Empires, by their very nature, embody and formalize difference, both between metropolis and colony and between colonial subjects. Imperial imaginary floods popular culture. Gender categories were one kind of bio-logic "new tradition" that European colonialism institutionalized in most African cultures — yet there is significant religious and linguistic evidence that before colonization social practices such as the division of labour, profession and monarchical structures were not gendered. The infantilization of women as part of the Western patriarchal system was also exported with the colonization of the mind, configuring a state of vulnerability and making the path of dependency propitious.

Can we assume that social relations in all societies are organized around biological sexual difference? Beauty canon, modernity, stereotypes: the book decolonizes feminism by questioning the Eurocentric rational frameworks that construct gender categories in a universalistic manner, and wrestles with the challenges of applying "universal" Western feminist ideas to cultures with entirely different histories.