The affective afterlife of naked body protests

Abstract

In this paper, we explore the afterlife of naked body protests through an examination of interview and archival data from women who participated in various naked protests in South Africa. We engage the emotional outcomes that follow African women’s naked protests. We read black women’s naked body protests through the theoretical lenses of refusal and the affective economies of shame and psychic distress. By examining a data corpus of 16 interviews, archival video, podcasts and written content emanating from South Africa, we explore what occurs after naked protests. The experiences endured by the women protestors range from negative affects such as shaming to humiliation by protestors’ communities and psychological distress. The findings suggest that refusal is not counter to women’s experiences of psychological distress and shame – they co-exist. We demonstrate how affects travel in affective economies and stick to bodies in ways that disperse bad feelings and create productive openings for freedom. Finally, we contend that the affective afterlife of naked protests might be understood as an ongoing theorisation of the body long after the event of the actual protest.

The paper engages the affects that follow African women’s naked protests. It explores the afterlife of naked body protests through an examination of interview and archival data from women who participated in various naked protests in South Africa. Women’s naked protests evoke heightened anxiety and draw the attention and ire of patriarchal observers (Diabate, 2020). For example, the 1990 naked women’s protests against the apartheid state’s efforts to demolish their houses in Dobsonville, a working-class residential area in South Africa (The Star, 1990), transfixed observers in much the same way that the #FeesMustFall and anti-rape protests did a quarter of a century later.

However, the naked body continues to be in dialogue with society long after what Sylvia Tamale (2016) refers to as the “spectacle” of naked body protests. While the #RUReferenceList and related naked body protests that took place on South African tertiary institution campuses in the mid-2010s have been studied extensively by feminist scholars (e.g., Diabate, 2020; Dlakavu, 2016; Gouws, 2018; Macleod et al., 2018; Maluleke & Moyer, 2020), we extend this work by pausing on the affective and material aftereffects of these protests through first-hand accounts from some of the naked protestors. Instead of training our lenses on the heightened affects of the actual protest, we attend to the afterlife of the naked body protests. We observe that the emotional aftereffects of protests are often overlooked in favour of the more interesting life of the naked body protests (Diabate, 2020; Tamale, 2016). Here, we tune in to the quieter moments of quotidian everyday life. These moments are often away from the heat of the protests and the glare of the media. Our driving quest in this paper is to understand the emotional residue of naked body protest.

We differentiate the naked body from the nude one. The former is wilful, agential and disruptive while the nude is positioned as sexually legible and possibly available. Young (2020) explains that the meanings associated with conscious nakedness are complicated. Unlike the passive position of the painterly nude, the agency involved in public nakedness may produce both a sense of empowerment and a loss of self for the subject, for example, “I don’t know who I was”. Public nakedness can disorientate both the naked protestor and the observer. By naked body, we index the deliberate public undressing and exposure of body parts that are typically expected to be clothed (Coly, 2015). In the next section, we turn to the theoretical underpinnings that inform our understandings of the afterlives of naked body protests. Broadly stated, to frame this work, we conceive refusal and affective economies as feminist standpoint epistemologies. We follow this with an outline of our methodological approach and decisions before finally attending to the analysis of the data.

Wilful subjects who refuse

Black women’s naked body protests are acts of refusal that we conceive of as strikes against patriarchal and colonial registers of legibility. For Campt (2019), to refuse is to demur against social orders that render people unintelligible and illegible. Refusal uses “negation as a generative and creative resource of disorderly power to embrace the possibility of living otherwise” (Campt, 2019, p. 25). In this conception, refusal generates its power from producing disorder by upending social expectations. For instance, Macleod et al. (2018, p. 5) paint a picture of refusal during the #RUReferenceList protests in 2016, where the women’s motto was: “We will not be silenced, with a visual representation of a woman refusing to have her mouth taped becoming the emblem of the protests”.

Since African women are required to reproduce femininity by being dutiful colonial subjects, those who disrobe transgress and turn away from patriarchy’s colonial codes. Braidotti’s (2010) theorisation of the undutiful daughter finds companionship with Campt’s conception of refusal. The undutiful daughter is deliberately gendered and specific to women’s forms of refusal. Braidotti advocates for difference, rebelliousness, unfaithfulness and conceptual disobedience which are driven by an affective energy that opens conditions for change. Similarly, Ahmed (2004) suggests that women who say “no” are wilful subjects who generate negative affects.

Hartman (2019) has illustrated that history is replete with a chorus of wilful African American women who demur and strike paths against racist and patriarchal orders. In the same vein, African women have long walked against the grain by refusing colonisation and coloniality (Tamale, 2020). ¹ This historicisation works against linear histories of inferiorisation and passivity. Given our colonial legacies, Africans have also come to internalise the patriarchal dictates inculcated through missionary sensibilities and postcolonial state making (Coly, 2015; MacFadden, 2005). While recognising the precolonial gender order, it is unproductive to ignore the misogyny that has come to define African masculinity (Gqola, 2015).

African women have, however, always refused control over their bodies (Mama, 2011). Tamale (2016) asserts that the long history of naked body protests speaks the language of spectacle, of rebellion and of subversion. As a grasp for freedom, refusing through acts of being undutiful is pleasurable and beautiful. However, as Campt (2019) reminds us, black pleasure and beauty are inseparable from suffering. We next turn towards the suffering that accompanies the pleasure of refusal. In taking this turn to suffering, we are cognisant of Shefer and Munt’s (2019) critique of the penchant of psychological work to focus on negative, individualising and internalising emotions. We, however, depart from this scholarship by tracing affective economies in ways that travel. In addition, while spotlighting suffering, we point to the productive elements of negative affects.

Refusal tends to push against power. Those who refuse and kill racist patriarchal joy often have to contend with social sanction (Lewis, 2001; Mendes et al., 2018). If, as Ahmed (2010) avers, we are socially compelled towards compulsory happiness, those who turn towards ugly affects (Ngai, 2005) are most likely to be punished. Since the sanctity of women’s bodies is implicated with modernity, post-colonial respectability of nation-states and patriarchal control, those who disrobe and expose the body are challenging the very foundations of African modernity and its patriarchal order (Coly, 2015). They produce injured feelings that threaten social order. Drawing on Ahmed’s (2004) conception of affective economies, the wayward protestors evoke loss and suffering which in turn unleashes patriarchal, institutional and state repression – economies of hate – to inflict suffering on wilful women. Those who refuse are separated from those who “behave”. The former are vilified and shamed in a network of hate that is generalised against undutiful women. Since emotions do things, we think through the data with an attentiveness to “how they [emotions] work, in concrete and particular ways, to mediate the relationship between the psychic and the social, and the individual and the collective” (Ahmed, 2004, p. 119). We attend to the circulation of affects between objects and signs in ways that punish or reward.

Methods

Our methodological approach is informed by feminist standpoint epistemologies that foreground concrete experience in the quest for knowledge creation and effecting social change to oppressive social conditions (Brooks, 2007). Feminist standpoint epistemologies place women at the centre of research in order to illuminate their lived experiences, insights about the world, and the ways they refuse injustice and create possibilities (Collins, 1990). By sticking to the women’s accounts of their experiences, we understand them as providing the ultimate “criterion of credibility” for their knowledge claims (Collins, 1990, p. 209). This conceptualisation is apt since this study is preoccupied with women’s world making in contexts of racial patriarchy.

The naked body protests to which we attend in this paper are the 1990 Dobsonville housing protests, the 2015, 2016 and 2018 protests against gender-based violence and rape culture, and the 2015 and 2016 protests against student fees and for decolonised education. We summarise these protests here. In April 2016, the students at Rhodes University engaged in parrhesia – the act of speaking frankly and boldly through free speech. A poster campaign called Chapter 2.12, highlighting sexual violence on campus, was initiated. This was followed by the online publication of the names of 11 people under the banner of #RUReferenceList. Although no direct accusations were made, it was assumed by all that these were the names of alleged rapists (Gouws, 2018). For Seddon (2016), the name #RUReferenceList was a wry gesture to academic referencing conventions against plagiarism in students’ work and a commentary on the seriousness of plagiarism offences when compared to sexual violence on campus. The list was therefore meant to get the attention of the university’s management on the high prevalence of rape culture on campus and to highlight the inadequacies of the university’s sexual harassment policies (Gouws, 2018). To compel university management to listen to their grievances, the women students staged disruptive protests, including a topless naked protest that shut the university down. While not all protestors participated in the topless event, our sample is drawn from the topless naked protestors. The protest was a rejection of the phallocentric and patriarchal view imposed on women students (Matich et al., 2019).

Related naked body protests with which we engage are the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) and Tshwane University of Technology (TUT) solidarity protest with the #RUReferenceList protest. The TUT protest sought university management’s attention and intervention to recognise and combat rape culture on campus.

In addition, we engage with a naked body protest that occurred at the 2018 #Gender Based Violence Summit when a woman undressed in front of the state president, attendees, and news outlets and presented her scarred naked body which had been violated in a gang rape. The final protest that we discuss is the 1990 Dobsonville, Ukuhamba’Ze! protest when a group of African women protested naked to challenge the demolition of their homes in Dobsonville, Soweto (Mainguard et al., 1995). The demolition was part of the apartheid government’s response to controlling urban housing. Since black women were not allowed to inherit property, building their own homes was an affront to apartheid patriarchy. The women faced off against the brutality of the police and their demolition vehicles on 12 August 1990. This protest allows us to articulate a lineage of black women’s naked protests that straddles late apartheid and the democratic era. This illustrates the continued struggles of women and the intergenerational nature of protest. By pointing to a history of African women’s naked protests, we tap into a different lineage to that of Euro-American “Slut walks” (Gouws, 2018). In summary then, these protests might be conceived of under two related broad rubrics, gender-based violence and protests for material needs which include housing and access to university education (fees and curriculum).

We analyse audio visual archives and interview data from these protests. We selected the Dobsonville housing protest video – Ukuhamba’Ze! (1995) – for its first-hand account of the 1990 housing naked protest. We note the 25-year period between the 1990 protests and more contemporary ones and use this period to think generatively about the data. We similarly chose the interview podcasts of the #FeesMustFall naked protestors. This naked body protest occurred on 4 October 2016 (“Situation intensifies at Wits as some students stage a nude protest”; YouTube). These materials gave direct accounts of the protests through a dialogic engagement with radio audiences. However, most of the data analysed in this paper are based on our attempt to trace the afterlife of protests through interviews with 16 women a number of years after the protests. The paper also analyses YouTube comments about naked body protests in which the women participated.

After receiving ethics clearance from Wits University human research ethics committee to conduct the study, the first author conducted the interviews in 2019. Participants were located through a process of purposive sampling of women who had participated in naked body protests. Since many of the naked protestors knew each other, we accessed them through a snowball sampling strategy. Some were approached directly through their publicly available information based on the publicity generated by their naked protest. Interviews varied in length but averaged one hour and 15 minutes, including a viewing of a seven-minute-long video of the 1990 Dobsonville protest. Most student participants (10 women) were in their early to mid-20s while the four women who had participated in the Dobsonville naked protest were in their mid-60s to early 70s. The lone Gender Based Violence Summit naked protestor was in her early 40s at the time of the interview.

All interviewees watched the 1990 Dobsonville housing protest video – Ukuhamba’Ze! (1995) – on the researcher’s notebook as part of the interview. This approach sought to stimulate historical reflections on naked body protests, to explore connections across time in the meaning-making of protestors and to observe affects elicited by interviewees. Interview questions prompted participants to narrate their recollections of the naked protest, reflect on the Dobsonville protest video, describe their emotions, talk about their struggles and desires, and to describe their lives in the period since their participation in naked protest. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and supplemented by interview notes that described the interview setting and affective responses observed in the course of the interviews. The Dobsonville women’s interviews were conducted in African languages mostly spoken in Soweto and translated into English by one of the authors. All other interviews were mostly conducted in English although some participants occasionally expressed themselves in their mother tongues. In this paper, we use pseudonyms in order to protect the women’s identities. Since some of the younger participants are also researchers who have written about their experiences and engaged in public discourse and litigation, it is possible that their identities may inadvertently be revealed. This risk was discussed with the participants, and they consented to participate with the undertaking that any resulting research publications would not intentionally reveal their identities.

We analysed the data using thematic analysis by reading the content of data thematically as outlined by Braun and Clarke (2019). We, however, read the data through the theoretical orientation of standpoint feminist epistemologies by attending to how naked protestors articulate their grounded experiences as epistemic and material interventions (Brooks, 2007; Collins, 1990). Importantly, by leaning on standpoint feminist epistemologies, we oriented our lens to the demands of the agential naked protestors. In addition, we proceed from the assumption that naked protests are shaped by social structure and social agents. Our analytical lenses are trained on how social phenomena come into being and maintain themselves (Parker, 2013). This approach is necessarily historical and invested in how forms of power are deployed to regulate and organise space (Hook, 2007). Therefore, while nakedness is a core analytical concern, we read the body as social and therefore as implicated and interlinked with the social and psychic disruptions that protests engender and represent. This is to suggest that nakedness is necessitated by social injustice and that the consequences of naked protest are social.

Having briefly sketched out our understandings of naked body protests within orders of refusal, and as affective economies, and outlined our methodological approach, in what follows we explore the consequences of naked protest. We begin by exploring the offstage experiences and affects of women after they engage in naked body protests. We next train our analytical lenses on the circulation of shame in the aftermath of naked body protests. In addition to Campt’s (2019) theorisation of refusal, Ahmed’s (2004) theorisation of affective economies is seminal for how we think together with the data of our protagonists.

“Our world stopped”: psychological aftereffects

There are considerable emotional costs involved in taking a stance of refusal on an issue, particularly when one is opposing the dominant beliefs of society. One of these costs is emotional (Brown & Pickerill, 2009). We explore this in Lolly’s account. Lolly is one of the women who protested topless in the #RUReferenceList protest. When she was interviewed at her apartment in Makhanda, she was wearing a red, white and black traditional healer cloth, and had beads on both her wrists and her ankles. During the interview, she smoked hubbly bubbly, and swore repeatedly. We read her turn to traditional ancestral spirituality as a decolonial practice that is congruent with her naked protest – a middle finger against modernity and patriarchy. Lolly recounts her experience of a psychological breakdown following the protest. “Umm, I think I just slid into a depressive state umm, and I was like that for a couple of weeks … for longer even.” When asked if she received any help for her mental state during that period, Lolly noted that she confided in her friend: “I told her and she was like ‘stay at home dude, because you have to be alive at the end of this thing’. And that’s the thing … is that we have to be alive. We have to continue. Our world stopped, but the university’s doesn’t”. Following Ahmed (2004), we observe that negative affects circulate between women protestors in ways that implicate the psychic and social, the individual and collective. Lolly describes a psychic and individual slide into depression. However, she recognises the social and collective experience of depression – “our world stopped”, and that of the university doesn’t. Here, the university is figured as unaffected by depression even as it generates psychic pain in women like Lolly. She points to the power of institutional life and its recalcitrance in the face of resistance. The individual cost of refusal against institutions is psychic and described as mental health difficulties.

Below Sihle, a black woman in her mid-20s, narrates how she and other women were left emotionally drained after the #RUReferenceList protest. The experience of constantly feeling “different” and apart from society or the university, as in the case of Sihle and other protestors, adds emotional pressure to activism and requires a high degree of emotional reflexivity and support in order to overcome or cope with this dissonance (King, 2007). Among the emotions expressed by Sihle are emotional fatigue and shock at the betrayal of the university, which appeared to be siding with patriarchy and rape culture while punishing women’s refusal (Gouws, 2018).

And my involvement in that protest was very deep for me. It was not just being in solidarity. So, I think after that … that day, a lot of us were just drained emotionally. We were very, very tired emotionally. Umm and the worst thing that the university could possibly do, they took out an interdict against the students … And I … I … I was shocked! Really. I was very, very shocked. Because we had just exposed ourselves. We had just done the most courageous things in front of everyone. And instead of sitting down, with, with, with the students, they took out an interdict.

Beauty, another participant in her mid-20s, describes her fury at the rapists, police and the university. She observes that scars are all she has from the naked protest.

I think I’m just more infuriated. But my infuriation has taken a different shape over the years. Umm in 2017, I was infuriated because now I’m out of this university but I’m still carrying all of the scars that came with that protest and nothing came out of it except the fact that we made it known to the world that this is what’s happening on our campus and our management is literally firing shots at us. … All the people who were on the [alleged perpetrator] list were taken to a safe house off campus, so that the police could shoot at us without worrying about harming them; very, very ironic [a sense of hurt in her voice].

Beauty foregrounds her fury by repeatedly using the word infuriated. According to Young (2020) and Macleod et al. (2017), the naked protests at Wits, Rhodes and other campuses in 2016 drew attention to the shocking prevalence of rape and the apathy towards rape culture on campuses. Beauty’s account is evidence of this institutional apathy. Like Lolly, Beauty – who participated in the same protest – experienced psychological health aftereffects that resulted in hospitalisation for three days. Brown and Pickerill (2009) advise that protestors must acknowledge that protest encounters are emotionally laden, relational, hybrid, corporeal and contingent. This relationality is not just between protesting bodies but implicates the social forces of institutions. It calls attention to the cost that comes with protest and resistance (Young, 2020). For instance, Beauty describes the debilitating afterlife of her participation in the #RUReferenceList naked protest as follows:

Umm, I was heavily affected by it … I was hospitalised umm for three days. And I went into a type of shock where I was just unresponsive. I don’t know what had happened, but my warden at the time came into my room for one reason or the other at res. Umm apparently one of my friends at res had come to my room umm coz she had seen me walk in, but I didn’t seem like myself. And she followed me into the room. She says I just sat on the bed and I just zoned out, and I would not respond to anything. So, she called my warden and then my warden decided to call the ambulance. The ambulance umm took me to hospital and I was hospitalised for three days.

While the cameras captured the bravery and daring of the protest, beyond a close friend and a caring residence warden, there are no witnesses to Beauty’s paralysis that followed the protest. Beauty’s account lets us into the off-stage moments of rebellion and refusal. Lwandle, a young woman who had protested naked, was similarly hobbled in the aftermath of the #RUReferenceList protest.

I must say that because I was going through this tailspin that for me the rape protest was so personal that I lost myself in it … I remember this other time, I was in my room, and I could not move … I remember my best friend realised I didn’t pick up my phone. She called my warden. And then she came and looked for me. And then she saw me, and then she just got onto the bed and just said “It’s OK!” And I just cried [says it in a whispering voice]. She knew also what had happened to me in the past …

Like Beauty and Lolly, Lwandle experienced emotional trauma following her participation in the naked body protest. For Lwandle, participation in this protest was personal and particularly triggering because of a prior experience of sexual violation. She and other women protestors hoped to have rape culture eradicated so that they could have closure and heal. They, however, bare the cost for refusing and daring to instigate change (Braidotti, 2010).

In an interview she had with the SABC ² on 19 March 2020, scholar activist Simamkele Dlakavu explained that protests are often romanticised, but they come with personal costs. She observed that the psychological trauma of those on the frontlines of these movements is not often highlighted. She urged that “when we think about these protests, we need to understand they came with a cost and this has not been resolved … some are in mental institutions, some in prison” (Mekuto, 2020). This is useful for thinking with Patricia, a protestor who was approximately 40 years old and disrobed, exposing her entire naked body at the 2018 Gender Based Violence Summit. For her, the cost of the protest came in the form of being shunned by her community. Since her protest was broadcast widely, she has been body shamed and ridiculed wherever she goes. However, like the wayward woman that she is, she consoles herself that people will eventually forget and talk about something else. She indicated that, after the protest, she had hoped to get assistance from the presidency for the costs of her medical procedures and scarring that resulted from her gang rape. However, this did not happen.

Not even one person talked to me. We are dealing with those consequences of what happened at the Summit, coz people can recognise you in taxis, and they start to chat about you! These are the kind of things we have to deal with. At the location, ³ when they are drinking, they will point at you when you pass and say “This is that one who undressed.” Then they take out their phones and say “we mean this one, you see her?” You are passing, going home, people they will see you! At the Summit, I was even stopped by big bodyguards, as no one wanted to talk to me or help me. I was hoping that other women would help, but that did not happen.

The apparent cruelty of those who point at Patricia and render her a spectacle belies a concealed history of patriarchal training and investments in economies of hate. The payoff of disciplining Patricia benefits individual rapists, the collective project of patriarchy and a nation-state that is propped up by the myths of modernity and order. Like other naked protestors, we might conceive of Patricia’s protest as underpinned by Berlant’s (2011) idea of cruel optimism – an optimism for change that is rebuffed and frayed at the seams: an optimism that leaves one depressed and reeling. Like Lolly and the other women protestors at Rhodes University, Patricia also had a “mental breakdown”. In trying to cope with emotional turmoil after the naked protest, she went to her deceased grandfather’s house. She states:

I went to my grandfather’s house. I wanted to see his pictures. I wanted to burn impepho, ⁴ and all of those things I grew up with. I wanted all of those things like now, now, now! [impassioned]. Like I had to go home. And at work they gave me two weeks and I stayed at home. I didn’t like it because when you are alone, you lose your mind. Sometimes you can feel like your mind is going somewhere, so I came back.

We read Patricia’s return to her ancestral home as a move backwards to an affective state before violation and public humiliation. The transgression of violation and being ignored after daring to protest naked can be felt so intimately that it fundamentally impacts women’s sense of self (Young, 2020). Patricia had moments of losing her mind. For Bruce (2021), going mad is at once a Fanonian place of non-being and a productive avenue from which radical renewal and imagination can emerge. Losing one’s mind is, however, more dangerous territory as it bears the risk of not being found. Patricia was able to return from this precipice.

Our interviews with naked protestors suggest that the protests had long-lasting emotional effects on some of the women. We refer to emotions instead of the psychological in order to index the relational between the psychic, individual, social and collective (Ahmed, 2004). This is important for surfacing feelings, not as residing only in individuals but as activated by the social world and operating in collectives. This indexes the obvious fact that the naked women protestors are not inherently damaged. Instead, they are brutalised by collective and institutional investments in patriarchal order. Despite the painful aftereffects of their protests, the women refuse institutionalised patriarchal habits of obedience and docility. They refuse silence against the rape culture on university campuses and elsewhere. They refuse even at the risk of losing their minds.

Although the Dobsonville protestors of 1990 faced the might of the apartheid police with their very homes at stake, they did not use psychological language to reflect on their emotional worlds after the protests. We posit that older, working-class, black women do not have access to current psychological lexicon characterised by “black pain” and “triggering”. This is not to suggest that the older women did not experience psychological pain. Instead, we hazard that the non-availability of psychological care and language closed off these avenues for them. Since they are generally not provided space to feel their emotions, older, working-class, black women are known to experience more psychosomatic conditions than the average population (Zvolensky et al., 2022). In addition, the 29-year timeframe since their protest may have created an emotional distance against the sharp pain of psychic breakdown. As we will shortly illustrate, shame was a much more familiar affect for them. Again, we read this tendency towards shame as a generational factor as the policing weight of patriarchy was more pronounced in late apartheid.

The circulation of shameful affects

Among the affective states that follow naked protests is shame. Tomkins (2008) describes shame as a negative affect. Shame is an intense negative emotion accompanied by an adverse evaluation and beliefs about the self (Benetti-McQuid & Bursik, 2005; Fullagar, 2003). Miller-Prieve (2016) explains that these negative evaluations of the self are in response to violating a societal or group norm. Here, we discuss the shame felt by the women protestors themselves and the shame foisted on them by society after their participation in naked body protests. Of course, a clear delineation between feelings that belong to individuals and those belonging to collectives is not possible, particularly if we understand emotions as networked economies. Afterall, as Probyn (2004) reminds us, shame depends on proximities to others, objects, places and surfaces. We therefore treat shame as mobile and as sticking to surfaces as nodal points in affective economies. This enables backwards and sideways motions between various surfaces (Ahmed, 2004). It is the accumulation of history, occurrences, power flows, and affective value that gives form to “the surfaces of bodies and worlds” (Ahmed, 2004, p. 121). Shame, like other affects, depends on what Tomkins (2008) has termed interest and on Berlant’s (2011) conception of optimism. This is to suggest that shame depends on interest in the other and optimism in the future.

Here it is worth observing that shame was particularly evident in the talk of the Dobsonville protestors. We understand this to be related to the fact that the women were older, working class, and mostly married and that their actions would have received social sanction and judgement from the vantage point of the respectability politics that attend to these social identities. In addition, since the women used the interviews to look back over a gulf of 29 years, their narratives are told by older women looking back at their younger selves. We postulate that most older people generally adopt conservative value judgements and may be more prone to feelings of shame when looking back at actions that appear incongruent with their present values. Lastly, Miller-Prieve (2016) observes that women usually experience shame as they are generally judged harshly.

To think with affects of shame and shaming that follow naked protests, we begin with an account of Thabisa, a woman in her late 60s and one of the 1990 Dobsonville naked protestors. Thabisa recounted that although she ended up being allocated a housing site, she worries about how her grandchildren will view her for protesting naked.

Just imagine. Today, I am watching this video with you, let’s say you are my granddaughter. Tomorrow I will be watching with your child … “But granny was crazy! To go naked? … Look at her. … What was she trying to do?” Then when you try to discipline them …

Thabisa wants to hide away from her granddaughter for fear of judgement of her public nudity. However, confronted with a video recording of her naked protest and its potential discovery by her granddaughter, there is no place for Thabisa and her fellow protestors to hide. In the video of Ukuhamba’Ze! where she was interviewed by Mainguard et al. (1995), Thabisa observes that she explained her behaviour to her children as follows: “I had to strip to fight the police. I always ask myself a sorrowful question. I tried to explain to my kids why I stripped. I was trying to fight for them so that they could find their home”. Therefore, even as Thabisa feels a sense of shame that her offspring would see her naked, she also recognises that the protest was for her children and grandchildren’s legacy. Here, her shame might be read as a continuing investment in the future.

To fight is to practise optimism even as negative affects stick and move between surfaces. For example, Thabisa’s offspring might be shamed by seeing their mother and grandmother engaged in public nakedness. Watching Thabisa’s shame in her downcast eyes as she watched the video of her naked protest 29 years later also shamed the author who interviewed her. This demonstrates the bodily circulation of affect as both an individual and collective feeling. Ahmed (2014) observes that when shamed, one’s body seems to burn up with the perceived negation. She asserts that shame impresses upon the skin, as an intense feeling of the subject being against itself. This feeling of negation, which is taken on by the subject as a sign of its own failure, is usually experienced before another. In the networked economies of shame, all of us are implicated in the circulating negative affects. We might therefore read shame as an affective contaminant that sticks to surfaces beyond the nodes of primary actors (Canham et al., 2020). Importantly, the video recording and its affects stand as an archival record of how African women fought for housing.

Like Thabisa, Mariam expresses her shame: “I am a woman and I am naked. I had lost myself for a while because what was happening had disturbed me. I also had a lot of strength and power, but I was very hurt. I had forgotten that as a woman, I wasn’t supposed to walk amongst people naked” (she protectively covers her genital area). In the same interview, Mariam wept as she reflected on the pain of her parents observing her participating in “these wars”. Paulina similarly describes her shame:

Everyone wanted to know what our problem was. You would explain but people didn’t have the same spirit as we did. People thought we were mad to strip off being adults. … I tried hiding behind other people because I was afraid of my husband seeing me.

These reflections index the success of patriarchy in conditioning women to internalise a disciplining gaze which demands shame. Shefer and Munt (2019) remind us that shame is a mechanism of surveillance that is deployed to police idealised and “respectable” forms of femininity. Paulina’s fear of being seen naked by her husband brings this surveillance into sharp relief. The naked body had been privatised for husbands’ private consumption. Using the naked body in public social causes that advance interests like housing that will benefit the welfare of the family is constructed as shameful. However, we find analytical valance in the double register of refusal and shame. The latter does not prevent resistance – it follows refusal. Since affect can also be preconscious (Thrift, 2008) and lead to spontaneous acts – “I had lost myself” – we posit that shame does not necessarily preclude future rebellion. For example, in her investment in freedom, Mariam observes that she lost herself in ways that suggest that she had no control. Shame might therefore be read as simultaneously locked into subjectivity and “free of the need for subjectivity” (Brown, 2021, p. 12).

What follows is an account from Busi, a woman in her mid-20s, who protested naked at the #FeesMustFall protest on 4 October 2016 at Wits University. She recounts how she had to deal with body-shaming from women after her participation in the protest.

So, umm, as … I think the most violent thing is to see the shaming coming from women. When I debated that topic on social media, a few weeks, a few days after, I was always debating women, and not necessarily men. It is very exhausting because I don’t, I’m not excusing men’s behaviour on that … but I would say I’ll take a different struggle when I fight with a man over those issues. But it becomes something completely different from a woman because you expect them to understand.

The hostility in the form of shaming the protestors suggests that women onlookers were also shamed by the naked protestors. This suggests that the circulatory flows of shame are not clearly delineated by gender differences. Because patriarchy is a social order that structures and gives form to society, patriarchal investments transcend gender. Women discipline other women. As Ahmed contends, “figures of hate circulate, and indeed accumulate affective value, precisely because they do not have a fixed referent” (2004, p. 123). Women might thus shame other women for fear of being figures of hate themselves. Of course, because patriarchy is so entrenched, even women who behave are already operating within economies of hate where they are sitting targets. Said differently, within the framework of modernity, affects of hate always stick to African women.

Following the #FeesMustFall protest being uploaded on YouTube, a woman user commented, “Like those boobs, fees must fall”. Another commentators wrote the following: “Fees must fall, but clothes must stay on … zero need to show off mkhabas [big stomachs]!” “A note to ugly people, don’t protest nude please. Thank you! Damn, those chicks look horrible!” This gratuitous shaming is invested in maintaining women as objects and seeks to curate their forms of refusal. In her account of #FeesMustFall events, Ndlovu (2017) contends that their hard work at the picket line had been reduced to discussions about beauty standards and hanging breasts. Responding to the #FeesMustFall naked body protest, in a clip that has since been removed after a public outcry about his comments, comedian Skhumba Hlophe observed: “Please don’t show your boobs. When a boob shows, it should look like a tennis ball. These females are showing hanging boobs that look like wet All-stars without shoelaces. Others have big tummies with silver stripes. A student with a silver stripe? With boobs hanging all the way to the belly. Please put your clothes on” (Times Live, 2016). Fanghanel (2020) asserts that most naked body protests staged by groups like FEMEN and Slutwalk usually mobilise thin, white, attractive, and able-bodied naked women. Mobilising such women gives us a commodified version of the naked protest, one that is easy to consume, is titillating and is complicit with capitalism. Since the black woman’s body is already historically positioned as ugly, fat and available, it attracts censorship, shaming and violence. If we see body shaming as an investment in clothed bodies that project successful modern subjects (Coly, 2015), we might understand shaming as a postcolonial malady that is always imbricated with coloniality.

However, while the women protestors are shamed, they also defy and refuse to succumb to these tropes. For example, Busi, a young woman who was interviewed on a radio podcast after #FeesMustFall, articulated her refusal thus:

We have refused to have our bodies policed. You are not going to tell me how to respond when I’m emotional, it’s my business. … Who said a woman’s body is a taboo? We refuse with our bodies, and we refuse to continue living in a society that polices women, and we are going to proceed as such. After this generation of fallism, ⁵ society will never be the same!!! (Radio podcast, 2016)

Busi’s adamant refusal might be read in relation to McGranahan, who theorises refusal by observing that it can be “generative and strategic, a deliberate move toward one thing, belief, practice, or community and away from another” (2016, p. 319). In this regard, Busi argues for a decisive move away from patriarchy, rape culture, and the policing of women’s bodies. She moves towards a society that “will never be the same” as a consequence of the fallist generation of women who refuse.

Siviwe, a young woman in her early 20s, who participated in the Tshwane University of Technology 2019 rape protest, recounts the body shaming she was subjected to. However, she also gestures to the multiple uses of shame.

This guy was like “Slender, hai! You are not even slender wena [you]. You are thin. You can even see a six pack here. You have a six pack on your chest … hee hee hee. But at least your thighs are nice. I could use some grabbing … heee at least your ass is nice … At least your ass complements your body. It’s not big, it’s not small”. Yo! ⁶ I was angry! I looked at him and I was like, “Would you tell that to your mom? Would you tell that to your sister? Why are you doing it to me if you wouldn’t do it to your sister or to your mom?” He was just laughing, but you could see that he was ashamed of himself. The grin on his face was not genuine. It was as if he was … you could see that I hit the head on the nail. And everyone was staring at him like … even the guys they were staring at him like, “Are you crazy?”

Refusing to cower and be silenced by the abusive words from the male spectator, Siviwe fought back. She flipped the shame back at him with her questioning (Al-Kassim, 2006). Here we again observe the mobile nature of shame as it circulates and sticks to individuals and collectives. Those who stared down Siviwe’s heckler were also shamed and compelled to take on his burden of shame. To point to Siviwe’s bravery and her ability to mobilise shame is not to misrecognise the emotional labour of shaming. Therefore, in addition to the labour of refusing rape culture, Siviwe has to resist its defenders.

Conclusion

The naked woman protestor follows in the lineage of the “mad black women” ⁷ (e.g., Davis, 2016) or Ahmed’s (2004) “bogeyman” of history. By undressing, she exposes the fictions of the nation-state – that we are modern because we are clothed, “our” women controlled, and that women have accepted the patriarchal structure of society. We have argued that public disrobing and exposing the flesh is an act of refusal against patriarchal myths. The disruptive forms of refusal that nakedness gestures to are an African aliveness and a life beyond human rights discourses. Nakedness demands nothing less than freedom to be. However, collective investments in patriarchal respectability, the surrender to the authority of its policing systems and the wisdom of its universities means that refusal is punished. The consequences of refusal have been clearly narrated in this paper. To be sure, there are positive material results to refusal. The limit of this paper is that these have not been articulated. We have sacrificed fulness of experience for focus. In relation to the latter, we chose to tarry on the negative affects that trail behind African women’s naked body protests. Here, our focus on negativity is on the productive possibilities of the negative. Instead of the spectacular heroism that feminist interlocuters tend to focus on, we focused on the stuckness of off-stage affects such as psychic trauma and shame. Relying on Ahmed’s conception of affective economies, we demonstrated how affects move between bodies of protestors and the social orders within which they live.

Further, following Berlant (2011) and Probyn (2004), we illuminated the cruel optimism of shame by illustrating how shame opens up avenues of relation rather than collapsing back into the psyche. Seen in this light, negative affects can have productive openings for the creation of common futures. This keeps the dream of liberation alive. Ultimately, we have illustrated the relational nature of the body by showing that it does not just exist in society but is constitutive of society. The body continues to generate emotions and to theorise long after the intensity of the action of the naked body protest. As sites of affective economies that centre relation, naked women protestors continue to give form to society in the wake of protest. As social beings, we are compelled to reckon with their psychic affects and we have to confront the shame that continues to vibrate and generate possibilities for African women’s freedom.

Finally, while there is value in highlighting the fierce face of feminist refusal, our attention to the quiet affects that follow the visceral politics of naked protest suggests the need for ongoing attention to protestors’ psychological needs. Therefore, although global movements such as #MeToo encourage women to speak out about violation, the consequences of speaking out need to be more fully surfaced and supported. To ignore offstage affects is to turn away from the ongoing theorisation of shame and psychic pain in the body. We have attempted to tune into these affects.