Audience perception of the reality in the representations of women in Nigerian films

This study examines the reactions of audiences to the representation of women in Nigerian films by investigating how audience, particularly female viewers, perceive and read the representations. The study suggests that the portrayals of women in Nigerian films are a representation of the dominant ideas about women, which are created and valued by the discursive practices and cultural system of Nigerian society. Since these discursive practices or dominant ideas about women are ideologically biased, the representations of women that are mainly drawn from them represented only a fraction of the reality of women’s lives. There is a marked difference in the ways women with high education and those with little or no education perceive Nigerian films and their representations of women. This difference is related to the way each group of women understands, reads, interprets and identifies/dis-identifies with the meanings of the images in the films. The study recommends that there is a need to challenge and change the pattern of the representations of women in Nigerian films.