Gender, Power, and the Female Body in Emeka Ukwuaba’s Benign Pain

In the domestic space of postcolonial Nigeria, the female body remains a contested site on which hierarchies of class, gender, and sexuality are simultaneously inscribed and contested. This study examines how Emeka Ukwuaba's Benign Pain (2021) constructs the female body of the domestic worker as a terrain of power struggle, drawing on the experiences of Lebechi in the Okafor household to interrogate the politics of gender and domestic labour in contemporary Nigerian fiction. The study is anchored on intersectional feminist theory, which attends to the simultaneous operation of gender, class, and social position in producing vulnerability and oppression. A qualitative close-reading methodology is employed, supported by recent feminist literary scholarship and sociological studies of domestic labour in Nigeria published within the last five years. Findings reveal that Ukwuaba constructs Lebechi's body as both a source of vulnerability and a vehicle of negotiation, showing how female domestic workers navigate the competing gazes and desires of their employers within a profoundly unequal power structure. The novel exposes the ways in which the surveillance, discipline, and sexual objectification of the domestic worker's body are normalised within middle-class Nigerian households. The study concludes that Benign Pain offers a significant feminist critique of the domestic economy and recommends its integration into gender studies curricula alongside policy discussions of the legal protection of domestic workers in Nigeria.

Keywords: Gender, Female body, Emeka Ukwuaba, Intersectional feminism, Nigerian fiction