Public Motherhood in West Africa as Theory and Practice

Introduction: Gender History Across Epistemologies

“…Rather than posing these female figures as alternatives to those models possible within a western ideology of separate spheres, then, Semley asks whether scholars should instead consider a different and more radical perspective of 'black women and public mothers as modern, and, dare one say, universal?' 31 Aniruddha Dutta's investigation of gender/sexual identity formation in eastern India also raises questions about the relationship between 'indigenous' categories and those imported through transnational scholarship. He starts by questioning categories of gender/sexual identity, in particular the often-articulated contrast between a historically grounded category of transgender identity -the hijra -with the more recently emergent (politically activist and thus supposedly less 'authentic') transgender identity kothi.…”