The Politics of the Body: Sexuality, Shame, and Bodily Autonomy in Postcolonial Feminist Texts

Abstract

This paper discusses the politics of the body in postcolonial feminist writings by theorizing sexuality, shame, and bodily autonomy as interrelated structural political forces. The study uses a qualitative interpretive design, combining postcolonial feminist textual and narrative-sensitive discourse analysis and reflexive thematic analysis to examine how bodies are governed through moral vocabularies, including purity, honor, and respectability. The results of the research indicate that sexuality as a social phenomenon is often made a property of the masses, which is regulated by a set of family members, community monitoring, religious-moral righteousness, and state/legal apparatus in such a way that the embodied life is placed in the ranks of a good reputation and national-cultural right validity. Shame is identified as a primary technology that transforms the external regulation into self-monitoring inside and shapes credibility, mobility, speech, and reproductive decisions. However, the texts also tell the stories of autonomy as relational and tactical: agency is reclaimed by refusing, strategic silence, testimony, self-fashioning, mobility, and networks of care. When sexuality, shame, and autonomy are read simultaneously, the article elucidates the role of postcolonial feminist writing as embodied restriction and imagines freedom as a practice contingent and expensive to continue.