Date of Award
12-1-2025
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
Department
Philosophy
First Advisor
Auxier, Randall
Abstract
This dissertation investigates the postcolonial condition of Nigerian woman through a critical philosophical engagement with feminist theory, focusing particularly on Simone de Beauvoir’s existentialism and Irigaray’s ethics of sexual difference. It interrogates the historical processes through which gender became the basis of hierarchy in the Nigerian society, arguing that colonial and patriarchal override precolonial forms of relationality—marked by dual-sex relationship and age-based hierarchies—into rigid, male-dominated structures of authority and representation. Drawing also on Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí’s critique of western gender epistemologies, the work contextualizes the Nigerian woman’s experience within a broader matrix of colonial imposition, cultural displacement, and epistemic violence. This dissertation examines how institutions and cultural norms limit Nigerian women to immanence. Some of the limitations placed on Nigerian women are manifest in practices such as domestic violence, female circumcision, and the ritual subjugation of widows. In response, the dissertation advances a philosophical call for a reconstitution of Nigerian femininity, grounded in Beauvoir’s notion of transcendence and Irigaray’s ethics of sexual difference. Rather than advocating for universalist gender equality modeled on masculine norms, I argued for equity: a culturally embedded framework that affirms women’s autonomy, subjectivity, and embodied difference. The work envisions a postcolonial Nigerian woman who is neither bound by inherited subservience nor alienated by imported feminist paradigms, but capable of rearticulating her identity in terms that reflect both existential freedom and cultural rootedness.
Access
This dissertation is Open Access and may be downloaded by anyone.