Fighting with proverbs; Kasena women’s (Re) Definition of female personhood through proverbial jesting

Abstract

I explore the way Kesena women from Northern Ghana exploit the joking relationship between a woman and her husband’s kin to subvert, contradict and deconstruct the sexist ideology in Kasem proverbs. I the process, they create “counter-proverbs” through which they establish their own signifying terms. I use the conception of the proverb as strategy, as well as the theoretical concepts of positionality, identification and performance to analyse their proverbs.