Popular culture and the male gaze: Objectification of women in contemporary Kenyan music videos

Abstract

Music videos have become one of the most widely consumed media forms among young audiences in Kenya, with genres such as Gengetone, Afropop, and Afrobeats attracting millions of views across digital platforms and raising substantive questions about how women are represented in these audio-visual texts. This study examined the visual objectification of women in contemporary Kenyan music videos released between 2021 and 2026. Using male gaze theory and objectification theory, a structured quantitative content analysis of 60 music videos was conducted across three genres, namely Gengetone, Afropop, and Kenyan Afrobeats, stratified by lead artist gender. Six coding variables were used to analyze each coded female figure, and these included camera framing, camera angle, body-part focus, costuming, narrative role, and choreography. Findings revealed that male-led videos highly objectified women, as evidenced by considerably higher rates of sexualized body-part focus, decorative narrative roles, and sexually suggestive choreography (47.6%, 42.9%, and 23.8%, respectively) than female-led videos (14.3%, 4.8%, and 4.8%), indicating that lead artist gender is the strongest predictor of fair representation of women. Among the three genres analyzed, Gengetone showed the greatest use of techniques that objectify women. The study’s findings point to increasing female creative leadership in music video production as the most determinative factor in fair representation, while also calling on industry stakeholders to attend to genre-level practices, particularly in Gengetone, where objectifying tendencies are most fully articulated