Gender, Power, and Social Work Practice in Nigeria: A Feminist Poststructural Analysis

Feminist poststructural theory offers analytical tools for interrogating how gender and power operate within social work practice, professional identity, and welfare institutions in ways that can reproduce or challenge gendered social arrangements. This doctoral study applies feminist poststructural analysis to social work practice in Nigeria, generating empirical data from South West and South South geopolitical zones. An interpretivist paradigm employing feminist poststructural discourse analysis underpins the research, combining 50 in-depth narrative interviews with women social workers and their female clients, 20 key informant interviews with welfare policy actors, and analysis of social work regulatory and educational policy documents. Discursive analysis employing Foucauldian power analytics and feminist narrative inquiry procedures is applied. The study's original theoretical contribution is the identification of three dominant discourse formations, described as the Protective Caretaker, the Professional Neutral, and the Rights Advocate, which constitute and constrain gendered social work subjectivities in Nigerian welfare practice. These discourse formations are shown to differentially serve and undermine women clients' welfare interests. The study contributes methodologically by demonstrating the applicability of feminist poststructural research to Nigerian social work scholarship and argues for reflexivity as a core professional competence. Keywords: feminist poststructuralism, gender, power, social work, discourse analysis