Gender and Language: The Construction of Gender Identities in Selected Francophone African Films

Francophone African cinema has emerged as a significant global cultural form that both reflects and contests the gendered social realities of its contexts of production, offering rich material for analysis of how gender identities are discursively and visually constructed. This study analyses gender identity construction in selected francophone African films from five countries: Senegal, Cameroon, Democratic Republic of Congo, Mali, and Cote d'Ivoire, with particular attention to representations relevant to West African social contexts accessible to Nigerian francophone culture students. A feminist film theory and critical discourse analysis framework was applied to ten films released between 2019 and 2024. Analysis focused on dialogue, narrative agency, visual representation, and the language of gender address across characters and situations. Results reveal persistent but not uniform patterns of female subordination in narrative agency, with francophone West African films in the corpus showing greater female protagonist agency than Central African texts. Language operates as a significant gender marker, with female characters more frequently code-switching into indigenous languages while male characters privilege French as a prestige register. Films by female directors in the corpus demonstrated systematically different gender representational strategies than those by male directors. The study argues that francophone African film provides a productive pedagogical resource for gender and language analysis in Nigerian French departments and recommends its incorporation into advanced French cultural studies modules. Keywords: gender identity, francophone African cinema, feminist film theory, critical discourse analysis, language and gender