Whose Body Is It? Religious Justifications, Patriarchal Control, and Female Bodily Autonomy in Nadia Murad’s The Last Girl and Yasmin Saikia’s Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh

Abstract

This article compares Nadia Murad’s The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity, and My Fight Against the  Islamic State and Yasmin Saikia’s Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971 to  examine how gendered power continues to shape women’s bodily autonomy during and after armed  conflict. Using qualitative comparative textual analysis, close reading, and critical discourse analysis, it  studies three related dimensions: ideological justifications for violence, the social afterlife of sexual  violence, and the role of testimony in reclaiming narrative authority. Murad’s memoir documents the  Islamic State’s persecution and enslavement of Yazidi women, including the use of extremist religious  interpretations to classify and control captives. Saikia’s oral history, by contrast, examines the varied  experiences of women affected by the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War and the tensions between public  recognition as Birangona and the stigma some survivors continued to encounter. The article does not  equate these distinct histories; instead, it identifies a comparative pattern in which women’s bodies  become sites through which political, religious, and communal authority is asserted. It argues that bodily  autonomy depends not only on freedom from direct violence but also on social belonging and the ability  to shape the meaning of one’s own experience. Both texts function as feminist counter-narratives,  although testimony is understood as a form of agency rather than a complete or automatic resolution of  trauma.