❝ The postcolonial state has moved to suppress women’s autonomy and women’s political organizing by attempting to disrupt the praxis of feminist and radical progressive movements that has focused on the politics of everyday life as a terrain of struggle. By linking morality to sexuality, and to conjugal marriage in particular, the postcolonial state is able to produce hegemonic discourse that is strikingly similar to the Victorian cult of true womanhood and the moral reform movements of its day, and to the religious and secular fundamentalists of the contemporary period.