Resisting a “Culture of Dependence”: Sexual Agency and Empowerment in Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah
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This article explores sexual empowerment in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s third novel Americanah (2013). Adichie’s novel connects violence against women and racism in America through the story of Nigerian protagonists Ifemelu and Obinze, and their love and growth throughout their separate departures to America and Britain. In particular, Ifemelu’s adjustment to America is informed by a newly developing awareness of racism, which is initiated by an experience of sexual assault and trauma. Adichie portrays this experience as an American capitalist variation of the systemic gender inequality that is already prevalent in Nigeria, which is portrayed as a “culture of dependence” among Nigerian women aggressively seeking material compensation from relationships with wealthy men, a system undergirded by wealth and power, to which women are subjected even as they seemingly benefit from romantic relationships. In a contemporary postfeminist society that assumes that structurally oppressive conditions against women have largely been removed, women are considered empowered in their sexuality, their sexual choices assumed to be freely chosen. In her novel, however, Adichie depicts the ways in which women’s individual sexual choices are shaped by structural circumstances that compel women’s sexual commodification in a male-based system. This article thus examines the ways in which Adichie exposes the precarity of women’s sexual agency within a system of gender inequality that spans the United States and Nigeria, demonstrating that individual choice is not always an indication of agency or power when it comes to female sexuality.
Abstract
This article explores sexual empowerment in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s third novel Americanah (2013). Adichie’s novel connects violence against women and racism in America through the story of Nigerian protagonists Ifemelu and Obinze, and their love and growth throughout their separate departures to America and Britain. In particular, Ifemelu’s adjustment to America is informed by a newly developing awareness of racism, which is initiated by an experience of sexual assault and trauma. Adichie portrays this experience as an American capitalist variation of the systemic gender inequality that is already prevalent in Nigeria, which is portrayed as a “culture of dependence” among Nigerian women aggressively seeking material compensation from relationships with wealthy men, a system undergirded by wealth and power, to which women are subjected even as they seemingly benefit from romantic relationships. In a contemporary postfeminist society that assumes that structurally oppressive conditions against women have largely been removed, women are considered empowered in their sexuality, their sexual choices assumed to be freely chosen. In her novel, however, Adichie depicts the ways in which women’s individual sexual choices are shaped by structural circumstances that compel women’s sexual commodification in a male-based system. This article thus examines the ways in which Adichie exposes the precarity of women’s sexual agency within a system of gender inequality that spans the United States and Nigeria, demonstrating that individual choice is not always an indication of agency or power when it comes to female sexuality.
참고문헌 (15)
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