The Exploited Body: A Marxist-Feminist Reading of Gender, Labor, and Capital in Emecheta’s Second Class Citizen, El Saadawi’s Women at Point Zero, and Darko’s Faceless
Abstract
This study employs a Marxist-feminist lens to analyze the systemic marginalization and exploitation of female characters in three African novels: Buchi Emecheta’s Second Class Citizen (1974), Nawal El Saadawi’s Women at Point Zero (1975), and Amma Darko’s Faceless (2003). Moving beyond cataloguing instances of patriarchal violence, the paper argues that these texts depict women’s oppression as fundamentally intertwined with capitalist economic relations, wherein the female body and labor are commodified, and social reproduction is exploited. Through qualitative textual analysis, the study examines how structures of patriarchy and capitalism converge to relegate women to a state of “second-class” existence, extracting both productive and reproductive labor while denying autonomy. The analysis reveals a continuum of exploitation—from the domestic sphere and formal employment to the informal sexual economy—highlighting how gender subordination is materially produced and sustained. The paper concludes that a Marxist-feminist framework is essential for understanding the depth of women’s oppression in these narratives and for envisioning liberation that addresses both economic and patriarchal domination.
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Introduction
The female body in literature often becomes a site where social hierarchies are inscribed and contested. In many African societies, patriarchal norms have historically sanctioned the control, objectification, and exploitation of women, legitimizing their treatment as socially and economically subordinate. However, as feminist theorists have long argued, this subjugation cannot be fully understood in isolation from the economic systems that structure society. Patriarchy and capitalism are not parallel systems but deeply interlocking ones that together organize the exploitation of women’s labor—both productive (waged) and reproductive (unwaged, domestic) (Federici, 2004; Vogel, 2013).
African literary landscapes have powerfully documented this confluence. Writers like Buchi Emecheta, Nawal El Saadawi, and Amma Darko offer searing portraits of female protagonists whose lives are circumscribed by both gendered violence and economic deprivation. Their works move beyond portraying women merely as victims of cultural tradition, instead revealing how traditional patriarchy adapts to and is reinforced by modern capitalist relations, neocolonial dynamics, and urban poverty.
This paper argues that a Marxist-feminist theoretical framework is particularly illuminating for analyzing three seminal novels: Emecheta’s Second Class Citizen, El Saadawi’s Women at Point Zero, and Darko’s Faceless. Marxist feminism posits that women’s oppression is rooted in their role in social reproduction—the bearing and rearing of children, maintaining the household, and sustaining the labor force—which under capitalism is largely unpaid and devalued, serving as a hidden subsidy to the formal economy (Bhattacharya, 2017). This devaluation facilitates the exploitation of women’s labor in the wage economy and the treatment of their bodies as commodities.
The study addresses the following core question: How do Second Class Citizen, Women at Point Zero, and Faceless represent the intersection of patriarchal domination and capitalist exploitation to render female characters as marginalized, “second-class” subjects? Through close textual analysis, we will trace the exploitation of social reproduction, the commodification of the female body, and the foreclosure of female autonomy. In doing so, this paper aims to contribute to a materialist understanding of gender oppression in African literature, demonstrating that the personal struggles of Adah, Firdaus, and the women of Faceless are inextricably linked to broader political-economic structures.
Conclusion
The novels Second Class Citizen, Women at Point Zero, and Faceless offer profound literary testimonies to the multi-layered oppression of women. By applying a Marxist-feminist framework, this study has argued that their power lies in depicting this oppression as a material condition, rooted in the exploitation of women’s reproductive and productive labor and the reduction of their bodies to commodities under patriarchal capitalism.
Adah’s struggle in London, Firdaus’s journey to the point zero of prostitution, and the harrowing survival of the women in Darko’s Accra are not merely stories of individual misfortune. They are narratives that expose the systemic logic by which value is extracted from female lives while autonomy is denied. They show that education and wage labor, within an unchanged structure of social reproduction, are insufficient for liberation.
For literary scholarship, this analysis demonstrates the utility of Marxist feminism in moving beyond thematic catalogues of “abuse” to uncover the structural economic relations that give such abuse its force and persistence. It calls for a continued reading of African literature that takes material conditions seriously, recognizing that the fight for gender justice is inextricably linked to the fight against economic exploitation. The “second-class” status of these female citizens is, ultimately, a class status in the fullest sense of the word. Their literary narratives compel us to envision a liberation that is as economic as it is social, demanding nothing less than the reorganization of who labors, who profits, and who is valued.
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