Genital Power: Female Sexuality in West African Literature and Film

382 Pages·2011·1.71 MB·English

by  Naminata Diabate

Copyright
by
Naminata Diabate
2011
The Dissertation Committee for Naminata Diabate Certifies that this is the approved
version of the following dissertation:

Genital Power: Female Sexuality in West African Literature and Film

Committee:

Lisa L. Moore, Co-Supervisor
Neville W. Hoad, Co-Supervisor
Barbara Harlow
Hélène Tissières
Jennifer M. Wilks
Matt U. Richardson
Genital Power: Female Sexuality in West African Literature and Film

by
Naminata Diabate, Maîtrise; M. A.

Dissertation
Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of
The University of Texas at Austin
in Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements
for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

The University of Texas at Austin
May 2011
Dedication

For all the women in Côte d’Ivoire and the United States who have taught me the values
of hard work and female solidarity.
For Dr. Lisa L. Moore: If I am just a distant echo of what you are, I will be the best!
For my all formal and informal teachers, with gratitude
Acknowledgements
The completion of this dissertation gives me the opportunity to thank the many professors
and mentors to whom I owe much gratitude. First, I would like to express my gratitude to
Dr. Lisa L. Moore without whose academic rigor and spiritual guidance this dissertation
would not have been possible. I also would like to acknowledge Dr. Neville W. Hoad,
whose insightful questions and comments, shared with humor, pushed me toward
challenging theoretical terrains.

Special thanks go to the distinguished faculty members who served on my dissertation
committee: Professors Barbara Harlow, Hélène Tissières, Jennifer M. Wilks, and Matt
Richardson. Their attentive comments and mentoring advice over the years have helped
me to become a confident young scholar.

I wish to thank Catherine Bacon, Kevin Bourque, Nandini Dhar, Molly Hardy, Amena
Moinfar, Laura Smith, and Caroline Wigginton, members of Dr. Moore’s dissertation
writing group. Their insightful readings and their ongoing support made this dissertation
stronger than it would have been otherwise.

Throughout my graduate studies, I have been lucky to benefit from the intellectual
generosity of many faculties at The University of Texas at Austin. The fruitful
intellectual conversations with César Salgado, Omi Osun Joni Jones, Bernth Lindfors,
Hannah Chapelle Wojciehowski, Susan Heinzelman, Katie Arens, Adam Newton, Toyin
Falola, Jossianna Arroyo, Fehintola Mosadomi, Domino Perez, Diane Davis, Naomi
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Lindstrom, Meta Jones, Alexandra Wettlaufer, and Aaron Bar-Adon have meant much
more to me than I can express here. I only hope this dissertation would distantly reflect
their outstanding professional and intellectual achievements.

I am grateful to many organizations and programs whose contributions made this
dissertation possible. I thank the Fulbright Foundation and the Institute for International
Education for providing me with the opportunity to pursue my graduate studies in the
United States. The Program in Comparative Literature at The University of Texas at
Austin has been supportive throughout the years. In particular Prof. Elizabeth Richmond-
Garza’s intellectual rigor, professionalism, and unfailing support have inspired me to
strive for excellence. The professionalization opportunities that The Ethnic and Third
World Literatures Concentration made possible have been instrumental in my intellectual
growth.

A continuing endowed fellowship from the Graduate School at The University of Texas
at Austin allowed me to fully devote my time to completing this dissertation. My heartfelt
thanks to the John Warfield Center for African and African American Studies and the
Center for Women’s and Gender Studies at The University of Texas at Austin for
creating a vibrant intellectual environment and for the travel grants that allowed me to
attend several national conferences.

Lastly, various friends and mentors including John S. Butler, Sheryl Smith, Patricia
Koch, Samara Turner, Shelley Damon, Denise Gilman, Assem Nasr, Ali Fuat Sengul,
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Somy Kim,Tim Bugh, and Mamadou Kane have provided me much needed emotional
and intellectual support. You all made Austin a home away from home, and for that I am
forever grateful.

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Genital Power: Female Sexuality in West African Literature and Film

Naminata Diabate, Ph.D., P

h.D.
The University of Texas at Austin, 2011

Supervisors: Lisa L. Moore and Neville W. Hoad

This dissertation calls attention to three important contemporary texts from West Africa
that resist the tacit cultural taboo around questions of sexuality to imagine empowering
images of female sexuality. Using postcolonial feminist approaches, queer theory, and
cultural studies, I analyze two novels and a film by T. Obinkaram Echewa, Frieda Ekotto,
and film director Jean Pierre Bekolo to retrieve moments in which women characters turn
the tables on denigrating views of their sexuality and marshal its power in the service of
resistance. I show how in these texts, women bare their nether parts, wield menstrual
cloths, enjoy same-sex erotic acts, sit on men’s faces, and engage in many other
stigmatized practices in a display of what I call “genital powers.” These powers are both
traditional to the cultures analyzed here and called into new forms by the pressures of
decolonization and globalization. Through more complex representations of female
sexuality, these texts chart a tradition in which stale binaries of victims and oppressors,
the body as an exclusive site of female subjugation or as a site of eternal female power
are blurred, allowing a deeper understanding of women’s lived experiences and what it
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means to be a resisting subject in the postcolonial space. By broadly recovering women’s
powers and subjectivities, centering on sexuality and the body, I also examine the ways in
which this mode of female subjectivity has thus far escaped comprehensive theorization.
In this way, my project responds to Gayatri Spivak’s call to postcolonial intellectuals to
unlearn privileged forms of resistance in the recognition of subjectivity, and to develop
tools that would allow us to “listen” to the voices of disenfranchised women - those
removed from the channels of knowledge production. However, my study cautions that
the recognition of genital powers should not be conflated with the romanticized
celebration of female bodies and sexuality, since West African women continue to
struggle against cultural, political, existential, and physical assaults.

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Table of Contents
Chapter One ......................................................................................................................................... 1
Genital Powers: Bodily Forms of Resistance and Their Discontents

I-Relevance and Genealogy of the Project ....................................................................................... 7
II-Genital Power and Its Discontents ............................................................................................. 16
III- Aggressive Uses of Genital Powers in Folk Media and Anthropological Texts ..................... 42
IV- Performatives of Victimization and the Unrepresentability of Empowering Images
of Female Sexuality ........................................................................................................................ 66
Conclusion: Recuperating and Recentering the Genital with its Limitations ................................ 88

Chapter Two..................................................................................................................................... 100
T. Obinkaram Echewa’s I Saw the Sky Catch Fire (1992): Aggressive Uses of Genital
Powers and the Dialectic of Resistance

I-Re-Emergence or Hypervisibility of Women’s Aggressive Uses of Genital Curse .................. 101
II- The Women’s War of 1929 and Echewa’s Revisionist Project .............................................. 108
III- The Dual-Sex System and Multiple Modes of Female Resistance ........................................ 119
IV- Oyoyo Love, the “Public Woman”: Culturally-Banned Genital Power ................................ 131
V- Sitting on and Public Undressing: the Vengeance of the Soiling Body .................................. 141
VI-Race, Gender, and the Misrecognition of Genital Cursing ..................................................... 157
Conclusion: The Tour de Force of a Double Narrative Fiction ................................................... 168

Chapter Three................................................................................................................................... 170
Positioning Frieda Ekotto’s Chuchote pas trop (2001) within the Archives of West
African Same-Sex Sexuality

I-Introducing the Narrative and Defining Sexual Identities ......................................................... 173
II- Fulani Heteropatriarchy, Silencing and Subversive Silence ................................................... 187
III- Mangled and Violated: Tribulations of the Fulani Female Body .......................................... 198
IV-Toward a Radical Queerness .................................................................................................. 214
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