A feminist critical discourse analysis of male dominance and violence in Zakes Mda’s the Madonna of excelsior and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s purple hibiscus

Ibitoye, Antonia Folasade

Title: A feminist critical discourse analysis of male dominance and violence in Zakes Mda’s the Madonna of excelsior and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s purple hibiscus
Creator: Ibitoye, Antonia Folasade
Subject: Feminism and education
Subject: Feminism and literature
Date Issued: 2023-12
Date: 2023-12
Type: Doctoral's theses
Type: text
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10948/63320
Identifier: vital:73249
Description: This study critically explored male dominance and violence in Africa, through the lens of South African author, Zakes Mda, and Nigerian author, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, in their novels, The Madonna of Excelsior (2004) and Purple Hibiscus (2003), respectively. Women globally often continue to live with male dominance, and this unequal gender structure has propelled feminists to commence movements to counter all forms of discrimination against women. For the study, excerpts from the two novels were used as data, to investigate male dominance and violence in Africa. To achieve the goals of this research, the study used socialist feminist theory, post-colonial feminist theory, and black feminist theory as the theoretical framework. This combined framework explicates that there is not just one system of oppression at the core of unequal treatment of women by men. Rather, it is a combination of structures related to social class, gender, race, sexuality, culture and society. Feminist critical discourse analysis (FCDA) was employed to analyse the data with the aid of ATLAS.ti software. FCDA was selected as an analytical framework because of its concern for the emancipation of women and social justice with transformation.What prompted the area of concern and the research problem of this study was an awareness of the extensive gender inequality in Nigeria and South Africa, which tends to be rooted in male dominance and violence. As a result, this study contributes to creating awareness of gender inequality, suggesting ways of combating violence against women and female suppression as well as promoting new conceptualisations of masculinity, femininity, and inequality. This research study explored how language use constructed identity, gender, and power relations and how these have reflected male dominance, and violence in Africa in the novels chosen for this study. This study is significant because it did not only analysed the marginalisation and suppression of the female gender but further exposed the strategies that were adopted by women to confront patriarchal oppression and domination as well as the resultant effect on the perpetrators as depicted in the novels for this study. The distinctiveness of this study can be viewed from three different perspectives. Firstly, it is one of the first research works to use FCDA to address the social problems of male dominance and violence. Secondly, it is the first research work which recognises the use of the novel as an essential source of data for FCDA on male dominance and violence. Using the novel as a data source supports the fact that novels are relevant data sources because 5 they often reflect the happenings in society, such as the incidence of gender inequality. Lastly, this project is distinctive because of its ability to combine socialist feminist theory, black feminist theory, post-colonial feminist theory as the theoretical framework and FCDA as the methodological approach. The study is limited to two novels from two African writers because the novels are reflections of the challenges faced by women in Africa and because of the novelists’ unique use of language and the representation of male dominance, violence and female suppression in Africa. The choice to restrict the scope of the study to Africa, selecting Nigeria and South Africa was because, both novels are set in African context and also as a result of the gravity of the identified social and equity issues in Africa. For further research, the study could be extended beyond the African continent to other continents. By so doing, other feminist theories could be used while FCDA could still be used as an analytical framework. Furthermore, a comparative analysis of male dominance and violence between South Africa and Nigeria could also be explored or between Africa and the western world. This study, therefore, explored how language use constructed gender identity and how this reflected male dominance and violence in Africa through the novels, which provided the data for analysis. Following the principles of FCDA, the study sought to create social awareness and to build an understanding of the need not only to resist male dominance and violence but to extend understandings of gender differences with the intention of generating a collective change and transformation in society for gender equality.
Description: Thesis (PhD) -- Faculty of Humanities, 2023
Format: computer
Format: online resource
Format: application/pdf
Format: 1 online resource (318 pages)
Format: pdf
Publisher: Nelson Mandela University
Publisher: Faculty of Humanities
Language: English
Rights: Nelson Mandela University
Rights: All Rights Reserved
Rights: Open Access

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