Naminata Diabate

“Despite supposed biological sharedness that undergirds the faulty argument that the exposed body carries the same impact across geographical and temporal spaces, the silence of the women’s targets became deafening.”

“The understanding that the women have limited abilities to predict the effects of their protests and rituals on targeted entities, or to shape the ways in which their actions are interpreted on the global stage, challenges us to be more nuanced in our conceptualization of their form of contestation.”

“The potency of women’s bodies is said to lie in the fact that many societies—including the Akan of Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, the Beti of Cameroon, the Malinké of Mali, the Igbo of Nigeria, and the Kikuyu of Kenya—consider women’s bodies as both life giving and life taking.”

“Literally and symbolically, nudity can be used as a form of resistance and counter resistance. In most societies where clothing or body covering is required in public, the uncivil exposition of genital organs disrupts principles of decorum, thus becoming capable of drawing attention.”

“Social media platforms are available where people can capture women's bodies and their nakedness and circulate them. What happens to those women? What happens to their images? What happens to their families who may come across them?”

“I also look at the uniqueness of those cultural artifacts in human beings because languages are both common as means of communication, but they're also unique because they translate unique worldviews, unique principles, and unique understandings of human nature.”