Gendered Dance and Bodily Display for (Dis)empowerment as Represented in Novuyo Tshuma’s Shadows

In Zimbabwe, images of the female body in fiction and the media are gradually shifting from being interpreted as merely sexualized objects of male visual consumption to those of resistance to and defiance against sexist objectification, exploitation, and moralist surveillance. Drawing on the intersection between Foucault’s notion of disciplinary power, feminist notions of the female body as a cultural template for punitive patriarchy and the male gaze, and the decolonial insights from African feminism(s), I discuss the potential for representations of female dance and bodily display to stimulate debate on gender (dis)empowerment, agency, and punishment in Novuyo Tshuma’s novella Shadows (2012). Acknowledging the pervasiveness of the globalized male gaze, I develop a flipside notion of male glare to negotiate the hardly critiqued unconscious African male desire to rebuke the imagined subversive dancing or stripping female body. The novella enables a discussion of the agency of the stereotyped African sex worker – not only as a debased performer, but also a potentially empowered embodied being. However, by employing a male narrative voice, informed by the dominant male discourses on gender, Tshuma problematically prioritizes the scopophilic and punitive narrative perspective that she seeks to undermine.