Political Tools and Subversive Agents: How Patriarchy Forms Identity Through Women and Their Bodies
A Feminist Literary Analysis
In Fall 2023, I took a class on African Feminisms for fun. I already have a Bachelor of Philosophy degree in Anthropology and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies with a minor in nonfiction creative writing. This is an advanced undergraduate degree that required a masters-level thesis to complete. During my undergrad career, I never had the chance to take a class focused on feminist movements in Africa, which is why I decided to take one four years after graduating. For this newsletter, I wanted to share my final essay I wrote for the class.
This essay is a feminist literary analysis of Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi and Woman at Point Zero by Nawal El Saadawi. There are a few things drawing me to share it, especially now. The first being that the US is a patriarchal society that is backlashing hard against what feminist movements have spent generations building. We are seeing the loss of rights for women and trans people, which means there is much to learn from history and from other cultures who have faced similar oppression. A cornerstone of African feminisms is that they are context-based. There is no one feminism to capture the needs of every person that exists in this world. That is why we must look at specific contexts to know what will be liberating. What I learned through this literary analysis is that regardless of context, patriarchy forms identity through women and their bodies. The more oppressed women and trans people are, the greater the subversive power they are given.
Agency has been a word coming to mind and conversation a lot lately. Regardless of how oppressive the system, we always have agency. The more we can tap into choices that bring us in touch with our agency, the more equipped we are to handle traumas that will come. The more oppressive the system, the more powerful we are when we exert our agency. This includes agency to say “no,” to resist, to imagine, to create. Let this be a message of hope for you: we are only becoming more threatening to the powers that be.
Although this is a different genre than I usually center in my newsletter, it is still my writing, and I am here to uplift my craft. If this is your first time reading feminist theory or feminist literary analysis then this is my word of advice to you: keep reading, even when you don’t understand it. Concepts can be a little dense or hard to grasp at first, and that is totally okay and normal. Take what resonates or what makes sense, and let the rest digest in your subconscious. You may find it helpful to annotate as you go. This is the nature of reading theory.
The major points of the essay can be summarized as follows:
The hypocrisies of patriarchy lie in the amount of power women have to shape men’s personal and political identities.
In patriarchal societies, personal and national identities are formed through the objectification and subjugation of women and their bodies. The power women have to shape identities is exemplified by the strict control men have over their lives. This gives women immense subversive power when they defy societal norms.
Patriarchy being measurable means that it is physically tangible. As gender and gendered experiences couldn’t exist without physical bodies being gendered, people’s bodies are key sites at which patriarchy is measured, and thus where patriarchy gains/exerts power. Without bodies, specifically women’s bodies, there would be no patriarchy.
Patriarchy operates in many spaces which means the ways women enact their autonomy and destabilize patriarchy will vary depending on their context.
Women and their bodies not only shape men’s identities in private and public dimensions of patriarchy, but their actions also serve to destabilize the entire system.
Patriarchy creates rules around what women can and can’t do, and these rules inform the actions women can take to assert their autonomy under patriarchy. Women’s subversive power arises directly from the control men exert over them. Subversion and autonomy can only be in relationship to the circumstances in which one is being oppressed. Thus, patriarchy creates the criteria for its own destruction.
How women negotiate patriarchal systems is reflective of their autonomy under patriarchy. Even though patriarchy often serves to objectify women and control their movement, negotiating what norms they will or will not challenge is how women choose if, when, and how to destabilize the system.
Solidarity between women increases their subversive power.
Women’s bodies are sites through which national identities and power are formed.
The amount of control patriarchy exerts over women affirms the extent of their power. Without women and their bodies, patriarchy would have no physical sites through which to elevate men.
Women are the cornerstone of men’s personal and public identities under patriarchy. This gives women great subversive power when they choose to defy oppressive cultural norms.
The ever-shifting dimensions of patriarchy mean negotiation is a powerful feminist tool, where women can use their autonomy in different subversive ways depending on the context in which they are acting. As men must have specific relationships with women in order to assert personal and public power, patriarchy delegitimizes itself.
Since this is a feminist literary analysis of two books that center the lives of women, I am centering women in my analysis. This doesn’t exclude trans women, but it may not always resonate with trans experiences. It is worth noting that trans and gender-nonconforming people are also heavily controlled under patriarchy in various contexts, which also gives them subversive power. Patriarchy requires there to be only two genders, and for one gender to be subservient to the other. Patriarchy determines what it means to be a man and a woman, and the criteria to fit into those gendered categories. It works very hard to deny and force trans people into a two-gender system where men have power over all. The very existence of trans people destabilizes and delegitimizes patriarchy. Cis women and trans people make very powerful allies when we work together to disrupt the system.
Ultimately, I hope this essay helps you understand how oppression gives subversive power to the oppressed. Oppressive systems, like patriarchy, determine the criteria for their own destruction by making it very clear what is or isn’t acceptable. They are often hypocritical and deny the lived experiences of the masses to exert control over our bodies. As systems move harder against us, we can negotiate when and how we utilize our agency to destabilize the powers that be.
If this academic genre isn’t your cup of tea, no worries. I’ll be back with more creative writing/poetry next time. In the meantime, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments!
Political Tools and Subversive Agents: How Patriarchy Forms Identity Through Women and Their Bodies
The hypocrisies of patriarchy lie in the amount of power women have to shape men’s personal and political identities. Starting with a culturally relevant understanding of patriarchy given by Lindsay J. Benstead, this essay applies feminist literary analysis to the characters and plots of Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi and Woman at Point Zero by Nawal El Saadawi to showcase how women’s bodies are the sites through which men gain power. A nego-feminist lens is applied to Firdaus in Woman at Point Zero to exemplify how women use their autonomy to reject male superiority and that rejection destabilizes men’s identities and the patriarchy itself. Through this analysis, the argument is made that in patriarchal societies, personal and national identities are formed through the objectification and subjugation of women and their bodies. The power women have to shape identities is exemplified by the strict control men have over their lives. This gives women immense subversive power when they defy societal norms.
Before an understanding of women’s subversive power under patriarchy can be achieved, it is important to look at how and where patriarchy operates. In her essay “Conceptualizing and Measuring Patriarchy: The Importance of Feminist Theory,” Lindsay J. Benstead outlines the “multi-dimensional and intersectional nature of patriarchy” to argue that political scientists must engage more with feminist theory when they attempt to measure gender equity in patriarchal societies (Benstead 234). This means that she is forming an understanding of patriarchy that can expand upon the measurability of gender equity to better see how it systemically operates. Patriarchy being measurable means that it is physically tangible. As gender and gendered experiences couldn’t exist without physical bodies being gendered, people’s bodies are key sites at which patriarchy is measured, and thus where patriarchy gains/exerts power. Without bodies, specifically women’s bodies, there would be no patriarchy. Benstead further explains that “feminist theorists identify two dimensions of patriarchy – public and private. Private rights are . . . matters related to family relationships, especially marriage and divorce. . . While public rights concern access to public spheres such as education and politics” (236). Thus, patriarchy operates in many spaces which means the ways women enact their autonomy and destabilize patriarchy will vary depending on their context.
Benstead’s analysis and definition of patriarchy are relevant to the novels Homegoing and Woman at Point Zero because she draws upon other feminists engaged with research in the Middle East and North Africa. These spaces are geographically relevant to Woman at Point Zero, taking place in Egypt, and her definition can include patriarchal societies in sub-Saharan Africa as these dimensions of patriarchy also exist there (Benstead 236). As Homegoing largely takes place in Ghana, her conceptualization of patriarchy works here, too. Benstead’s definition of patriarchy is useful when analyzing how men form identity through their oppression of women and the objectification of their bodies. Both Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi and Woman at Point Zero by Nawal El Saadawi involve public and private dimensions of patriarchy and exemplify how they intersect, showcasing the many contexts through which patriarchal identity is formed and can be subverted by women’s autonomy.
Looking at Homegoing, Nana Yaa’s story exemplifies how men’s political power is tied to women’s bodies. In Quey’s chapter (Gyasi 50-69), Nana Yaa is a woman who is kidnapped during a raid led by Fiifi (Quey’s uncle) and taken back to their Fante village. Nana Yaa is the oldest daughter of the Asante king, described as “an important political bargaining tool, and people had been trying to capture her since her infancy. Wars had been started over her: to get her, to free her, to marry her,” (67). Nana Yaa’s political power is not only exemplified by how heavily protected she is, but also through the lengths to which men are willing to go to gain access to her. This is the public dimension of patriarchy in action: the objectification and subjugation of women allow them to be used as sites for political battles. The Fante kingdom gained a political upper hand and a level of protection from the Asantes by capturing Nana Yaa, meaning her body was the physical ground where that power was achieved. Without women’s bodies, in this case Nana Yaa’s, men would not have sites through which to assert this specific kind of political power, proving the importance and power of women’s bodies themselves. Nana Yaa affirmed Quey’s Fante identity and his power as a Fante because of her kidnapping as an Asante woman. If men couldn’t gain power through women’s bodies, then there wouldn’t be a reason to start entire wars over them.
Nana Yaa’s story also showcases how private and public dimensions of patriarchy intersect. After kidnapping Nana Yaa, Fiifi tells Quey that he is to marry her the next day, “so that even if the Asante king and all of his men come knocking on my door, they cannot deny you. . . . I will make sure you become a very powerful man” (Gyasi 69). Nana Yaa’s capture and the subsequent power she gives to Quey through marriage means that private relationships can directly benefit public ones. As a “political bargaining tool,” proximity to her and “ownership” of her means that the men she is controlled by have much more freedom of movement, both physically and politically. It is through the private affair of marriage to her that Quey’s political power is gained, showcasing the intersections of the private and public dimensions of patriarchy. Although her nonconsensual marriage to Quey arises out of her capture in war, her father and the Asante kingdom recognize her marriage as legitimate because men dictated it within patriarchal norms. This marriage offers both Quey and their son James protection when they all travel to the heart of Asanteland after her father’s death during James’s chapter (89, 94). Even though her marriage was against her will and the result of her being kidnapped, her objectification solidifies her status as a “political tool,” which in turn offers these Fante men protection in Asanteland. Their bodies, with political and ethnic identities that are publicly understood, are protected through private relationships with her.
Women and their bodies not only shape men’s identities in private and public dimensions of patriarchy, but their actions also serve to destabilize the entire system. To understand how this subversive power works, it is useful to return to how other feminists conceptualize patriarchy. One of the writers whom Lindsay Benstead draws her understanding of patriarchy from is Deniz Kandiyoti. Kandiyoti conceptualizes gender relations as a “‘patriarchal bargain’ . . . the outcome of social and political negotiation” (Benstead 241). “The ‘patriarchal bargain’ constrains women while offering space in which women develop strategies and negotiate areas of autonomy; this can include the public or private domains or both” (Benstead 241). In other words, patriarchy creates rules around what women can and can’t do, and these rules inform the actions women can take to assert their autonomy under patriarchy. Women’s subversive power arises directly from the control men exert over them. Subversion and autonomy can only be in relationship to the circumstances in which one is being oppressed. Thus, patriarchy creates the criteria for its own destruction.
In a 2006 interview with Rema Hammami in Development and Change, Deniz Kandiyoti further explains that when she spoke of the “patriarchal bargain” she was “trying to show how the paths of acquiescence or resistance were to some extent conditioned by the dominant cultural scripts of each specific context, [allowing] nonetheless for a possibility of change, making ‘patriarchal bargains’ subject to constant renegotiation” (Hammami 1349). So, not only does the patriarchal dimension and context determine what actions will be subversive or destabilizing to the system, but that context is always shifting. How women navigate “patriarchal bargains” and their shifting contexts can be understood through the lens of nego-feminism. Nego-feminism, first conceptualized by Obioma Nnaemeka in her essay “Nego-Feminism: Theorizing, Practicing, and Pruning Africa’s Way,” is an African feminism that “challenges through negotiations and compromise. . . . It knows when, where, and how to negotiate with or negotiate around patriarchy in different contexts” (Nnaemeka 378). How women negotiate patriarchal systems is reflective of their autonomy under patriarchy. Even though patriarchy often serves to objectify women and control their movement, negotiating what norms they will or will not challenge is how women choose if, when, and how to destabilize the system.
In Woman at Point Zero, Firdaus is a woman who faces patriarchal society head-on after a lifetime of being subjected to patriarchal violence. Her life story exemplifies how it is possible to subvert and destabilize patriarchy in both private and public dimensions through negotiation with systemic norms, and how that negotiation is at the heart of women’s power under patriarchy. For instance, Firdaus is unmarried because she chose to leave her husband early on as she was tired of experiencing domestic violence (Saadawi 60). This in itself is defying patriarchal norms, as her uncle and his wife tell her that it is normal for a man to beat his wife and that she should get used to it as “her duty was perfect obedience” (59). In this context, the private dimension of patriarchy allows for physical violence against women and Firdaus defies that patriarchy by not accepting that situation. Women are also expected to be married in this culture, which means she is subverting forms of power men have over her by refusing to be married. After leaving her husband, she meets the owner of a coffee shop named Bayoumi and stays with him thinking that he would help her find work with her school certificates. On the contrary, he refuses, hits her, and locks her in his house. She is able to escape with the help of another woman who sees her crying in the window, once again refusing normalized domestic violence under patriarchy (62-68). It is worth noting that it’s another woman helping Firdaus escape, showcasing how solidarity between women increases their subversive power. After she escapes, she says, “the street had become the only safe place in which I could seek refuge, and into which I could escape with my whole being” (68). Since households are private spaces where patriarchy violently enacts its power, Firdaus finds autonomy alone in the streets and eventually through her experience as a sex worker.
As Firdaus’s situation changes, the dimensions of patriarchy also change around her. The patriarchy she faces now oscillates between public and private as she finds herself more often in public spaces controlled by men and her work brings her into private dwellings where she can still experience domestic violence. Even so, she can subvert norms and find means of resistance by negotiating what she will and will not give to men. When it comes to sex work, for instance, she says:
I learnt to resist by being passive, to keep myself whole by offering nothing, to live by withdrawing to a world of my own. In other words, I was telling the man he could have my body, he could have a dead body, but he would never be able to make me react, or tremble, or feel either pleasure or pain. I made no effort, expended no energy, gave no affection, provided no thought. 116
Firdaus recognizes and feels her autonomy when she chooses how much of herself she allows men to touch. This exemplifies what Kandiyoti meant when she said “the paths of acquiescence or resistance [are] . . . conditioned by the dominant cultural scripts of each specific context” (Hammami 1349). Firdaus is only able to resist through the means that are available to her under this context of strict patriarchy. Although she is forced into sex work for refusing to accept domestic abuse and other cultural expectations, she is still able to choose the level of power men have over her. In this situation, she negotiates with patriarchy by allowing men to have sex with her for work, but not allowing them to have anything more than her body.
Firdaus’s ability to destabilize public patriarchy through her autonomy is exemplified when a man holding a high place in office wants her to sleep with him and she refuses. Firdaus recognizes her political power as she grows throughout the novel and begins to name it the more she understands it, which is what empowers her to say no. After she refuses: “[The police officer] explained to me that refusing a Head of State could be looked upon as an insult to a great man and lead to strained relations between two countries. He added that if I really loved my country, if I was a patriot, I would go to him at once,” (Saadawi 122). The Head of State hiring a policeman to convince her to sleep with him proves that Firdaus has power as a woman through her body because of his desperation to have her. This underscores how women’s bodies are sites through which national identities and power are formed. Her decision affects national security itself and reflects her national patriotism. There is no reason for her to be a patriot since her profession is not considered respectable by men (Saadawi 95) and she faces violence from regular civilians every day because of it. This situation reveals patriarchal hypocrisy: her profession is desired by powerful men and gives her the ability to destabilize nations, and yet she garners no respect for the work she does. She recognizes this hypocrisy, so saying no is how she exerts her subversive power and negotiates what she is willing to accept under extreme patriarchy.
The public and personal power that men gain from Firdaus’s body is also reflected later in the novel when Marzouk the pimp wants to own her. Firdaus works to escape his efforts, but he has better social connections and eventually coerces her into answering his demands (Saadawi 125-126). He tells her, “I’m in business. My capital is women’s bodies” (126). Thus, his power as a man is directly tied to his control over women. If it weren’t for women and their bodies, he wouldn’t have a business or nearly as much sociopolitical power. In this dimension of patriarchy, Firdaus becomes trapped through the power Marzouk has gained through his ownership of women’s sexual labor. This is the situation in which Firdaus takes the most extreme action to defy patriarchy: she kills him (130). At this point, negotiation with patriarchy is no longer an option for Firdaus, and she takes violent action to escape a man’s control over her. Of course, this leads to her subsequent arrest, but her death sentence has less to do with what she did and more to do with the hypocrisies she has unveiled: “I was the only woman who had torn the mask away, and exposed the face of their ugly reality” (136-137). Firdaus’s death sentence is another indicator of her power as a woman, and her ability to destabilize patriarchy through that power:
They condemned me to death not because I had killed a man – there are thousands of people being killed every day – but because they are afraid to let me live. They know that as long as I am alive they will not be safe, that I shall kill them. My life means their death. My death means their life. They want to live. And life for them means more crime, more plunder, unlimited booty. 137
Killing Firdaus is another way patriarchal society is reaffirming its identity through her body. By killing her for revealing the hypocrisies of the world she lives in, the patriarchal state reasserts its power and snuffs out evidence of its fragility. Firdaus can’t live because she destabilizes multiple dimensions of the patriarchy. She only has this much subversive power because of how violently patriarchal this society is. Thus, her body is a site for the formation of men’s identities, national identities, and ultimately how she threatens all dimensions of the patriarchy she faced throughout her life.
The amount of control patriarchy exerts over women affirms the extent of their power. Without women and their bodies, patriarchy would have no physical sites through which to elevate men. In Homegoing, Quey’s body is protected through his marriage to Nana Yaa and her presence ensures his safety in the Asante kingdom. Nana Yaa’s body is where political wars are fought and personal power is achieved. Women are the cornerstone of men’s personal and public identities under patriarchy. This gives women great subversive power when they choose to defy oppressive cultural norms. In Woman at Point Zero, Firdaus exemplifies the agency women have even in the most strict of patriarchal contexts, and how exerting that agency destabilizes entire nations. The ever-shifting dimensions of patriarchy mean negotiation is a powerful feminist tool, where women can use their autonomy in different subversive ways depending on the context in which they are acting. As men must have specific relationships with women in order to assert personal and public power, patriarchy delegitimizes itself.
Works Cited
Benstead, Lindsay J. “Conceptualizing and Measuring Patriarchy: The Importance of Feminist Theory.” Mediterranean Politics, vol. 26, no. 2, Apr. 2021, pp. 234–46.
Gyasi, Yaa. Homegoing: A Novel. Vintage, 2016.
Hammami, Rema. “Deniz Kandiyoti.” Development & Change, vol. 37, no. 6, Nov. 2006, pp. 1347–54.
Nnaemeka, Obioma. “Nego-Feminism: Theorizing, Practicing, and Pruning Africa’s Way.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture & Society, vol. 29, no. 2, Winter 2004, pp. 357–85.
Saadawi, Nawāl El. Woman at Point Zero. Zed Books, 2015.