I-Key Notions to Gender and Literature

By the end of this lecture the students should be able to:

 Explain the concepts of sex and gender.
 Discuss these concepts with reference to culture and literature.

1- Sex
Sex is a biological fact. It refers to biological differences, chromosomes, hormonal
profiles, internal and external sex organs.

Sex as female or male is a biological fact or determination which is the same in any culture.
Sex does not change because it is natural. However gender perceptions are cultural and
therefore may change from one culture to another.

1.1 Male Sex

One may talk of the male sex when the biological fact refers to man’s; that means it is
man’s sexual organ, or male sex and all the chromosomes and hormonal profiles pertained
to man.

1.2 Female Sex

The female sex refers to the biological fact of the woman’s sex or organs as well as all
the female chromosomes and hormonal profiles.

1.3 Gender
Gender is a cultural concept that depicts all the characteristics that a society or culture
delineates as masculine or feminine. Here, gender has something to do with role playing
which can be quite different cross-culturally. This means that different cultures may
attribute different characteristics and behaviours to the sexes as a determination of their
gender

1.3.1 Male Gender

The male gender refers to the characteristics and behaviours a given culture may
attribute to male sex as masculine.

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1.3.2 Female Gender
The female gender is referred to as the characteristics and behaviours that a society may
attribute to female sex as feminine.

1.4 Some Feminist Protests

Currently, in Africa, women are united to protest against patriarchy and government in view
to achieve justice and equality for women. They protest for equal representation in many
domains because in fact traditional and colonial laws under privileged them. In this
perspective, the focus is to empower and increase their access to education as well as to
improve the quality of education to close the gap between men and women in the classrooms.
Women specifically have targeted girls’ education that began to be implemented in African
countries like Togo, Benin, Gambia, Guinea etc.

Although there have been promising improvements in providing equal education for men and
women the latter are still behind in the educational domain.

It is to be known that colonial teachings made families to prioritize women doing domestic
labor while men went out to work .This carried on to push colonial values in African countries
.In this respect when austerity programs were introduced to African countries in 1980s, it cut
educational spending and households had to choose who to send to school, which caused
many homes to prioritize house work over education for women and education for the men,
leading to these low retention rates. Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood and Achebe’s
Things Fall Apart are significant illustrations in African literature.

Feminism has empowered women so that in many countries in Africa they are able to fight
against girls’ denial of education, with disparities starting in primary school. Colonial forms
of educations for women came from missionaries and institutions using religious teachings
and basic Western teachings in reading and writing. They were not taught economic
education, but instead were taught European values of women’s roles in society into
educational spaces .These Western teaches extended to post- colonial education, which
prioritized men’s education leading to wide disparities within the educational system.

Today thanks to feminism women can discuss the necessity and process for achieving changes
in legislation for materials and legal rights for women, with national recognition of their rights
under law and constitutions. After independence, African women have contributed in the
political, social economic and cultural domains to participate in the development of nations.

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Nowadays women’s fear and reluctance to speak up politically and culturally when pressures
were put on them, have disappeared.

In literature, many women have contributed to changing many traditional conceptions and
laws that favor men only. Buchi Emecheta, Flora Nwapa, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, to cite
but a few have contributed a lot to change the literary world by making the woman visible.
Arranged marriage, prohibition of divorce, female barter, preference of boys to girls, etc have
become conceptions of the past. In this respect many regimes have reinforce the equality of
sexes in their constitutions. Even though there are still difficulties in how strong patriarchy is
in both urban and rural African communities women’s statues have risen into higher
positions.

As a matter of a fact, feminism has made the woman visible. It has delivered the woman from
the shackles of servitude, dominance, pressure and stress. It has taught the woman to learn
how to work, challenge, and reorder human communities by creating structures that favor
humanity. They have learned to win challenges by negotiating and sometimes compromising
enough so that they could gain freedoms. In fact, they know when, where, and how to react
while using the culture of negotiation to deconstruct patriarchy to the benefit of the woman.

WOMANISM AND ALICE WALKER

Alice Walker’s womanism, which is based on humanization of male female class culture
advocates values of humanization which focus on tolerance and peace as prerequisites to love.
Alice Walker has faced some challenges like racism, class and motherhood as an African-
American. She has come to this end, (Womanism) because in fact when feminism emerged in
America, it aimed at protecting the rights of women and empowering them to obtain equal
treatments with men. Because, previously, men had more privileges than women in the human
communities. So when feminism arose, Black women eagerly joined the movement to fight
the gender bias systems that governed the communities of that epoch but they have finally
realized that there was another challenge to face, the problem of race that is color/skin, race
which means that even in the context of fighting gender bias systems, there was separatism.
Therefore there is in that concept of feminism a hidden complex of superiority where the
white women put themselves in a higher position of race, gender and class structures. Then
the black-American woman found herself double-crippled. She is despised by men, both black
and white and worse by her own counter parts women, white women, which is black women’s
separation from the whole. Here the black woman as an entity is separated from the whole,

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(group of white women feminists). In this context the black woman finds herself rejected from
the group of feminists.

Alice Walker’s womanism is a response to the white women’s feminist racial segregational
altitudes of color and class differences. She has understood that feminism was a race-centered
sisterhood and thus she advocates her womanism as a human society of genderless and
colorless-centered attitudes resulting in human and equal, happy communities.

AFRICAN FEMINISM

African feminism is also oriented towards the harmonization of both sexes. African feminists
are not seeking to overthrow the men or trying to revenge. They advocate equal standards and
equity between both sexes. To them, African’s predecessors established many traditional
assumptions based on erroneous beliefs and practices that oppressed the African woman. But
today, to the modern mind some past beliefs and practices are no more acceptable. It is in this
sense that they change inevitably in all contexts with regard to their emancipation and
fulfilment. Therefore they claims equal opportunities for the male and the female, equity in
the gain of social , cultural, economic and political welfare of mankind. African feminists
think that there should not be any discrimination in sex, status, racism, ethnic group, etc.
They claim inclusive collaboration, belongingness, mutual considerations, fraternity,
confidence and love, which construct peace and happiness. In fact, what the African feminist
is fighting against is the sexual biased roles that are structured in the African communities of
male-dominated orientations that subjugate the woman/female.

Carole Boyce Davies in this context states that African feminism “is not antagonistic to
African men but it challenges them to be aware of certain salient aspects of women’s
subjugation.” This is what Buchi Emecheta captures in her declaration that she is a feminist
with small “f”. As a matter of fact, Emecheta focuses on Cultural Feminism which is a theory
she has invented to show her feminist standpoint.

The focus is put on Emecheta and her fiction because even though she has been new on the
literary scene, she has been more prolific than her counterparts. That is why she has been
nick-named “the fighter” and Flora Nwapa her predecessor, “the attacker”.

Achebe and his fiction have also been considered a great deal, for in Anglophone African
fiction he has been considered as the canon and therefore can be taken as reference. It is in
this perspective that his early fiction is mostly referred to in this lecture.

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