Sexual Violence and the Making of the Anti-Heroine in Contemporary Nigerian Women's Fiction

This article examines how sexual violence and its aftermath shape the development of the anti-heroines in two contemporary Nigerian novels: Yejide Kilanko’s Daughters Who Walk This Path and Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, the Serial Killer. It argues that sexual violence in these novels is not presented merely as individual trauma but as a systemic feature of a typical patriarchal society, one that generates complex, morally ambiguous female characters. The article explores how Kilanko and Braithwaite subvert traditional tropes of female victimhood drawing on a mélange of feminist theoretical perspectives of Andrea Dworkin’s and Catharine MacKinnon’s radical feminist frameworks, bell hooks’ intersectional insights, and Judith Butler’s conception of subjection. Within the framework of these respective theories, female protagonists resist, survive, and reconstitute themselves as anti-heroines: characters marked by resistance, ethical compromise, and agency within repressive systems. Through this analysis, the article positions contemporary Nigerian women’s fiction as a site of feminist intervention that interrogates both local and global gender politics.