ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 focuses on the discursive and ideological construction of the body. It looks at how the FRELIMO nationalist discourse created space for new ways of conceptualizing and living gendered bodies. The chapter explores the relationship between FRELIMO’s nationalist discourse and the female bodies that it sought to represent and mobilize. I focus especially on how this new discourse resonated with the female combatants who as “women” now became defined as “the most oppressed, humiliated and exploited beings in society.” To what extent did the women recognize themselves in this new nationalist category of the to-be liberated “Mozambican woman”? Moreover, what is its relevance today? What do women ex-combatants in Niassa remember of this wartime gender discourse? How do they interpret its meaning based on their now extensive life experiences? The chapter importantly interrogates the relationship between body and discourse and explores how individuals creatively negotiate the meanings imposed on them from the outside. Through a MCA, the chapter shows how the identity categories of the nationalist discourse are constituted—but also resisted and creatively transformed—in the conversational remembering of the DFs’ interview talk.
