That summary of Igbo society was pretty fascinating. Like all societies, rigid in some places and flexible in others with the values showing where it bends and where it won’t. And what is “normal” so often isn’t.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:57 PM on March 1, 2020 [1 favorite]

I can’t pretend to know a lot about this, but didn’t Christianity and its values, whether we like it or not, become an essential part of Igbo identity? Surely that history has to be properly addressed, not dismissed as a wound that’s somehow supposed to ‘heal’. Biafra wasn’t about recovering pre-colonial gender fluidity.
posted by Segundus at 3:58 AM on March 2, 2020 [5 favorites]

Thank you so much for posting this!
posted by clockzero at 11:04 AM on March 2, 2020