Maternal Bodies in Militant Protest: Leymah Gbowee and the Rhetorical Agency of African Motherhood

Abstract

This essay analyzes how Leymah Gbowee and other Liberia Mass Action for Peace (LMAP) activists drew on the cultural power of African motherhood to engage in militant protest. Framing the movement as one motivated by a concern for their children, these women employed three specific rhetorical tactics to demand an end to the fourteen-year civil war: (1) repositioning women and children as the war's real victims; (2) threatening to bare their bodies in deliberate public nakedness; and (3) constituting the political agency of ordinary women both in Liberia and around the world. These militant maternal protests positioned the LMAP activists as coherent political agents empowered by their literal and symbolic participation in Liberian performances of African motherhood. Their actions suggest the rhetorical potential of militant maternal protests in countries that exclude women from political involvement.