Naked Agency: Genital Cursing and Biopolitics in Africa by Naminata Diabate

Abstract

Reviewed by: Naked Agency: Genital Cursing and Biopolitics in Africa by Naminata Diabate Chijioke K. Onah Naked Agency: Genital Cursing and Biopolitics in Africa BY NAMINATA DIABATE Duke UP, 2020. xii + 259 pp. ISBN 9781478006886 paper. Naminata Diabate's Naked Agency engages the performance of the gesture of female naked protest in Africa. Diabate troubles what she sees as the triumphant accounts of women defiantly disrobing—what she calls "the romanticization framework"—that uncritically celebrates female genital cursing. What distinguishes this book is that while most of the extant literature on female naked protest in Africa often celebratorily focuses on the women, or at most their targets, Naked Agency argues that a thorough analysis of these events must also consider the agency and reaction of the women's targets, witnesses, bystanders, and other stakeholders. But even when the focus is on the women, the author challenges the romanticization framework that occludes the women's fear, desperation, vulnerabilities, backlash, physical harm, or even internal dissent. The romanticization framework, she contends, assigns a fixed meaning to a gesture that is unstable, temporary, contested, and negotiated. It also suggests a uniform agentic response from the women, which she finds problematic. Naked Agency, thus, offers a nuanced perspective on insurrectional nakedness that locates agency with vulnerability, accounting for both "the constraints and freedoms that produce, enhance, or curtail the power effects of women's insurgent self-exposure" (15). The oxymoronic nature of the concept of naked agency captures the dialectical movement between agency, on the one hand, and vulnerability, on the other, inherent in naked protest. Diabate reaches for the nature of political agency when both desperation and a sense of power are operative. In this sense, the women's fears and vulnerabilities are co-constitutive of their agency. Her discussion of agency in Naked Agency, she posits, contributes significantly to "an affirmative understanding of biopolitics" (6). Naked agency as a concept, analytic, and a reading praxis emerges to "designate the cycle of power and vulnerability that involves women and their target" (3). It is the continual negotiation of the power relations between naked protesters, their targets, and other stakeholders that is at the core of naked agency. The questions that animate the book show Diabate's investment in nuancing existing knowledge of naked protest in Africa. For example, against Western commentators who, in responding to various crackdowns against naked protesters in the continent, often frame the women as "unarmed," "peaceful protesters;" Diabate asks: "How does one articulate cursing as a peaceful demonstration when the protesters hope to inflict a certain kind of injury on the body politic?" (15). In other words, given that the women's cursing ritual is recognized as the most violent weapon they could unleash against their targets, which could supposedly cause their targets a myriad of misfortunes, including literal and social death, are these commentators not in fact undermining the women's agency by framing them as "unarmed," "peaceful," and "harmless?" In this case, is the women's own [End Page 205] agency dismissed if not ignored by what Diabate calls the "paradoxical dynamic of globalization" that claims to be empowering the African women? Furthermore, given the crude fear that a mere threat of genital cursing elicits in many societies in Africa, how do we articulate the agency of the women's targets who also ought to fight for their lives? Also, in response to pro-feminist readings of the gesture, Diabate probes further: how can defiant disrobing be anti-patriarchal when it fundamentally draws its power-effect from patriarchy? In other words, how can naked protest be pro-feminist when "it works in tandem with patriarchy" (17)? Attending to these complex questions demands a new kind of reading that accrues a deeper understanding of the gesture. Naked Agency, extraordinarily capacious in its geographical, cultural, and generic scope, is arranged in three sections—Restriction, Co-optation, and Repression—each with accompanying scenes (instead of parts and chapters). The book's very structure underlines the performative nature of naked protest as a gesture. The structure, notes the author, equally foregrounds "the mutually constitutive dynamic" between the performers and their audience (20). Each of the scenes highlight a different aspect of...