Social Identities and Male Prejudice in Emmanuel Ifediata’s Slay Queen

Abstract

This research has examined the patterns of male prejudice in Emmanuel Ifediata’s Slay Queen (2019). With a glaring evidence, the study has investigated intra gender and inter gender institutional abuse based on economic exploitation, verbal abuse, discrimination, stereotype and manipulation as patterns of male oppression. The study employed Freud’s Psychoanalysis and Marxist Critical Theory in interpreting the male protagonist’s patterns of oppression in the proletariat domain. The paper has interpreted Conscientization as a major concept in Marxist Critical theory which gears towards critical social consciousness—a social concept that aids in gaining a social understanding of our world, especially in exposing oppressive orientation against the male gender. This research has also discovered through the interpretation of Freud’s psychoanalysis that prejudice is a tormenting form of oppression—an injustice which controls the oppressed to act in a powerless manner which could be conscious or unconscious. The implication could result to internal conflicts or acts of physical or psychological violence.