Breaking the conspiracy of silence: Representations of social actors in the online narratives of Nigerian rape victims
Vol.17,No.2(2024)
Discourse and Interaction
This paper explores discursive strategies Nigerian victims of rape deploy in narrating their traumatic experiences. Data for the study comprise purposively selected online narratives of two major Nigerian rape victims circulated on Pulse.ng and Nairaland in 2018 and 2019 respectively. The data are analysed qualitatively using van Leeuwen’s social actors’ model, a framework that describes how participants of social practices are represented in discourse. The analysis reveals that the rape survivors deployed different mechanisms of representation of social actors, such as nomination, categorisation, beneficialisation, and honorification in their narratives to assert themselves, construct power, expose perpetrators and contest specific institutionalised forces that suppress them. These are done to challenge repressive traditions thus, breaking the culture of silence and revealing the dynamic nature rape discourse is assuming in Nigeria. The paper concludes that the discursive strategies highlighted in the selected narratives evince self-representations of rape victimhood.
rape; culture of silence; stigmatisation; traumatic asylum; victimhood; personal online narratives; repressive tradition; digital activism; social actors; self-representation
Oluwabunmi Oyebode
Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife
Oluwabunmi Opeyemi Oyebode, a fellow of the African Humanities Program (AHP), is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of English, Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria. Her research interests include (multimodal) discourse analysis, media communication and applied linguistics. She has published articles in reputable journals in local and international outlets, including Journal of Pan African Studies, Discourse Studies, Discourse & Society, Discourse & Communication, Metaphor & Symbol and Visual Communication.
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