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While some research has been carried out on gender and religion in some parts of
Africa, studies are yet to attend to how gender perspectives are expressed in the
Christian theo-religious context (in Nigeria). This paper addresses this gap by
investigating the gender linguistic and discoursal resources deployed by Nigerian
theological seminary students to orient to gender beliefs. Two orthodox religious
institutions, the Nigerian Baptist Theological Seminary, Ogbomoso and the Dominican
Institute, Ibadan were purposively sampled. Seventy eight essays, written by all the
students (72 males, 6 females) in the two institutions, on 'God and Humans' were
collected. The essays were subjected to linguistic and pragma-discoursal analyses,
with insights from dominance and postmodernist gender theories, discourse tracking
and critical discourse analysis. Written communication in theo-religious contexts in
Nigeria projects two terms: patriarchal and gender-neutral/balanced. Both male and
female genders opt for patriarchal terms to refer to God and humans. Men employ the
items subjectively to assert independence and, sometimes, gender superiority; women
use them objectively to associate with the male group. Nominal and pronominal
gender-neutral/balanced items are used by the two groups. Men either draw on the
tokens exclusively to subsume women or inclusively to cover both men and women.
Women engage the items inclusively by involving both groups and submissively by
presuming presenting neutral tokens with patriarchal items. Gendered language used
by seminary students largely reflects the traditional social and religious roles of men
and women in the larger Southwestern Nigerian society. Future research can compare
gendered language in the theo-religious institution with that in medical, academic or
commercial institutions. It can also compare gender perspectives among male and
female students in selected African and Western seminaries.
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