Female Sexuality in West African Literature and Film
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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 v 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, vi 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. vii 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 viii 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. ix 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 x V- Suicide, Bodily Dissection, and Death: Impossible Figurations ............................................. 230 Conclusion: Compiling the Sacred Texts of Women’s Lives .......................................................... 241 Chapter Four .................................................................................................................................... 248 Staging Horror, Mevoungou