She’s ‘sexssertive’ and she knows it!: a postfeminist reading of African femininities in Afrobeats music videos

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper engages a (post)feminist-aligned critical reading of women’s gendered performances in Afrobeats music videos to highlight—in the visual culture of this popular African musical genre—the visibility of sexually assertive black African women who variously subvert heteropatriarchal moral public scripts about “respectable” African womanhood and expression of their sexualities in relation to black African men. In my considerations of postfeminist sensibilities, I align with Simidele Dosekun by regarding postfeminism as a transnational cultural sensibility with flexible contours that render it analytically applicable and valuable as a scholarly lens in an African popular cultural landscape. I deploy a multimodal discourse analysis of five Afrobeats music videos (derived from a larger corpus of videos from my PhD study), their storylines, plot progressions, and the accompanying lyrical contents, to advance my arguments. The article draws significantly on postfeminist literature and key perspectives from bodies of feminist critiques of popular culture to demonstrate inflections of feminine subjectivities that I theorise as “sexssertive,” given their active constructions of counter-narratives in relation to conservative and restrictive meanings of black African womanhood. I conclude by considering the implications hereof for broader feminist efforts towards the just treatment of women across diverse African contexts in the domains of sexuality and sexual expression.