Feminist Protest and the Disruptive Address of Naked Bodies

Abstract

The strategies with which a new generation of feminist activists have made visible the impact of gender-based violence have rendered bodies legible in the public discourses that challenge the social norms of everyday life in post-apartheid South Africa. This article considers the implications of public nakedness for an understanding of precarity not only as a condition but also as a resource for the politics of resistance. It examines the testimonies of activists involved in the Fallist protests on university campuses in 2016, as well as some antecedents of this form of protest: the women who participated in the Dobsonville township protests of 1990 as seen in the documentary, Uku Hamba ‘Ze – To Walk Naked (Maingard, Meintjes and Thompson 1995), and the protest strategies adopted within the women’s peace movement in Liberia, as recounted in the documentary, Pray the Devil Back to Hell (Disney and Reticker 2008).