Naked Agency: Genital Cursing and Biopolitics in Africa (Theory in Forms)

Naminata Diabate explores how the deployment of defiant nakedness by mature women in Africa challenges longstanding assumptions about women's political agency. "Baring genitalia, or the threat thereof, as a form of protest has appeared with increasing frequency across sub-Saharan African countries since the 1990s. Naked agency provides a conceptual framework for reading African women's "defiant disrobing" not as a stable, singular event, but rather as part of an ongoing struggle between victimhood and sovereignty. An act that makes claims to ritual and political power that is nevertheless performed out of abjection and vulnerability to state- and locally-sanctioned death, naked protest is fundamentally biopolitical, but also offers forms of agency that trouble the liberal subject. Diabate therefore offers ways to understand protests as situated performances. Diabate's analysis primarily considers media accounts of naked protests, from films to autobiographical accounts, novels to fine art, and beyond, bringing into focus the work cultural production does in representing naked protest. Her book situates the particularities of each instance of women's naked protest within the interactions of the indigenous, the local, and the global, emphasizing the contingent, collective, and triumphant forms of agency produced through insurgent nakedness." -- Provided by publisher Across Africa, mature women have for decades mobilized the power of their nakedness in political protest to shame and punish male adversaries. This insurrectionary nakedness, often called genital cursing, owes its cultural potency to the religious belief that spirits residing in women's bodies can be unleashed to cause misfortune in their targets, including impotence, disease, and death. In Naked Agency, Naminata Diabate analyzes these collective female naked protests in Africa and beyond to broaden understandings of agency and vulnerability. Drawing on myriad cultural texts from social media and film to journalism and fiction, Diabate uncovers how women create spaces of resistance during socio-political duress, including such events as the 2011 protests by Ivoirian women in Côte d'Ivoire and Paris as well as women's disrobing in Soweto to prevent the destruction of their homes. Through the concept of naked agency, Diabate explores fluctuating narratives of power and victimhood to challenge simplistic accounts of African women's helplessness and to show how they exercise political power in the biopolitical era.