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Adamma Music and Dance Genre: Oddities and Paradoxical Subversion of Gender Binaries in the Igbo Socio-Cultural Milieu
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 November 2025
Abstract
The Igbo of Nigeria, a patriarchal ethnic nation, promotes gender binaries cultivated through cultural and social ideologies and contexts. Existing studies reveal how distinctions between the male and female sexes are deliberately entrenched, promoted and fairly accepted within the society through binary gender identities in all human endeavours. Paradoxically, however, the same culture seems to accept a form of oddity and subversive indigenous music, dance and costume culture presented as Adamma masquerade. This paper, by means of ethnographic, descriptive analysis and culture-owner interactions, interrogates the oxymoronic or self-contradictory notions on gender identities expressed through Adamma music and dance genre.
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- © The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the International Council for Traditions of Music and Dance
References
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