Gendered language and identity in Kenya: from Bantu morphosyntax to urban slang performativity

This paper examines how gendered identity in Kenya is constructed, constrained, and reconfigured across three linguistic formations: Bantu morphosyntactic structures, Kiswahili national discourse, and urban youth slang. While many Kenyan Bantu languages lack grammatical gender marking, this structural neutrality does not produce gender neutrality in social practice. Drawing on feminist theory, African gender scholarship, and linguistic anthropology, this paper argues that gender in Kenyan linguistic contexts operates primarily at the level of discourse, indexicality, and language ideology rather than morphology. The paper develops a theoretical model that integrates Butlerian performativity, African feminist critiques of colonial gender epistemologies, and indexicality theory. It proposes that Kenyan gendered language practices move across three phases: structural containment, nationalist moralization, and urban re-signification. The analysis contributes to Gender Studies by centreing African linguistic structures in debates that have historically privileged Indo-European grammatical systems.