Short Abstract

This panel examines how African cinema represents, negotiates, and contests gender, sexuality and patriarchy by highlighting women’s agency, identities, masculinity, intersectionality and culturally specific forms of resistance, negotiation and social transformation.

Long Abstract

African cinema has increasingly moved beyond representations of women as passive victims, moral symbols or object of social judgement. Contemporary African films foreground women’s resilience, agency, creativity, voice, desire, leadership, and survival even when constrained by intersecting social, cultural, political and economic structures. This panel examines how African cinema reflects, negotiates, contests and reimagines gendered power within patriarchal societies. Drawing on nego-feminism, intersectionality, feminist film theory and decolonial approaches, the panel explores culturally specific forms of agency, relational autonomy, negotiation and resistance. The panel also interrogates the politics of cinematic gaze, representation of masculinity and feminity embodiment, and the role of spectatorship in shaping interpretations of gender and sexuality. The discussion will feature close readings of selected African films, including Citation (2020), King of Boys (2018), A Tribe called Judah (2023) and Funmilayo Ransome Kuti, (2024) from Nigeria, The Perfect Picture: Ten Years Later (2019) from Ghana Stories of Our Lives (2014) from Kenya; Wulu (2026) from Mali; and The Sacred Bonds (2021) from Chad. Through intersectional textual analysis, the panel argues that contemporary African cinema is not merely a reflection of patriarchal society but a contested cultural space in which gender norms, sexual identities, and structures of authority are reimagined. Selected case studies demonstrate how African filmmakers engage patriarchal power across domestic, political, religious, and communal spaces while articulating alternative possibilities of identity, belonging, intimacy, and social transformation.

Keywords: African cinema, Gender and sexuality, Patriarchy, African feminist theory, Intersectionality

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