Shifting Ideological Conceptions of Gender and the Challenge of Characterisation in Nigerian Drama

Drama has, over the years, portrayed issues of gender inequality and agitations, from Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, J. P. Clark’s The Wives Revolt, Ola Rotimi’s Our Husband Has Gone Mad Again, Fred Agbeyegbe’s The King Must Dance Naked, Tracie Uto’s Our Wives Have Gone Mad Again, Irene Salami-Aguloye’s Sweet Revenge, More Than Dancing to Ama Ata Aidoo’s Anowa by the Ghanaian writer. The list of plays x-raying gender and feminist issues is endless. Drama has thus portrayed gender issues in its complexities, limiting itself majorly to the male-female binary in gender discusses. Using the psychoanalytical theory, Feminism, Genderism and Postgenderism as critical paradigms, the paper interrogates contemporary Nigerian drama portrayal of discriminatory gender practices arising from the social-cultural construct of the dichotomy between the genders. It uses Ben Binebai's monodrama, Karena’s Cross, as the primary text in a paradigmatic study of gender, male-female relationships, perceptions, presentations and portrayals of social roles in drama. The study identifies that over the years, drama has portrayed the female gender in stereotypical ways and presented socially constructed images of male-female relationship that reinforces the victim status of the female gender. The paper also identifies that Nigerian society is no more as traditional as it used to be. There is presently a transition from stereotypical gender understanding to an acceptance of western concepts of gender and gender roles. The paper concludes that Nigeria, and Africa, is presently experiencing a reversal of thought and perception of gender roles. The paper identifies that there is a nostalgic reliance on a past and fading culture in contemporary Nigerian drama presentation of gender issues, which reinforces archetypally held notions of gender.