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Naked Nanas and Militant Mothers: Tactics and Resilience in Women's Protest Movements in Francophone West Africa
Bullard, Lena
Bullard, Lena
Abstract
As people power movements have proliferated and overturned political systems, the contributions of women in sub-Saharan Africa and the protest tactics they use have been overlooked. This thesis investigates the unique mobilization tactics used in women’s maximalist protest movements in Francophone West Africa. Examining these movements, I argue that women in Côte d’Ivoire and Togo disrupt the established socio-political order through maximalist protests, implementing tactics that exist within an established "genealogy of resistance,” demonstrated by the persistent use of protest tactics, resilience in women’s contestation, and the nonlinearity of resistance struggles in women’s movements in Francophone West Africa. These genealogies create inherited modes of resistance that are maintained through contemporary protest movements. I propose an alternative model of success in these movements that challenges the binary success-failure framework commonly used to study protests. Instead, I argue that women’s resistance movements should be analyzed through the lens of genealogies of resistance and phenomenology. This study uses image and textual analysis, open-source and archival data, and discourse analysis to examine African female modes of resistance, such as nude protests, public funerals, sex strikes, protest signs, and symbols. Several theoretical currents inform this work, including Afro-feminism, decoloniality, necropolitics, and non-violent resistance theories.
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2026-04-30
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http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
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Modern Languages and Literatures