“At the time when I was naked, I felt so powerful… the power even to hit a policeman…” (43). Naminata Diabate in Naked Agency interrogates expressions of resistance that women engage in across Western, Eastern, Southern, and Central Africa and beyond. This resistance, predicated on defiant disrobing, exposure, and shaming, she terms “naked agency”. Diabate begins by contextualising her terminological choice, departing from terms like “genital power” and “genital cursing” that scholars have adopted to describe events regardless of how women themselves choose to name their resistance tactics. She illustrates this naming practice through the events of July 2002, when hundreds of Niger Delta women gathered to protest against a multinational oil company and its local and foreign expatriate workers, demanding basic infrastructure and employment for their families.
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