PERFORMING GENDERED RESISTANCE: AFRICAN WOMEN ARTISTES AND GENDER SUBVERSION IN AFROBEATS

Abstract

Afrobeats has become one of Africa’s most visible cultural exports, but its global ascent continues to unfold within masculinist traditions and gendered hierarchies. While scholarship on Afrobeats is expanding, far less attention has been paid to how women artistes negotiate, contest, and revise the genre’s dominant gender scripts. This article addresses that gap by examining how selected female artistes deploy lyrics, performance, and visual aesthetics to challenge normative expectations and assert cultural authority. Using a multimodal and interdisciplinary approach that combines lyrical discourse analysis, performance and visual analysis, and Africana womanist theory, the study analyzes four songs: Tiwa Savage’s Koroba (2020), Simi’s Woman (2021), Tiwa Savage and Asake’s Loaded (2022), and Amaarae’s Reckless & Sweet (2023). The analysis shows how these works interrogate and reframe cultural narratives of female respectability, economic ambition, sexual agency, and gendered silencing. Across the corpus, it identifies a spectrum of resistant strategies, including satirical reappropriation, aesthetic excess, and unapologetic affirmations of sensuality and financial autonomy mobilized to displace patriarchal common sense. The article maintains that Afrobeats constitutes a pivotal site where African women articulate emergent idioms of womanhood, recalibrate gender relations, and claim voice and visibility within a rapidly globalizing musical economy.