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

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.