Chinweizu and Woman’s Place: A Response to Anatomy of Female Power

This article examines the reality or illusion of the perceived ‘paradises’ of ‘female power’, the purported façade of patriarchy and the claimed pervasiveness of matriarchy in Chinweizu’s Anatomy of Female Power. By deconstructing the extreme essentialist perspectives of AFP, and in line with womanism, the article interrogates the perceived covert matriarchal power sites of the masculinist creation and argues that they essentialize woman’s place in fixed biologically defined gender spaces, hence negating the concept of societal power as exercised rather than possessed. These placements, while trivializing woman’s role in the public sphere, obviously obfuscate the acknowledged dual-sex political system in some African and Nigerian settings. Responding from the generally African and specifically Igbo experience, the work offers an alternative womanist conceptualization, beyond matriarchy-patriarchy and other gender stereotypic binaries; a humanistic form of gender fluidity where the synergy of the two genders will engender complementarity, collaboration, compromise and cooperation.