Feminist Undercurrents in Selected Traditional Igbo Songs: Contemporary Igbo Women's Voice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The paper investigates selected traditional Igbo songs and argues that they provide a good niche for gender construction, negotiation and contestation. These songs, got through participant observation during traditional ceremonies touch the domains of lineage perpetuation/inheritance rights, family life, marriage and leadership roles/allocation of social privileges. More of women’s genres, the songs provide a medium for their voice in the prevailing patriarchal social arrangement constructed by men’s songs drawn from pop music, folk songs and texts. Insights from various feminisms, womanism and Searle’s indirect speech acts were applied to explain the different ways women resist, accommodate, adapt and contest the patriarchal social order and assert their agency in these songs. It was found that whereas men’s songs emphasize hegemonic masculinity, striving to hold tenaciously to the reins of social and political control; women’s portray various attitudes to the masculinised social order as compliant, ambivalent, didactic and resistant. The first category tend to emphasize the womanist ideals and values that confer agency to the African/Igbo woman, the second adopts indirectness in this self-assertion, the third educates both sexes on the essence of accommodation and acceptance of these ideals while the last shows outright rejection of women self and imposed subordination. These songs thus become veritable genres for women to talk back at patriarchy and call for compromise, equity and complementarity of both sexes. The paper concludes that these songs speak for what can best be called “compromise feminism” in Igbo gender performance.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".