Infundibulum Scientific

Titre de l'article

STIGMATIZING TO EVANGELIZE? A CRITICAL APPRAISAL OF DEMONIZED WOMEN IN AFRICAN PENTECOSTAL CHRISTIAN FILMS

Auteur.e.s

Olubunmi O. ASHAOLU , .

Résumé

This article focuses on how proselytizing Pentecostal Christian film directors vilify African women depicting them, in the mysterious and spiritual realm, as demonic agents to contend with. In this realm, constructed through the power of patriarchal ideology and enhanced film technology, “lies the power of religion […] to assume a reality of its own” (B. Meyer 2003 p. 1) to propagate evangelization. This article draws its major theoretical backbone from an in-depth ethnographic study of African women/demonology and Pentecostalism. From a purely ethno-feminist literary standpoint, the paper explores the representation of the spiritual roles given to African female characters in Yatin (2002) and Fierce War (2017), two films from francophone and Anglophone Africa. One question stands out in the course of this research. Why must films directors rely on depicting female characters as forces of darkness, whose characters must be sacrificed as devil advocates to ensure new converts to Pentecostal Christianity? Drawing from the compelling significance of Pentecostal evangelism, the paper argues that in the films under study, female characters are mostly accorded evil roles such that cast them as the demonic ones that occupy the axis of evil, torment fellow characters and thus deserve to be vanquished before evangelism could take place. The paper concludes by advocating for a re-consideration of strong anti-feminist patriarchal inclined culture in film evangelism. It calls for an informed and neutral gender sensitive scripts in the process of apportioning roles to female characters in evangelical films. Keywords: Women, African, demon, evangelization, born-again, Pentecostal, film.