Ikú l’Obìnrin – ‘Women are death!’: An African radical feminist subversion of masculinity and power in Nigerian cinema

Abstract

The Nigerian film industry, Nollywood, has become a constitutive locus for the (re)construction and contestation of gender identities. Through the combined frameworks of embodiment theory and African radical feminist thought, this study examines the Yoruba Nollywood film Ikú l’Obìnrin (literally ‘Women are death’). Employing sociocultural close reading, it argues that the film reconfigures male sexual impotence from an individual dysfunction into a symbolic rupture, where the ‘death’ of virility indexes the collapse of patriarchal legitimacy. The analysis further demonstrates how sexual impotence is strategically exploited to subvert and reconfigure masculine authority, positioning sexual performance – its presence or absence – as a volatile terrain where power is negotiated and contested. By casting the home as a radical arena of gendered struggle, the study extends African radical feminist debates beyond public protest to take serious considerations for intimate spaces where sovereignty is covertly policed, reversed and reimagined. Further expanding conversations on how shame and the destabilization of masculine sexual potency figure as radical instruments for reversing authority within intransigent patrifocal spaces, it pinpoints alike the disruptive possibilities and the ethical ambivalence of embodied radical feminist agency.