The Representation of Women in Igbo Oral Poetry: A Feminist Linguistic Reading

This study applies a feminist linguistic analysis to the representation of women in Igbo oral poetry collected from communities in Imo and Anambra States, South East Nigeria. Oral poetry constitutes a central medium for the articulation and perpetuation of gender ideologies in Igbo culture, and its systematic analysis from a feminist linguistic perspective contributes to both language and gender studies and Igbo cultural scholarship. The study is grounded in feminist critical discourse analysis and draws on Mills' feminist stylistics framework. A corpus of forty oral poems, including praise poetry, lament forms, and satirical compositions, was collected from oral artists and community elders through ethnographic recording sessions. The poems were translated from Igbo with the assistance of community translators and subjected to lexical analysis, figurative language analysis, and thematic framing examination. Findings reveal a complex and sometimes contradictory representation of women, with poetry genres functioning differently across gender roles. Praise poetry constructs women primarily through roles of motherhood and domestic virtue, while satirical poetry provides a space for female critique of male authority. The study documents instances of linguistic agency in female-performed genres that challenge simplistic characterisations of Igbo oral poetry as uniformly patriarchal. The research recommends broader collection and scholarly engagement with female-authored oral poetic traditions in Igbo communities. Keywords: feminist linguistics, Igbo oral poetry, gender representation, Imo State, feminist stylistics.