Abstract

This paper attends to the rhetorical and discursive constructions of gendered violence in Ghanaian digital culture surrounding the prospective nomination of women on Ghana’s ORAL task force – Operation Recover All Loot. As a charged rhetorical site of gendered and epistemic violence against women’’s acumen, this study unravels the deployment of meritocratic logics, ornamentalism, claims of intellectual ineptitude, tropes of competency, and tokenistic rhetorics to delegitimize women’s inclusion in high-stakes political offices in Ghana. Grounded in African Feminist Theory and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), this study evinces how public rhetors mobilize androcentric narratives on X to frame women as quintessential distractions and illegitimate political actors within anti-corruption initiatives. These discourses further establish a colonial gradient of neoliberalism, that constructs the political sphere as result-driven and inherently masculine, while co-naturalizing women as concerned with matters of beauty and aesthetics. The study calls for decolonial interventions nested within Indigenous public pedagogy and social media collective authorship for change.