The Cinematic Language of Naked Protest

Abstract

Recently in Africa, documentaries have appeared that revisit contemporary gendered traumas wherein women threaten to, or do, strip naked, to signal dispossession, to punish men, and to resist injustice. These documentaries do more than just bring to our attention the disempowering political, juridical, social, and economic conditions that call for exceptional modes of resistance. They highlight the forms of resistance that emerge in response to the widespread sense of perishability and injustice prevalent in postcolonial nation-states. Assuming that topics such as genital cursing and female genital surgeries are inherently exotic in filmic narratives, this essay analyzes several documentaries to showcase the cinematic language that the filmmakers deploy for representing women's defiant disrobing. This question dovetails into notions of authorial “authority,” given the filmmakers' racial affiliations and class background. Exploring these questions, I outline the texture of the filmmakers' cinematic language to argue that while at times reminiscent of old, colonizing representational politics, the new language offers more than repetition. Thus this essay contributes to the politics of documentary filmmaking in Africa and its influence on race, gender, and geography.