Women, visibility and morality in Kenyan popular media

Ligaga, Dina

doi:10.2307/j.ctvxcrxrj

Cited by 22 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…They come across, especially through their lyrical content, as not expressing entitlement over women’s bodies. This is an observation that may be appreciated by several pockets of feminist scholars ( Sommers-Flanagan et al, 1993 ; McRobbie, 2004 ; Bretthauer et al, 2007 ; Mowatt et al, 2013 ; Ligaga, 2014 ; Ligaga, 2020 etc) who have partly spoken truth to power as it relates to heteropatriarchal men and their relationships with women’s bodies.…”

Section: The Façade Of the Empowered Agentic And Self-determining Woman In Afrobeats Music Videos: The Intersection Of Post-feminism And mentioning

confidence: 93%

Women’s Empowerment, Agency and Self-Determination in Afrobeats Music Videos: A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis

Rens

2021

Front. Sociol.

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Stemming from a broader PhD project, this article argues that neoliberal post-feminist cultural sensibilities–entrenched in contemporary popular culture–about empowered, agentic and self-determining women, are regressive for the feminist advancement of gender-relational equality in the African context. To arrive at this conclusion, the central aim was to elucidate whether the gender-performative representations prioritised in the multimodal discourses of Afrobeats music videos are implicated in post-feminist sensibilities and if so, in what ways and to what effect? Given the continent’s richly diverse, yet largely heteropatriarchal, sociocultural formations, I argue that ideas about empowered, agentic and self-determining (black) African women are–based on the limited purview offered through the multimodal discourses of a small corpus of Afrobeats music videos–no more than sociocultural façades as opposed to gender-relational realities in our context. The article relied on a multimodal critical discourse analysis of a total of nine music videos drawn from the PhD project’s larger corpus of 25 Afrobeats music videos, their accompanying song lyrics, as well as a selection of YouTube viewer comments extracted from the analysed music videos. In critically exploring the gender-relational depictions prioritised in the analysed music videos, I argue for the consideration of what I am coining “misogyrom”; a gender-relational cultural sensibility which, in tandem with a post-feminist sensibility partly undergirding the multimodal discourses of these music videos, effectively veil this popular musical genre’s evidently sexist and misogynistic undertones that subvert potentialities of empowered, agentic and self-determining black African women.

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Section: The Façade Of the Empowered Agentic And Self-determining Woman In Afrobeats Music Videos: The Intersection Of Post-feminism And mentioning

confidence: 93%

Women’s Empowerment, Agency and Self-Determination in Afrobeats Music Videos: A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis

Rens

2021

Front. Sociol.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…The burden of being a writer, I have now come to appreciate, is to learn when to let go of a project; and to understand that there may never be resolutions to the tensions emerging from the finished work. This is how I feel after reading the wonderful and thoughtful responses by four women scholars who have read my book from different locations Women, Visibility and Morality in Kenyan Popular Media (Ligaga 2020). With each response, more questions arise on the value of doing critical work on women and public cultures in Africa.…”

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confidence: 99%