Fighting with proverbs; Kasena women’s (Re) Definition of female personhood through proverbial jesting
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Date
2009
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Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Research in African Literatures. 3(40): 74-95
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.
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Keywords
Proverbs, women, Ghana, joking relationships