Complicit Bodies: Self-Objectification and the Psychoanalytic Logic of Female Subjugation in Chika Unigwe's on Black Sisters' Street

Ebi Kuku; Tarimoweni Justline Egule

doi:10.56201/ijelcs.vol.11.no7.2026.pg22.32

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Complicit Bodies: Self-Objectification and the Psychoanalytic Logic of Female Subjugation in Chika Unigwe's on Black Sisters' Street

Ebi Kuku, Tarimoweni Justline Egule

Abstract

Chika Unigwe's on Black Sisters' Street narrates the recruitment of four African women into a sex trade network in Antwerp, and each woman arrives at that network through a decision she makes rather than a force applied against her. This paper reads Efe, Alek, Ama and Sisi through a psychoanalytic feminist lens that draws on Jessica Benjamin's account of submission as identification, Nancy Chodorow's theory of gendered psychic reproduction and Tanjare' McKay's model of self-objectification, arguing that the novel stages a double objectification in which patriarchal valuation of the female body is first imposed by others and then internalised as a means of survival. Close attention to the four-character studies in the text shows that complicity does not cancel coercion; it reveals the psyche as the site where structural subjugation is converted into personal motive. The paper closes by asking what a self- objectification model built from Western consumer contexts misses when applied to a migration narrative shaped by poverty, war and religious abuse, and argues that Unigwe's novel demands a revision of the concept rather than a straightforward application of it.

Keywords

psychoanalytic feminism; self-objectification; double objectification; Chika Unigwe; patriarchy.

References

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Complicit Bodies: Self-Objectification and the Psychoanalytic Logic of Female Subjugation in Chika Unigwe's on Black Sisters' Street

Abstract

Keywords

References

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