Images of African Women in the News

 Kate Azuka Omenugha

Kate’s research ‘Constructing ‘Africanness’: Cross-cultural Reading of Images of African Women in the News’ aims to illustrate that the current dominant feminist view of gender relations regarding content and images in the media is based on the idea of a ‘male bias’, which Kate suggests, is predominantly cultural.

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 Omenugha is targeting the ‘ordinary’ woman. The ‘Other’ of the feminist discourse is examined in relation to ways of resisting the dominant knowledge as established currently, including the ideological content of the news. She uses Nigerian and British newspapers to explore the construction of images of African women in the news and the different cultural positions adopted by Nigerian and British women newsreaders as they decode these images.

 Using multiple approaches to the study of the media and combining both quantitative and qualitative methodologies Ms. Kate Azuka Omenugha aims to find the dominant images and their underlying meanings of African women in both countries. More importantly, she is looking at the cross-cultural ‘readings’ of these images by women newsreaders in Nigeria and Britain and is analysing the relationship between these ‘readings’ and the dominant view of the ‘African woman’ in the news.

 Ms. Kate Azuka Omenugha is assessing the relevance of the Feminist European tradition, currently the dominant tradition in discourses of gender and the media, in particular when analysing the creation of the image of the ‘African Woman’ and concludes that the Feminist European tradition is culturally based and therefore of limited relevance to feminist tradition in general if applied without reference to African Feminist thought.
 For more information on this subject please contact directly Ms. Kate Azuka Omenugha at the University of Gloucester, Cheltenham using the following email address: Komenugha@glos.ac.uk