Ibukunolu Olodude

Biography

Dr. Ibukunolu Olodude, is a Researcher and Lecturer in the Department of Linguistics and African Languages, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria. He holds a B.A. degree from Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria, where he graduated as the best male student in the Faculty of Arts during his set. He also possesses MA and PhD degrees in Linguistics from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria.

His doctoral research is multidisciplinary and intersects the fields of Linguistics, Religion and Migration. His areas of specialization are Sociolinguistics, Applied Linguistics, African Studies, Discourse Analysis, and Gender/Sexuality Studies, while his research interests include the intersections of language with religion, identity, public health, migration, ecology and gender/sexuality studies.

His articles have appeared in several top journals including the Journal of British Academy, Dialectologia, Journal of Culture and Ideas, Yoruba Studies Review and a book published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. He has attended and presented papers in several international conferences and workshops, including the British Academy funded 2023 African Ecologies workshop and 2025 Gender, Sexuality and Agency workshop held in Nairobi, Kenya; the 2023 African Association for the Study of Religions (AASR) conference held in Nairobi, Kenya; the 2024 African Studies Association (ASA-UK) conference in Oxford; and the 2024 British Association for the Study of Religions (BASR) conference in Leeds, UK.

He is a member of the West African Linguistic Society (WALS) and the African Association for the Study of Religions (AASR). He is a Fellow of the Ife Institute of Advanced Studies (IIAS).

Project Information

Project Title: “Is Queerness Truly Un-African?”: Disentangling the Complexities of Gender Binaries and Sexuality in Yoruba

Understandings of, and contestations about, gender and sexuality in contemporary Africa are entangled in the web of globalisation. Both in Africa and the West, queerness is often depicted as “un-African” and is understood in Eurocentric forms. This project therefore explores African queer epistemologies through a sociological, ethnographic and linguistic lens by finding answers to the following questions: (i) In what way does Yoruba gendered proverbial expressions articulate, or silence non-normative gender and sexual categories? (ii) How does queer individuals in the Yoruba society interpret the gendered proverbs in the expression of their gender orientations and sexualities?

The focus is on proverbs because of their prominent roles in conveying the religious, philosophical and cultural experiences of the Yoruba people. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) will be carried out on selected Yoruba gendered proverbs to unpack their semantic and contextual import about the realities of gender/sexual orientations in Africa. I also conduct in-depth interviews with selected queer Yoruba individuals in Ibadan, Southwest Nigeria, to get their interpretations of the gendered proverbs, vis-à-vis their personal stories of their gender/sexual expressions.

My mentor on this Visiting Fellowship project is Professor Adriaan van Klinken, School of Philosophy, Religion and the History of Science. He is an internationally leading scholar in the field of African queer studies and currently working on Nigerian literature and culture.