Citation:
Jemiluyi, Omotayo. 2025. “Performing Toxic Womanhood: Patriarchy, Infidelity, and the ‘Good Woman’ Trope in Yoruba Nollywood.” Women’s Studies, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/00497878.2025.2520324
Summary:
This article interrogates the performance of “toxic womanhood” in the Yoruba Nollywood film Tade Idan, arguing that the film constructs female suffering not as tragedy but as moral virtue. Using African feminist frameworks and cultural analysis, the study examines how patriarchal expectations are normalized through cinematic storytelling. The protagonist of the film is idealized for her silence, endurance, and constant forgiveness, even in the face of repeated emotional neglect and infidelity. Meanwhile, the husband’s misconduct is softened through humor and spiritual rationalization. By critiquing the ways that women’s emotional labor is moralized on screen, the article contributes to broader conversations about gender, representation, and the politics of “good womanhood” in African media. It calls for more emancipatory portrayals, narratives that affirm women’s dignity, agency, and freedom from relational suffering.
Behind the Work:
If you’ve ever watched a film that unsettled you, either because of violence, shock value, or the subtle way it normalized harm, you’ll understand how Tade Idan made me feel. I was watching, as I often do, Nollywood movies to relax or keep my creative energy going while working. But this time, I couldn’t just shake the discomfort. In Tade Idan, one of the central characters who is a devoted wife is repeatedly betrayed, emotionally neglected, and humiliated by her husband’s serial infidelities. What even disturbed me more was the way the film framed it; the wife’s silence and loyalty were portrayed as her strength and her moral triumph and her pain was celebrated.
So, I began to ask myself: What message does this send to women watching this? What does it teach men? That’s when the phrase toxic womanhood came to me, a term to describe how women are praised for enduring the very things that diminish them. I wrote this article to name that pattern, to challenge it, and to call for better; for portrayals that affirm women not through their suffering, but through their full humanity.
Key Ideas:
- The film frames women’s endurance of infidelity and disrespect as moral excellence, contributing to the good woman trope.
- The husband’s promiscuous behavior is trivialized and justified through spirituality and humor, softening accountability.
- Toxic womanhood is coined to describe how women’s suffering is aestheticized and moralized.
- The article calls for liberatory storytelling that resists patriarchal glorification of endurance and celebrates women’s freedom and agency.
Relevance:
This article contributes to African feminist criticism, Nollywood studies, gender representation, and cultural discourse around marriage and womanhood in African societies. It will resonate with scholars, activists, and creators invested in shifting how women are represented on screen and in cultural memory.
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