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Female Masculinity in Selected Shake Spearean and Nigerian Plays
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Humour Strategies and Acts in Nigerian Stand-Up Comedy
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Page will reload when a filter is selected or excluded.- Female masculinity 1 results 1
- Female masculinity is an expression of male gender traits in females. These masculine traits in female characters have received little attention from scholars of Western and Nigerian literary writings when compared to their focus on the socio cultural constructs of females as weak, soft and inferior. This study, therefore, examined different ways by which some female protagonists in selected Shakespearean and Nigerian plays express related masculine attributes with a view to determining the existence of masculinity features in the plays. The study adopted Derrida‟s Deconstruction and Nussbaum‟s model of Liberal Feminist theories. Eight drama texts were purposively selected based on their thematic affinities for revolutionary attributes in females. These include Shakespeare‟s Merchant of Venice (MV), The Twelfth Night (TN), Macbeth (MAC), and Romeo and Juliet (RJ); Osofisan’s Morountodun and Other Plays (MT), Red is freedom Road (RED), and Sofola’s Wedlock of the Gods (WED) and The Showers (SHO). Data were subjected to literary analysis. Females in Shakespearean and Nigerian drama engage in diverse forms of era-bound masculinity clues to control people and situations. These clues include dress code, voice act, assertiveness and body language. In dress code (transvestism), Viola (TN) and Portia (MV) remain in disguised position, an exclusively male attribute in the Shakespearean period, to win in the law court and to subvert the society‟s ethics of women‟s voicelessness; Titubi (MT) engage in a psychological warfare-fashioned disguise to suppress warlords in their aggressive states. Voice act (mannerisms, soliloquies, prophecies, persuasions) are subtly, but effectively used by all the protagonists. Juliet (RJ) and Viola (TN) use mannerisms and soliloquies with infectious love to exert forces that trap their lovers; Portia (MV), Ibidun (RED), Obinna (SHO) and Ogwoma (WED) use persuasions with doggedness to subvert their men; Lady Macbeth and the witches (MAC) use prophecies to subdue Macbeth. Assertiveness (persistence, coercion, control) cut across the texts. Portia (MV) and Juliet (RJ) use persistence to dismiss the potential suitors dictated by the society; Viola (TN) and Lady Macbeth (MAC) use coercion to assert wills on their men; Titubi (MT), Ibidun (RED), Obinna (SHO) and Ogwoma (WED) use persistence and revolutionary qualities to transform the lives of their people. Body language is displayed by all protagonists, except Ogwoma (WED), Portia (MV), Viola (TN) and Juliet (RJ) who use aesthetic outlooks to entrap their suitors to succumb to their wills. Titubi‟s (MT) use of beauty, courage and determination quell the militant peasants, making the riotous society peaceful. Portia, Viola, Juliet and Lady Macbeth exhibit isolated, individualistic clues while Titubi, Ibidun, Ogwoma and Obinna exhibit masculinities through alliance of assertiveness in the spirit of unionism. Females in Shakespearean plays display all the masculine attributes of dress code, voice act, assertiveness and body language clues, while those in Nigerian drama engage largely in assertive tendency clues. These largely semiotic features establish the era-bound differential exhibition of female masculinity in the dramatic works of Shakespeare, Sofola and Osofisan 1 results 1
- Humour acts 1 results 1
- Humour strategies 1 results 1
- Humour, which is associated with amusement and laughter, is produced in comic performances, particularly stand-up comedy; and Nigerian stand-up comedians (NSCs) use language to evoke humour and correct social vices. Existing studies have conceptualized humour, its use and sub-genres but have not given adequate attention to intentionality in Nigerian stand-up joking contexts. This study, therefore, investigated humour strategies and context in Nigerian stand-up comedy, in order to identify NSCs’ intentions and how they are realised in their performances. Humour acts, a model, which combined insights from general theory of verbal humour, multimodal theory, pragmatic acts, relevance, and contextual beliefs, was adopted as the theoretical framework. Data were purposively collected from video compact disc recordings of 28 routines of 16 male and three female NSCs in editions of Nite of a thousand laughs and thecomedyberlusconi, which were produced between 2009 and 2013. This is to reflect the gender composition of NSCs, focus on popular practising professional NSCs and avoid analysing their repeated joking stories. The data were subjected to pragmatic analysis. Humour strategies adopted by NSCs involved manipulating cultural assumptions, stereotypes, representations, corresponding concepts and projecting personal beliefs. The humour strategies included jokes, voicing, verbal and nonverbal cues. NSCs’ jokes were categorised into two: the physical appearance class and the socio-political and cultural situations class. NSCs presented jokes with comic and participants-in-the-joke voices. While comic voice was used to articulate comic image, comedians used participants-in-the-joke voice to dissociate themselves from the activity-in-the-joke. They articulated voicing differently through code-switching, reported speech, mimicry and change in pitch. Female NSCs favoured English as the matrix language of their narration, but male comedians primarily used Nigerian Pidgin. Verbal cues in their jokes included joke utterance, participants-in-the-joke, especially the targets of jokes, and activity-in-the-joke. Two kinds of nonverbal cues, physical and prosodic, were found in NSCs’ performances. The physical cues included gestures, which were categorised into iconic, deictic and metaphoric; posture, which was primarily open; dressing, which connoted professionalism, costume or affiliation with the audience; layout/space, which denoted NSCs’ superior conversational role; dance, which mirrored participants-in-the-joke actions; and pauses, which could be a transition relevance place pause or a non-transition-relevance place pause. Prosody was used to articulate comedians’ attitudes and indicate different performance functions: a change in pitch signalled a change in voice, accents were used for emphasising comedians’ focus, whereas intonation enhanced the textuality and musicality of narrations. The NSCs operationalized two contexts: context-in-the-joke and context-of-the-joke. The context-of the- joke consisted in assumptions shared with the audience like shared knowledge of code, shared situational knowledge, and shared cultural knowledge. By making mutually manifest context-in-the-joke in the context-of-the-joke, they instantiated humour acts like commencement, teasing, eliciting, reinforcement, appraisal and informing, which bifurcated into self-praising and self-denigrating. Nigerian stand-up comedians consciously design their humour strategies towards building a positive society. There is, therefore, the need to harness the views projected in the jokes of Nigerian stand-up comedians for national development 1 results 1
- Jokes 1 results 1
- Literature and gender 1 results 1
- Masculinity clues 1 results 1
- Nigerian plays 1 results 1
- Nigerian stand-up comedy 1 results 1
- Shakespearean plays 1 results 1
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