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Articles

Vol. 3 No. 1 (2016): June 2016

The Semiotics of Feminism and Nigeria’s Cultural Identity in Nollywood: Women’s Cot in Focus

Submitted
December 24, 2016
Published
2016-12-24

Abstract

This paper is a critical analysis of feminism as it relates to Nollywood – the huge movie industry of Nigeria and Africa. The contextual and textual methods of research as they apply to the production of the video film – Women’s Cot – are adopted. The paper also theorizes about the concepts of semiotics/structuralism and culture, which elicits the syntagmatic and paradigmatic investigation of the film‘s scripts and video forms. Findings show that in spite of the challenges faced in the struggle for the emancipation of women from harmful traditional practices (owing to egoistic socio-political
aggrandizement), Women’s Cot is able to mirror the triumph of women‘s liberation from the cult of feministic diabolism. The paper recommends that in the fight against devious practices, women must extricate themselves from the cult of a few privileged women whose behavior portends no iota of altruism.

Keywords: Nigeria, Nollywood, Women’s Cot, Cultural Identity, Semiotics, Feminism.