Challenging Patriarchy: The Feminist Perspective in Stella Oyedepo’s Brain Has No Gender

The feminist goal is to usher in an integrated human society, one that is free of gender imbalance. The primary aim of feminism is to expunge from society all forms of male dominance, oppression, subjugation and marginalization of women in all aspects of human existence — social, political, religious, economic, intellectual and cultural, on the basis of sex. This paper analyzed Stella Oyedepo’s Brain Has No Gender, explicating how patriarchy and its institutions privilege men to the disadvantage of women in society, using the interpretative and deductive methodology. Stella Oyedepo is a feminist playwright who creates strong-willed, stubborn and self-assertive women who rise to challenge patriarchal beliefs and values which hemline them. She does not believe in the superiority of either of the sexes and is in strong opposition to sexual injustice meted out on women in society. Oyedepo has therefore, through Brain Has No Gender undertaken the challenge of the feminist scholar to find the ground to argue effectively for the end of cultural/sexist oppression of all women. All deleterious traditional cultural practices affecting women should be discarded as most of these were carried out in the pristine past. As a feminist, she is guided by the tenets of African feminism. Man is not the measure of humanity but men and women are. It is therefore imperative for a life of complementarity to exist between the sexes for a more harmonious existence and societal development.