Nollywood and Women: Reading Gender in Nigerian Cinema Through ‘Snail-Sense’ Feminism

Chijioke Azuawusiefe. “Nollywood and Women: Reading Gender in Nigerian Cinema Through ‘Snail-Sense’ Feminism.” Igbo Studies Review (ISR) , Goldline & Jacobs Publishing , no. 9, 2021 , pp. 35-54 .

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Abstract

From its inception in the early 1990s, Nollywood, the cinema of Nigeria, has complicated the representations of women in popular media, expanding, in the process, Nigeria’s discourse landscape for scholars, filmmakers, media practi- tioners, and the public to engage gender and feminism questions. This paper deploys the “snail-sense feminism” of Akachi Ezeigbo to interrogate how contemporary indigenous African feminisms can be engaged in the reading of Nollywood melodrama. Using a critical discourse analysis of two films, Glamour Girls (1994) and Fifty (2015), it examines not only the performances of gender in Nollywood films, but also how these performances bear out the multiple and varied iterations of the indigenous feminisms by Nigerian feminist scholars who continue to ques- tion the dominant patriarchal normative order within the Nigerian society. Where Glamour Girls reveals, for instance, Nollywood’s first framings of women from its early days, Fifty sheds light on how those portrayals have continued to be interro- gated in Nollywood’s present-day films. Highlighting the pushback on patriarchy (albeit sometimes understated and non-verbalized) by female characters in these films, the paper contends that rather than being an aberration, subversion of gen- der relations by women has been Nollywood’s intended objective from the start.

Author(s): Chijioke Azuawusiefe

About the author(s)

Published: November 22, 2021

Journal: Igbo Studies Review (ISR)

Issue: 9

Pages: 35-54

Publisher: Goldline & Jacobs Publishing

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