Catachresis in Côte d’Ivoire: Female Genital Power in Religious Ritual and Political Resistance
Abstract
Ivoirian women vehemently protest the violence and calamity of
civil war by deploying an embodied rhetoric of ritual, appealing to the
traditional religious concept of “Female Genital Power”. I propose that
their imagistic resistance to the postcolonial state represents a catachresis,
with a few interesting twists. Most salient is that what women
reinscribe onto the political scene is not as a feature of the imperial
culture but the concept-metaphors of indigenous religion, and especially
the image of Woman as the source of moral and spiritual power from
which proceeds all political, religious, and juridical authority.
Whereas the logocentrism of the academy, and postcolonial theory in
particular, leads to aporia, ritual remands scholars into the situation
of the actual world, where women are actively engaged in
self-representation that both defies projected depictions of them and
rejects their absence from state conceptions of power.
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