Abstract
Gender is the state of being male or female, but in most cases it is defined with reference to social and cultural differences rather than biological differences. Gender is not determined biologically as a result of sexual characteristics of either women or men; it is rather constructed socially and culturally. This socio-cultural construct has submerged and suppressed the female folk in all spheres of life. Their literary history is conceived and perceived as subterranean or undercurrent, characterized by the vocabulary of silence, absence and hiding views with one of revelation, uncovering and discovery. The birth of female consciousness has interrogated the place of patriarchy in the African society. Patriarchy has created an imbalance situation in African socio-cultural and political system, and this as presented in African creative works, has disrupted the harmony between the two sexes. This essay argues that, with the polemics and advocacy of women??s right, there has been a shift in paradigm in the representation and presentation of female characters in African contemporary writings by both male and female authors. The exclusivity of the dominant tradition established by the male folk has raised a plethora of questions regarding the social and cultural construction of women in African literary works. No longer silent or hidden, female characters and female authors take on life and energy and are conceived as heroic, revolutionary, radical, passionate and subversive. Analyzing Bole Butake??s Lake God (1986) and Osonye Tess Onwueme??s Then She Said It (2002) from the feminist and deconstructionist standpoints, this essay revealed that, the deconstruction of the discourses of gender politics against androcentricism has placed some African contemporary dramatic texts within the gynocentric perspective. Thus, this study de-narrativizes the meta- narrative of patriarchy and gender politics that represents women as inadequate and irrelevant. Consequently, the two plays unfold certain astute anxieties regarding gender and sex in the various shades of a culture unable to adjust to the swiftly changing socio-political and cultural calculus of the worlds of Lake God and Then She Said It.
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