Abstract
This paper investigates gender-related Igbo taboos and their subtle recruitment in legitimising and sustaining patriarchy in Igbo culture. Thirty-eight taboos in the domains of inheritance, economic activities, family, leadership, marriage and widowhood were collected through participant observation and interviews. Applying ethnomethodological indexicality and reflexivity and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), strategies like dominant hegemonic masculinity and femininity, naturalisation, silencing, proximisation, positive-self and negative-other presentation are identified as constructing men’s superiority and women subordination. The paper calls for their deconstruction and delegitimisation for maximum harnessing of optimum human potentials in view of the global benchmark for gender equality by 2030.
Highlights
Igbo refers to the language as well as the people of the South East Nigeria with a population estimate of 32million or 18% of Nigeria’s 177milliom (CIA World Factbook, 2016) this is still controversial as some sources put the figure at over 180 million)
Critical Discourse Analysis Since patriarchy entails “doing power” (Coates 2004, p. 6) as a means of doing gender, the present study finds a locus in critical discourse analysis (CDA), a linguistic means of subverting power struggles, use and abuse in discourse, and through this means, to linguistically deconstruct taboos that legitimise patriarchy
As already hinted earlier, the taboos were analysed in line with the different domains of operation – the family, inheritance, marriage, leadership and social privileges – and the patriarchal legitimization strategies indexed by the listed taboos
Summary
Igbo refers to the language as well as the people of the South East Nigeria with a population estimate of 32million or 18% of Nigeria’s 177milliom (CIA World Factbook, 2016) this is still controversial as some sources put the figure at over 180 million). Of particular interest in this paper is the fact that the language has a genderless grammatical system, that is, gender as a grammatical category is non-existent in the Igbo language (Emenanjo, 2015). This is buttressed by the non-gender-marked pronouns as in English he/she; only one pronominal reference (O/ya) apply for both sexes. The language is non-sexist as it lacks generic nouns (man) and pronouns (he) in reference to both sexes as in English, it does not have to contend with morphologically-marked gender pairs as the English host-hostess, hero-heroine binaries. Patriarchal social arrangement and patrilineage inheritance rights are the norm
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