Decoding Female Resistance in Buchi Emecheta’s Kehinde

1843 Words4 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Traditional roles of women in societies

In order to understand and explore the subject of women’s subordination, it is pertinent that one look at the dynamics of power that govern the relationship between men and women. Kate Millet calls it “ sexual politics”, her definition of politics being that of a “power structured relationships, arrangements whereby one group of persons is controlled by another”(2000:23). The female body becomes the site where sexual politics is played out because it is constantly under pressure to conform and submit to prescribed social and cultural norms. . The female body is considered as a procreating device and a source of sexual pleasure. Here it would be significant to mention Simone de Beauvoir’s argument regarding the body, she writes that man “thinks of his body as a direct and normal connection with the world, which he believes he apprehends objectively, whereas he regards the body of woman as a hindrance, a prison, weighed down by everything peculiar to it”(1997:15). This suggest that man takes immense pride in his body while considering the body of a woman as a burden she has to live with. Man being the measure of all things, women’s body is perceived as a lack that can hope for perfection or completion only in its relation to men. Ketu Katrak reiterates this alienation from their own body saying that women , “experience self-exile ,a sense of not belonging to themselves.”(2006:158). The subordination of women is related to control over her sexuality, reproductive rights etc. Female resistance to the lack of self-determination over their own bodies form an important aspect of the African feminist struggle.
This paper examines Buchi Emecheta’s Kehinde(1994), as an account of female resistance to disempowe...

... middle of paper ...

...nowledge;Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977.Pantheon Books:New York, 1980.
Hooks,Bell. Ain’t I A Women: Black Women and Feminism.Pluto Press: London,1982
Katrak,H.Ketu . Politics of the Female Body:Postcolonial Women Writers of the Third World .London :Rutgers University Press.2006
Millet,Kate. Sexual Politics. America:Illinois,2000
Olaniyen,Tejumola,Ato Quayson. African Literature: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory.Feminism,Postcolonialism and the Contradictory Orders of Modernity.UK:Blackwell Publishing,2007.
Umeh, Mary(eds.). Emerging Perspectives on Buchi Emecheta.Brenda Berrian.”Her Ancestors Voice: The Ibeji Trancendence of Duality in Buchi Emecheta’s Kehinde”. New Jersey: African World Press.1996
Weitz, Rose. The Politics of Women’s Bodies. Sandra Lee “Bartky Foucault,Femininity,and the Modernization of Patriarchal Powe”r .OUP:NY,1998

Show More
Related

  • The Political Performance of Motherhood: Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo

    3443 Words  | 7 Pages

    Butler, Judith. "Gender is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion." Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge, 1993. 121-140.

    Read More

  • Postmodernism and Social Praxis

    4506 Words  | 10 Pages

    Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres. Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991.

    Read More

  • Power And Power In Foucault

    855 Words  | 2 Pages

    The writings of Foucault, Bartky, Butler, and Bordo are significantly separate from each other in the issues that they grapple with within the body of their texts but their also overlap on major points, as is to be expected when many people write on the same subject. Each of these writers is concerned with different aspects of power and how that power is used and how it operates within our society. Most of these writers are feminist theorists and concerned with the ways that the female body is affected by power used against her while Foucault is less concerned with how power affects female bodies specifically but that can be seen as a result of his lack of connection to feminist thought. If Foucault mentions women and how they are affected

    Read More

  • They Still Don T Understand Why I Hate Wearing Dress By Sarah Crawley

    1033 Words  | 3 Pages

    In terms of Crawley’s argument of illegitimacy when it comes to the construction and idealizing of gendered norms, which she personally counteracts with butchness, Simone De Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex” (1949) supports the idea that we create what men and women value. Beauvoir looks at gender not as a natural occurrence, but rather the normalization and expectations related to female bodies; women should be feminine and adapt to physical responsibility different from men.

    Read More

  • Reservation Blues

    1707 Words  | 4 Pages

    Head, Bessie. “Snapshots of a Wedding.” Unwinding Threads: Writing by Women in Africa. Ed. Charlotte H. Bruner, et al. London: Heinmann Books, 1983. 157-161.

    Read More

  • The Beauty Myth Analysis

    2766 Words  | 6 Pages

    The female body is the site of extensive theoretical discourse and intense political struggle; it has become the expressions of culture but also has become a site for social and political control. Through history the female body has been the site of discrimination, exploitation, abuse and oppression. She has also occupied a dominant position in the discourse of beauty; its imagery being pervasive and manipulated throughout literature, visual arts and religions and also the site of scientific and psychological investigation. Through historically male dominated fields of expertise and political power, the female body has become the subject to conscious and unconscious patriarchal influences.

    Read More

  • Awa Thiam's Arguement Against the Statement “Rape is to Women what Lynching is to Blacks”

    1724 Words  | 4 Pages

    Awa Thiam speaks on the topic of the daughters of black Africa trying to find themselves. She also states the comparison of the black women struggle with the European women. Thiam is arguing the point that the European feminist imposed the false argument “Rape is to women what lynching is to Blacks” (Thiam 114). Women in the text suffered from double domination and double enslavement by the colonial phallocratic. Thiam explains the false consciousness of the black women as well. The goal for the women is to achieve total independence, to call man bluff and all alienating influences.

    Read More

  • Feminist Literature

    1601 Words  | 4 Pages

    When it comes to post-colonial literature, most initially think about the colonization of other countries and how it has affected the natives. Though it is the most well known form of post-colonial literature, it is not the most wide-spread. By slightly altering the framing in which one looks at it, the idea that feminist literature by women from a patriarchal society is post-colonial literature begins to make sense.

    Read More

  • Simone de Beauvoir in Relation to Howard Gardner's Model of Creativity

    2865 Words  | 6 Pages

    When Simone de Beauvoir died in Paris in 1986, the wreath of obituaries almost universally spoke of her as the 'mother' of contemporary feminism and its major twentieth century theoretician. De Beauvoir, it was implied as much as stated, was the mother-figure to generations of women, a symbol of all that they could be, and a powerful demonstration of a life of freedom and autonomy (Evans 1).

    Read More

  • The Mbuti Culture

    2264 Words  | 5 Pages

    Angeles, Los. (2009). African arts. Volume 28. Published by African Studies Center, University of California.

    Read More

  • Under Western Eyes by Mohanty

    1374 Words  | 3 Pages

    In this text Mohanty argues that contemporary western feminist writing on Third World women contributes to the reproduction of colonial discourses where women in the South are represented as an undifferentiated “other”. Mohanty examines how liberal and socialist feminist scholarship use analytics strategies that creates an essentialist construction of the category woman, universalist assumptions of sexist oppression and how this contributes to the perpetuation of colonialist relations between the north and south(Mohanty 1991:55). She criticises Western feminist discourse for constructing “the third world woman” as a homogeneous “powerless” and vulnerable group, while women in the North still represent the modern and liberated woman (Mohanty 1991:56).

    Read More

  • Racial Discrimination and The Civil Rights Movement

    962 Words  | 2 Pages

    Aldridge, Delores P., Carlene Young. "Africana Womanism: An Overview." Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies. Lexington Books, 2000: 205-217. The University of Missouri-Columbia. Web. 11 April 2014.

    Read More

  • Reconfiguration of Social Relation: The Second Sex by Simone De Beauvoir

    902 Words  | 2 Pages

    There has been a long and on going discourse on the battle of the sexes, and Simone De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex reconfigures the social relation that defines man and women, and how far women has evolved from the second position given to them. In order for us to define what a woman is, we first need to clarify what a man is, for this is said to be the point of derivation (De Beauvoir). And this notion presents to us the concept of duality, which states that women will always be treated as the second sex, the dominated and lacking one. Woman as the sexed being that differs from men, in which they are simply placed in the others category. As men treat their bodies as a concrete connection to the world that they inhabit; women are simply treated as bodies to be objectified and used for pleasure, pleasure that arise from the beauty that the bodies behold. This draws us to form the statement that beauty is a powerful means of objectification that every woman aims to attain in order to consequently attain acceptance and approval from the patriarchal society. The society that set up the vague standard of beauty based on satisfaction of sexual drives. Here, women constantly seek to be the center of attention and inevitably the medium of erection.

    Read More

  • Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

    1327 Words  | 3 Pages

    In Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie attempts to use history in order to gain leverage on the present, to subvert the single story stereotypes that dominate many contemporary discourses on Africa. Written in the genre of historical fiction, Adichie’s novel transcends beyond mere historical narration and recreates the polyphonic experiences of varying groups of people in Nigeria before and after the Civil War. She employs temporal distortion in her narrative, distorting time in order to illustrate the intertwining effects of the past and present, immersing deep into the impact of western domination that not only catalyzed the war, but continues to affect contemporary Africa. In this paper, I will analyze her portrayal of the multifaceted culture produced by colonialism – one that coalesces elements from traditional African culture with notions of western modernity to varying degrees. I will argue that Adichie uses a range of characters, including Odenigbo’s mother, Ugwu, Olanna and Kainene, to each represent a point in a spectrum between tradition and modernity. Through her juxtaposition, she undermines the stereotypes that continue to characterize Africa as backwards and traditional, proving instead that colonialism has produced a cross culture where the two are intertwined.

    Read More

  • Buchi Emecheta's The Joys of Motherhood as an African Feminist Text

    3065 Words  | 7 Pages

    Schipper, Mineke. "Mother Africa on a Pedestal: The Male Heritage in African Literature and Criticism." Women in African Literature Today. Ed. Eldred Durosimi Jones. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1987. 35-53.

    Read More

More about Decoding Female Resistance in Buchi Emecheta’s Kehinde

Open Document