Conceptualization of ‘the Woman’: A Critical Analysis of Selected Yoruba Proverbs

Abstract

Gender representation is evident in the Yoruba proverbs and this has partly formed the basis on which males and females are evaluated in the Nigerian society. A large concentration of the studies on the representation of women in Yoruba proverbs come from cultural and sociological perspectives. Little attempts have been made to explore the images of the woman in Yoruba proverbs and their ideological implications. The study, therefore, attempts to identify and analyze metaphors in the representation of women in selected Yoruba proverbs and their ideological implications. This study adopts Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) and Lazer's (2005) approach to Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (FCDA). The sources of the proverbs for this study are oral medium, internet, Yoruba movies, radio and television broadcasts and programs in the Yoruba language, and Yoruba texts on proverbs. The corpus consists of forty-three proverbs illuminating the Yoruba notion of the woman. The study reveals that quite some Yoruba proverbs contain negative metaphors that can unconsciously shape speakers’ perceptions and actions towards women, particularly sustaining masculine hegemony. Significantly, this paper argues for positive gender post-proverbial to replace the negative ones.

Keywords: Gender representation, Yoruba proverbs, Conceptual metaphor, Patriarchal hegemony, Representation of women

DOI: 10.7176/RHSS/11-13-05

Publication date:June 30^th 2021