Gender, Religion, and the Media: An Analysis of Selected Media Representations of Fungisai’s Images and Music

Abstract

The study looks at the associations between gender, religion, and the media through an analysis of some media representations of selected images and music of the Zimbabwean gospel “diva,” Fungisai Zvakavapano Mashavave (hereon Fungisai). With close to two decades on the Zimbabwean gospel music scene, Fungisai is not only a celebrated musician, but her career also demonstrates the complex ways in which power operates on subjectivities that are governed by gender and religion. The study aims to unpack the ways in which this power is determined and endorsed and also how the female gospel musician’s image and music choices work to subvert this power. Homi Bhabha’s conceptualisation of hybridity as the “third space,” third culture, and a mixture of two cultures and identities, provides the theoretical guideline for this study’s arguments. As a female gospel musician, Fungisai’s image and music choices have come under scrutiny and have been subjected to socio-cultural and religious prescriptions which dictate often constricting perceptions of what it means to be an “ideal” woman. The study is particularly interested in the ways in which Fungisai navigates her way through various competing as well as colluding systems of power in order to forge emancipatory religious identities.