Language and Power: Deconstructing the Social Construction of Masculinity and Embracing Femininity- was to be published in Writing the University Journal Fall 2020 Sacramento State University. 

In Language and Power, Fairclough (1989) works to correct a widespread underestimation of the significance of language in the production, maintenance, and change of social relations of power, advocating for academic scholars to use Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to examine language and texts. CDA is a critical study of how power is exercised through language (p. 1). To examine how people in power control and exercise language, Fairclough (1989) writes, consciousness is the first step towards emancipation, and recognition of unjust normalization. (p. 1)

Using Fairclough (1989) theory of language and power, this critical essay examines how Igbo language and social norms define and restrict gender performances of masculinity and femininity in Chinua Achebe’s (1959) novel Things Fall Apart and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s (2014) autobiographical essay, We Should All Be Feminists. I reveal linguistic inequities that are fundamental to the social asymmetries between Igbo males and females. By analyzing Igbo culture pre-British colonization and post-British colonization in contemporary Igbo Nigerian culture, I examine how linguistic inequities have manifested over time. Further, by juxtaposing the language and social experiences of characters from Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, with excerpts from Adichie’s We Should All Be Feminists, I analyze and unpack linguistic utterances from Igbo language that are rooted in the political ideology of historical Igbo culture that restrict human expressions of femininity in Igbo males while at the same time restricting expressions of masculinity in Igbo females. I shed light on how these linguistic utterances and sociopolitical aspects of language contribute to the continued struggle of Igbo males and females embracing the coexistence, balance, and harmony of masculinity and femininity within the human self.