POST-MALE DOMINATION AND INTRA-FEMINIST RESISTANCE: ILLUSTRATIONS FROM SELECTED NARRATIVES OF THE URHOBO PEOPLE

Abstract

This study is an analysis of intra-feminist resistance in a post-gender equality struggle period. Feminist resistance is well documented in pre-colonial literature of Africa. The performers of Urhobo narratives even go further than just portraying the feminist resistance to male domination to providing futuristic models of the post-male domination resistance time when women would have achieved equality with men in political, economic and social spheres of human existence. In the analysis of the two models chosen for this study –The Favoured and Unfavoured Wives and The Virtuous Wife stories, the paper argues that in the eventuality of the attainment of power by women, there is still feminist resistance; this time it is intra-feminist resistance. Adopting cultural studies as a framework, the paper discovers that through the motifs of inequality, incompatibility, struggle, division and revolution, the intra-feminist resistance in the post-male dominance period still lead to either peaceful or violent change in leadership. As the narrators grapple with these themes, they objectified their models with the techniques of parallelism, mask, magic realism and symbolism to show that in the reign of women, the major antagonists are also women. The study concludes that women are the major challenge to the successful attainment of the reign of the woman and that feminist resistance will be a continuous struggle.