Pop Music, Literature and Gender: Perceptions of Womanhood in Grande’s “God Is a Woman” and Achebe’s Things Fall Apart

Abstract

Pop music has become a platform where discourses of gender are analyzed and challenged. Ariana Grande’s “God Is a Woman” joins the ongoing conversation to challenge the status quo by creating a narrative that showcases the supremacy and importance of the woman in the society. However, this narrative has been in place in the pre-colonial Igbo society where the woman occupies significant positions and status in the society. This society recognizes the supremacy of the woman and an appropriate reverence is given to her. This study suggests that the concept behind the song and its video is in close resemblance with the way the precolonial Igbo society views women by examining the status of women in the society represented in Things Fall Apart. Even though the novel shows strains of the patriarchal society, it has not failed to showcase the important status of the woman as recognized by the precolonial Igbo society. This paper does so by conducting an interpretive and explicative analysis of the novel and highlighting how it is in tandem with the feminist ideology that is propagated in the music video. This research is an attempt to demonstrate how the feminist agenda propagated in “God Is a Woman” resonates with the important roles of women in Things Fall Apart both socio-politically, religiously and economically.

Keywords

• womanhood
• feminism
• womanism