‘Her market has closed’: Critical rethinking of gender stereotypes in selected Igbo idioms

Abstract

The paper takes a survey of Igbo idioms on gender to ascertain how these canons of cultural wisdom and philosophy represent the sexes. A total of ninety-six idioms, thirty-six about men and sixty about women, were analyzed using Lakoff's (1993) conceptual metaphor theory which sees one entity as ontologically related to another in a kind of cross-domain mapping, causing semantic tension in their interpretation. The observed encodings tend to cast individuals in strict, highly limiting gender categories and stereotypic positions. Our findings also revealed that gender stereotypes in these idioms appear to be polarized on the positive-male, negative-female metaphors as evidenced in the conceptual schema of perpetuator-terminator, owner-property, buyer-commodity, unlimited time-limited time, provider-consumer, sower-nurturer stereotypes, terminologies formulated on the bases of the observed conceptual mappings. These gender categorizations tend to position women in the domestic and repressed sphere leaving the public and liberal operating space to the males, seemingly negating the postmodern concepts of gender equality and women empowerment. The work argues that these idioms have become clichéd in the present age because of their conventional stable forms and need to be recontextualized to expunge these apparently rigid polarizations that may hinder the harnessing of human optimal potentials.

Keywords: idioms, gender, stereotypes, gender equality, metaphor, cross-domain mappings