Hybrid voices and embodied politics: Gender, performativity, and postcolonial negotiation in Mary Karooro Okurut’s ‘The Invisible Weevil’ and ‘Child of a Delegate’.

Abstract

This chapter explores gender-based challenges and opportunities in African cultural expression through a comparative analysis of Mary Karooro Okurut’s The Invisible Weevil and Child of a Delegate, drawing on feminist performance theory, postcolonial performativity, and hybridity. Although these texts are prose narratives, they are deeply performative in their narrative strategies, dialogic structures, and representations of embodied social practices such as political spectacle, ritualised speech, and gendered public performance. The chapter deploys mobilizes Homi Bhabha’s notion of hybridity to analyse how Okurut’s narratives operate within liminal postcolonial spaces where traditional gender norms intersect with modern political and social institutions. In The Invisible Weevil, gendered political participation becomes a contested arena where women navigate corruption, patriarchy, and civic agency, while Child of a Delegate foregrounds intergenerational and socio-political performances of power, masculinity, and femininity within postcolonial governance structures. Although music and dance are not foregrounded as theatrical devices, the novels encode performative cultural practices, rituals, political rallies, and communal gatherings that function as narrative performances of identity and power. These narrative performances contribute to African heritage discourses by illustrating how gender is enacted and contested within everyday socio-cultural spectacles. Ultimately, the chapter argues that Okurut’s fiction constructs the postcolonial public sphere as a performative stage where gendered identities are continually negotiated and reimagined. By bridging literary studies with performance and cultural studies, the chapter contributes to interdisciplinary debates on gender, power, and performativity.