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.
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Mobilizações de mulheres maduras na África recorrem à nudez em protesto para avergonhar e punir adversários masculinos, vinculadas a crenças sobre espíritos que podem causar impotência, doença e morte; casos como os protestos de 2011 de mulheres na Costa do Marfim e ações em Soweto aparecem como exemplos concretos. Diabate reúne imagens e textos de mídias variadas — redes sociais, cinema, jornalismo e ficção — para analisar como essas ações produzem espaços de resistência em contextos de pressão sociopolítica. O conceito de "naked agency" propõe ler a nudez coletiva como forma oscilante de poder e vulnerabilidade na era biopolítica, deslocando leituras simplistas de impotência.
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