Help, The Women are Naked: Bodies, Power & Resistance in ‘Post-colonial’ Uganda

Abstract

This paper engages with acts of naked protest in Uganda to explore their effect and affect as a decolonial praxis for both gender and human rights. In this paper, the successes of such rights activism by Ugandan women are made clear. With regard to womanhood, this paper discusses how naked protest questions Western epistemologies of gender in colonized Uganda – troubling an exclusionary and racialized sex/gender dimorphism through its anachronistic performance that relies on bringing a specific pre-colonial power imbued in Ugandan womanhood into a ‘post-colonial’ present. With human rights, this paper proposes that both human rights and gender are inextricably linked and must be read in tandem to truly actualize the significance of naked protest. Where claims to womanhood are made, inevitably, claims to a denied humanness are too. Decolonizing the human in human rights requires reconceptualization that consequentially returns us to Wynter’s question: what does it mean to be human? This paper attempts to offer some preliminary answers by necessarily reading this decolonial movement with an epistemic disobedience and by emphasizing the importance/power of the category ‘human’ in ‘post-colonial’ Uganda. Notably so, the ‘limitation’ of naked protest is also explored, particularly its participation within a colonial framework for the way in which naked protest fails to move beyond established gender boundaries. That said this paper questions whether this circumstance marks an inadequacy or, given that naked protest infuses agentic and political meanings to what it means to be a Black Ugandan woman, a necessary utility. Altogether, this paper is interested in reading the performance of naked protest through a lens that goes beyond the corporeal, or more precisely, that reads this corporeal performance in a metaphysical or macro-societal arena paying particular attention to the ways that it utilities pre-colonial cultural meanings as a source of power to demand rights and lay claim to the categories woman and human.