Igbo bu Igbo: Culture, Language, and Gender Relations

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: "Igbo bu Igbo" - Keynote at 7th Annual International Igbo Conference

How to Become an Invisible Woman in Lagos

(By Sisi Lucia) - Do you want to become an invisible woman? I have found the perfect vanishing cream, immediately you slather in on your body, fiam, you just vanish.

So I live in an estate, every morning or evening I pass by the only gate in the estate. Depending on my mood, I either smile and greet, or just wave at security men at the gate. On Fridays or during any celebration say Christmas or Easter, they razzle me for ‘something for the boys’ and also depending on my mood, I give them ‘something’ or not. So you would think they know me, yes?

Well, they know me until they see me with a man and that’s it, the vanishing cream. Men are the vanishing cream. The presence of a man makes women invisible. The other day I took a cab home, they greeted the cab driver and totally ignored me. I wasn’t even expecting the greeting because I knew the presence of the cab driver has already made me evaporate. The cab driver had to ask me “did you just move here? Abi na new security?” I just smiled. It was not the first time. If my male friends are visiting, they do it and it is not as if the greeting adds any naira to my account, so shrug, right?

This Sex Which Is Not One

"'She' is definitely other in herself. This is why she is said to be whimsical, incomprehensible,
agitated, capricious ... not to mention her language, in which 'she' sets off in all directions leaving 'him' unable to discern the coherence of any meaning. Hers are contradictory words, somewhat mad from the standpoint of reason, inaudible for whoever listens to them with ready-made grids, with a fully elaborated code in hand. ...
        It is useless, then, to trap women in the exact definition of what they mean, to make them repeat (themselves) so that it will be clear; they are already elsewhere in that discursive machinery where you expected to surprise them. They have returned to themselves. Which must not be understood in the same way as within yourself. They do not have the interiority that you have, the one you perhaps suppose they have. Within themselves means within intimacy of that silent, multiple, diffuse touch. And if you ask them insistently what they are thinking about, they can only reply: Nothing. Everything.
        Thus what they desire is precisely nothing, and at the same time everything. Always something more and something else besides that one--sexual organ, for example--that you give them, attribute to them. Their desire is often interpreted, and feared, as a sort of insatiable hunger, a voracity that will swallow you whole. Whereas it really involves a different economy more than anything else, one that upsets the linearity of a project, undermines the goal-object of a desire, diffuses the polarization toward a single pleasure, disconcerts fidelity to a single discourse ..."

Luce Irigaray, 1985: 29-30

This Sex Which Is Not One

Patriarchy, Misogyny, and Gender Relations

(By Temidayo Ahanmisi)--It's interesting though seeing die hard misogynists coming out from the woodworks...literarily. Like the craven worms they truly are.

The oodles of comic outrage about the president's "other room" gaffe just makes me want to chuckle and choke someone dead in amusement.

I mean..like...really?

"My wife belongs in my heart, my life, my office..."

"I am a mother, a wife, a career woman. I don't belong in the..."

Aaaah spare me!

Nobody fucking cares. Go suck a lemon...