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- Title
Proverbs in Lubukusu and Ekegusii in Kenya: Empowering or Disempowering for Women and Girls?
- Authors
Barasa, Margaret Nasambu; Opande, Isaac Nilson
- Abstract
Research about the Kenyan women has primarily been conducted from socio-demographic perspectives. Such approaches, while important, are not exhaustive. This paper reports on the findings of a study that focused on the socio-linguistic perspectives that explore the place and role of women and girls in the society. Thus, this paper also set out to investigate how proverbs portray women and girls, and effect on gender identity and the implications of proverb messages to achievement of the UN Millennium Development Goals. Data of the study comprised thirty eight Bukusu and Gusii proverbs related to (dis)empowerment of women and girls; ethnography was used to select the proverbs, the data analysis focused on the representation of women through the examination of the meanings of the respective proverbs using the language dominance framework by Lakoff Zimmerman and feminist theories of the Radicals and Critical Discourse Analysis by Norman Fairclough. The findings revealed that women are portrayed as inferior, worthless and weak and thus constructed in specific roles as domestic workers, wives and caretakers. Consequently, such specific roles marginalize and discriminate women and girls in issues of decision making, participation, resource distribution and policy formulation due to the prejudice. Such discriminative proverbs slow the achievement of development goals. The paper concludes that in order to realize the UN Millennium Development Goals, there is a need to eliminate or re-conceptualize some of the proverbs which reinforce gender parity and also reform the language to suit the needs of the society.
- Subjects
KENYA; SELF-efficacy; WOMEN; GUSII (African people); BUKUSU dialect; PROVERBS; UN Millennium Project; CRITICAL discourse analysis
- Publication
Journal of Pan African Studies, 2017, Vol 10, Issue 7, p155
- ISSN
0888-6601
- Publication type
Article