Othering the Other Sex in Buchi Emecheta’s The Bride Price and The Slave Girl: A Snail-Sense Feminist Analysis

Abstract

The paper tackles the issue of gender, sex and otherness in Emecheta’s The Bride Price and The Slave Girl. It first provides scholarly definitions of the three concepts (sex, gender and othering) before specifying their operational meanings as the study uses them. Then, it shows that gender constitutes a serious predicament for the Igbo woman because of its social constructions, considerations and attributes. As a result, the findings showed that Igbo women are marginalized, exploited and oppressed on the basis of certains customs and traditions such as the bride price, the kidnapping of young girls, the widowhood rituals, and the preference of male children. They also revealed that Emecheta is rather for an African feminism based on negotiation, conciliation, alliance and complementarity than a feminism based on confrontation and the use of force to enable the emancipation and the empowerment of the African woman.