Nairobi — If we define gender in terms of relations of power that structure the chances of both men and women, then women's day should have afforded us the opportunity to reflect on this aspect of our lives. But even more important, if gender divisions are not fixed biologically but constitute an aspect of our wider social divisions of labour, it is necessary to place discourses on gender in the terms of production and reproduction while paying attention to cultural, religious and ideological systems prevailing in our society.

Patriarchal structures that exist in our society make it possible for the production and consumption of culture that purports to effectively control one sex over another. In this case the biological male controls the female in power relations. This categorisation of persons, artefacts, events, draws upon sexual imagery to make concrete our ideas about the nature of gender relationships.

It is therefore necessary to take cognisance of feminist concerns, which have striven to redress the women's place in culture, society and history. The philosophies of Julia Kristeva, Helen Cixous, and Luce Irigaray inform gender discourses in the sense that they delight in illuminating the internal contradictions in seemingly perfect and coherent systems of thought, which serves to attack ordinary notions of identity and selfhood. These scholars are interested in reinterpreting traditional Freudian psychoanalytic theory and practice. Their thoughts are tied together by an external perception with roots in Simone De Beauvour's Second Sex, which questions why women are the second sex or in post-modern terms, why the woman is the 'other.' Rather than view this condition as something to be transcended, they proclaim its advantages. The condition of otherness enables them to stand back and criticise the norms, values and practices that patriarchy seeks to impose on everyone.

For us in Africa and Kenya in particular we need to take into consideration all possibilities of interpretation that recognise African women as active agents in the struggle for space in a patriarchal society. How our women strategise within this set of concrete constrains reveal and defines what Deniz Kandiyot calls the acts of 'bargaining with patriarchy'. These, she notes, 'exert a powerful influence on the shaping of women's gendered subjectivity and determine the nature of gender ideology. They also influence both the potential for and specific forms of women's active and passive resistance in the face of their oppression.

It is this subtle and active resistance that literary critics need to interrogate in order to determine and explore women's inventiveness in creating and manipulating hierarchies by transgressing and subverting ideological boundaries. This will enable us see how women experience gender. It will also help us to understand socio-economic relations of power and production and how women perceive these relations consciously or unconsciously. More important, there is need to depart from the obvious and consider women, not as passive and submissive conformists to patriarchal authority, but active agents of subversion.

It is in this respect that we may need to interrogate Chinuezu's Anatomy of Female Power: A Masculine Dissection of Matriarchy. Chinuezu makes what I could call shocking yet profound claims. He defines 'Masculinism' as the concept of men's oppression by women. Female power, he says, is inscribed into the body in form of the fertile womb and the role of the matriarch develops from women's biological capacity to give birth. He anatomises female social roles by locating the womb as the source of women's domination over men.

Chinuezu proceeds to demonstrate how women have exploited this biological superiority and consolidated their power by taking over the roles of mother, cook and nurse in the household. He only sees redemption from this tyranny in the form of career bachelors who refuse women's 'bodily bribery' and insists on the redistribution of household roles.

Women, according to Chinuezu are 'the hidden manipulators determining men's material well being and physical health.' They inherit these abilities from their mothers using kitchen power and womb power to take men's souls by exploiting their oral and sexual appetites. He blames marriage institution for man's oppression globally and declares that 'all mothers detest their sons and use their positions as child-bearers and children primary socialisers deliberately to induce a psychological and sexual dependency on the female body.' Through such actions like clitoridectomy and punishment for expressing sexual desire, he claims, girls gain the enormous advantage of physical restraint. They also benefit from lessons in the art of flirtation and pre-marital courtship. Girls are trained from the onset by their "witch like mothers to seduce men with their womb power"

This is what Chinuezu calls the matriarchal conspiracy theory. Men are viewed as being fundamentally weak at each stage of their life cycle. Female power is established over them through peculiar weaknesses in every stage of life. Chinuezu argues that a cluster of social roles have been snatched by women to consolidate their womb power. Serving a man with his favourite dish and dressing in tight clothes are just some of the tactics that enslave them. To Chinuezu, 'if the essence of power is the ability to get what one wants then women are far from powerless. Contrary to appearance, woman is boss, the boss of the world. Being brilliant manipulators they choose to appear stupid it takes great cleverness to feign such stupidity successfully' Do you agree?

* The writer is a senior lecturer at Western University College of Science and Technology.