Female Victimisation and Resistance in Alobwed’epie’s Trilogy: The Lady With A Beard, The Lady With The Sting and She Seized The Balls

This paper examines how male characters in the corpus use tradition as a pretext to suppress female characters. The paper also demonstrates the challenges they face in their struggle with female protagonists. Feminism constitutes the theoretical lens that will be
used to analyze and interpret the texts under study. Feminism is a theory that advocates for the equality between men and women. According to feminists (de Beauvoir :1973, Gunew and Yeatman :1994, Tyson :2006) women are considered as social actors with specific characteristics which ought to be taken in account singularly. The problem the research addresses is one of representation of women in the corpus. Female characters are oppressed and victimized. The study is premised on the hypothesis that patriarchal norms are responsible for the subjugation of female characters who in turn fight back by performing roles that are known to be male in the society in which they live. The novels form a trilogy composed of The Lady with a Beard, The Lady with the Sting and She Seized the Balls. In this corpus, women are victims of male chauvinism. Male chauvinism is the belief that men are superior to women. According to Cambridge Dictionary, it is the “belief that women are naturally less important, intelligent, or able than men, and should be treated differently”. The trilogy provides great examples of mechanisms of hegemony, subordination and marginalisation through the representation of its male characters. In the fictional world which the texts depict, men denigrate women in the belief that they are inferior to them and thus deserve less treatment or benefit. What accounts for this belief is the patriarchal order imposed by the tradition of the Bakossi land. The study concludes that male characters manipulate social traditions to maintain inequality in gender relations but meet the opposition of women who are determined to
express themselves.

Keywords: Male Chauvinism, Patriarchy, Female Oppression, Resistance.