Buchi Emecheta’s Feminism of Selfhood: Self-Concept, Gender, Marriage, and Sexuality
Abstract
Today, there is a multiplicity of intriguing, complicated and complex feminisms in the globe that has resulted from individual women’s search for answers to their peculiar experiences, advocacy for general improvement in women’s conditions, as well as search for models of women’s empowerment to counter power differentials between males and females. This essay will focus on Buchi Emecheta’s Feminism of Selfhood inherent in her 1988 Stockholm pronouncement on gender, her notions of self-concept and self-identity, and her consequent, complex views on homosexuality, same-sex and heterosexual marriages. The entire body of Emecheta’s writings, along with her penchant for the literary device of irony for heavy emphatic effect, will constitute materials and sources of investigation. Also to be examined are the complexities that have arisen from critics’ unawareness or misunderstanding of the impact of lived experiences on the author’s writings and interviews, which have colored her feminist ideology and opinions on sexuality. Ultimately, this essay will posit that Emecheta’s Feminism of Self- hood motivates the eminent author’s support for the betrayed, victims of social, political, cultural and economic injustices wallowing in poverty, not the least of whom are women and females, everybody’s fools that she urges subtly by her personal example to stand up for their human rights and their social and economic interests, and thereby assume their own agency for change, freedom and power.
Author(s): Ada Uzoamaka Azodo
About the author(s)
Published: November 22, 2021
Journal: Igbo Studies Review (ISR)
Issue: 9
Pages: 17-34
Publisher: Goldline & Jacobs Publishing
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