A Relevance-Theoretic Analysis of Gendered Insults and the Policing of Female Sexuality among the Gĩkũyũ of Limuru Sub-County, Kiambu County, Kenya

Abstract

This study argues that ordinary verbal abuse works as a tool for controlling female sexual behaviour in a corpus of gendered insults in Gĩkũyũ (Eastern Bantu) of central Kenya by using a qualitative discourse-analytic approach. The study is based on the Relevance Theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1986/1995; Wilson & Sperber, 2004): insults directed at women are not just outbursts of anger but ostensive stimuli that rely on mutually manifest cultural assumptions - concerning circumcision, chastity, marriageability, and animality - to communicate strong disapproval with minimum linguistic effort. All ten insults are qualitatively analysed for the ad hoc concepts, explicatures, and implicatures they entail, and for the higher-level explicatures of the speakers' attitude they encode, from a larger set of insults developed in a doctoral thesis. The analysis reveals that the insult lexicon of Gĩkũyũ consistently reduces women to their genitals, their circumcision or their presumed sexual availability, thus reinforcing a patriarchy based on women's sexuality as communal property that is subject to surveillance. The study’s cognitive-pragmatic analysis of the gendered nature of verbal abuse adds to the sociolinguistics of an under-documented African language.