The Guy Was a Toxic Player: The Discourse of Heterosexual Non-Marital-Relationship Breakups among Female Youth in Nigeria

ABSTRACT

This article examines the subjective narratives and experiences of urban female youth in heterosexual-relationship breakups in the Calabar metropolis, southeastern Nigeria, where they “do gender” and reposition female heterosexuality in order to gain access to new social spaces. Drawing on ethnographic qualitative data sourced through purposive sampling and semi-structured interviews conducted with 30 participants who had unilaterally cut romantic ties in the previous eighteen months, I interrogate from participants’ nuanced perspectives their previous relationship quality, causes of breakups, and social and structural factors that informed their decision to quit from the account of “doing gender” – a social-constructionist approach to gender which conceives the phenomenon as a routine accomplishment embedded in everyday interaction that recreates and reinforces the cultural meaning of gender. The results, based on linguistic evidence, demonstrate that narratives of gender equality, access to secure livelihood, and needs for emotional well-being as motivators for ending relationships reflect an agentic shift in the way young Nigerian women enact gendered scripts in heterosexual partnerships. The study concludes that breakups provide avenues for participants to exercise autonomy in decision-making and to negotiate gender and sexuality under conditions of patriarchal dominance and inequality in-line with broader social changes.

KEYWORDS:

• Gendered youth
• heterosexuality
• doing gender
• youth language
• patriarchy
• Nigeria

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to three anonymous reviewers of this article who contributed insights and perspectives that really improved the quality of the paper. I am grateful to all the participants who were involved in this study and to the field assistants, Idorenyin Attah and Francis Bassey, who arranged all interviews and recordings. I thank Heaven Nkoyo for reference assistance and Prof. Basile Ndjio (University of Douala, Cameroon) for critiquing an earlier draft of the manuscript. The remaining errors are mine.

Ethical Approval

Approval was obtained from the Ethics Committee of the University of Calabar. The procedure used in this study adheres to the tenets of the Declaration of Helsinki. Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study. The author affirms that human research participants provided informed consent for the publication of the data they generated for the research.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The authors have no funding to report.

Notes on contributors

Eyo O. Mensah

Eyo O. Mensah is a Professor of Anthropological Linguistics at the University of Calabar, and a Marie S. Curie Senior Fellow and Guest Professor at the Freiburg Institute of Advanced Studies (FRAIS), University of Freiburg. His areas of research interest include language and sexuality, language and identity, youth language, syntax, and pragmatics. His latest publications have appeared in English Today, Language Matters, Anthropological Quarterly, Journal of Religion in Africa, Gender Issues, Semiotica, Sexualities and Language Sciences. He is the general editor of the Journal of the Linguistic Association of Nigeria (JOLAN). Email: [email protected]