International Journal of Gender & Women's Studies

The Language of Nigerian Women in Politics: An Ideological Reconstruction
Balogun, Temitope Abiodun (PhD)

Abstract
Women participation in politics in Nigeria and many parts of Africais lower compared to men. Inrecent times, women consciousness of politics, campaigning and contesting elective positions are improving. These roles have enjoyed scant attention among existing literature. This paper, therefore, investigates language use on posters of selected female politicians towards elections so as to identify their context, themes, linguistic features, and strategies. Data were collected from fourteen campaign posters of selected female politicians from Lagos, Ogun, Oyo, and Osun between 2007 and 2015. Six campaign posters of three female political leaders from Liberia, America, and Germany were also used. Analysis was carried out in line with Van Dyke‟s (1999) model of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA).The Nigerian female politicians appealed to religious sentiments, family heritage and gender-based emotion, unlike their counterparts, whose emphases were intellectual and technical competence, purposeful agenda, and experience which promotes their suitability or otherwise for the positions aspired. Nigerian women need to de-emphasise the sentiments of gender, family affiliation and emotion as campaign‟s strategies through which they can secure election victory and significantly contribute towards building a technologically, economically, and ideally democratically developed society.

Full Text: PDF      DOI: 10.15640/ijgws.v6n2a4