Female Genital Mutilation

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    I find it problematic that female genital mutiliation in Africa
regularly reappears on this list as a locus of feminist research interest,
and that it more generally is treated as a legitimiate topic of U.S.-based
feminist writing.  U.S.-feminist authored writings on the topic thus far
demonstrate to me only that FGM cannot be analyzed or theorized from a
U.S.-based perspective. When U.S. feminists write about FGM, their
writings almost invariably become vehicles for placing non-Western women
once more 'under Western eyes', to borrow a phrase from Chandra Mohanty:
African women end up constructed, in these works, as thoroughly oppressed
victims (of their men, their 'culture') while Western women are the free
and enlightened thinkers who would rescue them, or at least draw back the
'veil' over these practices and 'expose' them to the enlightened light of
U.S. feminist criticism.
    Rather than promoting the further exoticization of African women
from those few societies within which some women undergo FGM, rather than
adopting the colonial assumption that it is in 'other places' that one
finds the more radical practices which 'mutilate' female bodies and
desires, U.S.-based feminist scholars interested in FGM would stand on
much firmer grounder -- methodologically, epistemologically, and ethically
-- if they looked to 'female mutiliation' in their own backyards:  Breast
implants, anyone?  'Cosmetic' surgeries?  Belly tucks?  Liposuction?  And
what of the variety of services provided to infants:  intersex sex
assignment surgeries, for example, the surgical 'correction' of
'ambiguous' genitals?
 
Deborah A. Elliston
Department of Anthropology
New York University
New E-mail (effective immediately):  deborah.elliston  @  nyu.edu
    *NOTE NEW E-MAIL ADDRESS:  OLD ADDRESS EXPIRES SOON*

 
        I have been pondering this post [from Deborah Elliston] in terms of
what it would mean to any teaching in the U.S. about other cultures.  I
study Latin America--Central America in particular.  Much of what I study
has to do with things like discrimination, persecutions, torture and other
practices in which common people are the vic- tims.  If I followed the
principle articulated in the above argument, I would be unable to criticize
those cultures.  Even though I can (and do) point to the role of the U.S.
CIA in teaching dictators the latest torture techniques, I cannot ignore
the role of the elites in the maltreatment of their own people.
Furthermore, since I was born and raised in the U.S., albeit from Central
American parents, I cannot even claim to be criticizing my own. It seems to
me that we cannot just be tourist bureaus for foreign cultures.
 
The question I would pose to the list is, does teaching about abuse in
foreign cultures necessarily involve exoticizing that culture?
 
To carry the thought a bit further: While Mandela was still in prison,
a friend of mine was invited by a colleague to go to South Africa.  Not being
of a political bent, she called the consulate to request information about
travelling there.  She received a fat packet in the mail of beautiful travel
brochures, etc., and nary a mention of Apartheid.  If we DON'T teach about
things that we judge to be abusive of women, are we  any better than the
South African consulate?
 
____________________________________________________________
Rosa Maria Pegueros                  pegueros  @  uriacc.uri.edu
University of Rhode Island
Department of History                phone: (401) 874-4092
80 Upper College Road,  Suite 3        fax: (401) 874-2595
Kingston, RI 02881
                            "Qui me amat, amat et canem meum."

 
I agree completely with Rosie.  I think that we can carry cultural
relativism to far.  Ethical we can point to practices in any culture that
untimately inteferwith the welbeing of any individual member. The original
poster has not taken into account that femminists in many contries were
genital mutilation is carried out are actively fighting this practice. I
certainly agree that we should look at csomtic surgery interventions in a
similar light and the cultural structures that underlay these actions.
However - with the eception of intersexed children, must of the other
cosmetic interventions are made on adults whio who actively sought them
out.  Any procecedures like Gm , that result in infection, scarring, pain,
loss of sexual pleasure. greatily increasing the risks of childbirth and
of aids, or aparthide and toture of prisoners, seem to me clear issues
that cross cultural and state lines.  Marilyn
 
***************************************************************************
* Marilyn P. Safir, PhD         Internet:  msafir  @  psy.haifa.ac.il         *
* Associate Professor           Telephone: 972-4-8240929/21w 8245223/022h *
* Department of Psychology      Fax:       972-4-8240966                  *
* UNIVERSITY OF HAIFA           Telex:     46660 UNIHA                    *
* Haifa  31905, Israel                                                    *
***************************************************************************

 
Okay already!
This seems to be a knee-jerk topic.
On the one side are those women concerned with any abuse of women, genital
or otherwise.
On the other hand are those women concerned with keeping non-Western women
outside the purview of Western eyes.
This binary opposition might be acceptable if it were consistent.  But it
is interesting to note that what Western women suggest instead makes a
mockery of the issue and further exoticizes a real problem of global
abuse.  Liposuction?  Breast implants?  HELLO! Western women with low
self-esteem who seek such solutions are self-mutilating; they "choose" to
do so (pressured perhaps by supposedly-male societal forces).  Women who
have cliteridectomies and other "genital mutilations" have no say in such
"surgery."  That's a critical difference.
If one were to compare self-mutilatory behavior cross-culturally, for
example breast implants and liposuction to neck-stretching and so on, that
would be more academically sound, in my opinion.
It is also interesting when and where Western women choose to interfere
with what goes on elsewhere; for trust me, they do. To deny sisters
support is criminal: whether it be rape, murder or mutilation in the
private or public sphere (war crimes or hate crimes or "passion" crimes)
we should be there.  Why are women in Bosnia different from women in
Rwanda in this respect?
I, for one, am my sister's keeper.
What I do agree with is that cultural changes should come from within.
Support for those doing the anti-FGM work in countries where it is endemic
is in my opinion the most effective way to go.
 
 
Liora Moriel
University of Maryland

 
I know, Joan, that this list is not primarily for discussion of issues,
but I can't help jumping into this one.  I want to respond to Rosie's
question, "Does teaching about abuse in foreign cultures necessarily involve
exoticizing that culture?"  The answer is, I think, not *necessarily* --
but quite often when those doing the teaching haven't made the effort
to fully understand what they're teaching about, which has all too often
been the case with female genital mutilation.  I generally agree with
Deborah's post, but I didn't understand her to say that we must not
teach about these issues, but rather that we should not construct them
in such a way that African women become the totally helpless victims who
have to be "rescued" be enlightened Western women.
 
My own take on cultural relativism is that it is not the same as maoral
relativism -- it is *not* an "anything goes/that's just their culture and
we have no right to judge it" attitude.  But what cultural relativism does
demand of us is that we try to gain as deep and full an understanding of
a custom and its place within the cultural tradition in which it is
embedded as possible, and then, if we make a moral judgment about it, we
do so by considering it critically in a larger context than the norms of
our own culture.  There are questions we *have* to ask in making such a
judgment -- How do the people themselves understand the practice?  If our
understanding is different, what makes us so sure that we are correct?  Are
there comparable items within our own culture that we would understand
differently (and if there are that ought to make us think longer and
harder about our understandings of other people's customs)?  What harm
is done by the practice?  Are there benefits associated with it?  Are there
ways to preserve those benefits, if the practice were abandoned?  Is there
internal opposition to the practice?  On what basis?  Etc.
 
Cultural relativism is not incompatible with working for culture change.
Applied anthropology exists.  Cultures do change.  Local warfare, for
example, has been abandoned in most parts of the world.  Applied
anthropologists, in inducing change, usually try to work *with* members of
local communities in deciding directions of and strategies for change, and
I would strongly advocate doing the same with regard to female genital
surgeries.  The first point of such a strategy is to listen to the voices
of these women, and understand the practice and its accompanying costs and
benefits from their point of view.
 
This -- understanding from the insider's point of view -- is what very little
Western writing on and agitation about "female genital mutilation" has tried
to accomplish.  A lot of it conflates types of genital surgery, and attributes
consequences of one type to other types.  Much of it allege reasons for
these practices that women in the societies involved dismiss as ludicrous.
And concern about African women's welfare often ends with eradicating this
particular practice that *we* consider so horrific.  African women themselves
often care more about other issues -- like economic security and infant
mortality -- and then western feminists dismiss their lack of interest in
FGM as their primary issue as an index of the degree of their oppression.
After the Kenyan government outlawed clitoridectomy, one Kenyan feminist
said to me, "Now they will say they have done something big for women, and
don't have to do anything else."  Rhetorical style is an issue too --
African feminists are understandably rankled by rhetoric that labels FGM
a "barbaric" practice of "primitive" cultures.
 
Western feminists who have been told by African feminists to mind their own
business on these issues often completely understand the reasons for this --
too many of us just don't get it.
 
And strident demands that people cease this awful practice *right now* often
are met with a cultural backlash -- so that these practices, which often are
really not the core of the culture, become key markers of cultural identity,
and therefore view as intrinsically worthy of preservation.  How do you
think Americans and others who practice male circumcision would react if
aliens landed and demanded that we immediately cease our primitive and
barbaric practice of mutilating our baby boys?  (And nobody needs to point
out here that FGM is more severe physiologically than male circumcision --
the analogy is still valid, as are those Deborah drew.)
 
Bottom line:  of course we can teach about oppression in other cultures, but
we really should try to understand it thoroughly first, consider critically
what is really wrong about it and why, and how it compares to other wrongs,
listen to the voices of the people it intimately affects, try to understand
it from their point of view, etc.  It is in failing to do those things that
we fail in cultural relativism -- not in the mere fact of having made a
value judgment.
 
Sorry to rant.  :)
 
  -- Gina Oboler

 
        I think the issue here is not so much whether we deal with these
issues, but how.  That, it seems to me, is precisely the point of Chandra
Mohanty's "Under Western Eyes."  Mohanty's warnings about the dangers
inherent in such undertakings must be taken to heart.  Too much western
feminist work on this topic falls into the traps Mohanty has identified,
creating a totalizing category of "third world woman" and then treating such
women as objects of study (and of pity), rather than as subjects of their
own lives.  So, if we are going to teach about FGM, we must first
problematize the use of this category to cover an enormous range of
practices (kind of surgery, age at which it is done, who makes the decision,
how the practice is carried out, etc.) in a diverse array of cultural
contexts.  Then, we must let the women who live with this practice tell
their own stories.  One possibility would be to use Nawal El Sadawi's
writing about the horrific experience of her own clitoridectomy (I believe
in *The Hidden Face of Eve,* but I'm not sure) along with the film "Hidden
Faces" (available from Women Make Movies).  The film is critical of El
Sadawi, thereby making it clear that she cannot speak for all "third-world
women," or all Arab women, or even all Egyptian women.  It also includes a
marvelous sequence of a group of women (three sisters and their
daughters)discussing clitoridectomy.  It's been a while since I've seen the
film, but if memory serves me, all three of the mothers have had
clitoridectomies.  One has reacted by insisting that this not be done to her
daughter, the others by carrying on the tradition.  They disagree (and so, I
think, do their daughters) about whether this is a form of mutilation or a
form of beautification.
---------------
Jean L. Potuchek
Women's Studies, Gettysburg College
jpotuche  @  gettysburg.edu

 
As an anthropologist, a member of a discipline that studies other cultures
primarily though not solely -- and as a feminist anthropologist who is
particularly concerned with the situation of women in these cultures --
female genital mutilation is naturally a subject of study and discussion,
just as much as all the forms of mutilation that women experience in the
United States.  If we ignore the situation of women in all cultures, there
would be no such thing as an international women's movement.  To become
suddenly conscious of other cultures when the subject of female abuse
arises is, to my mind, a front used by those who don't want the abuse to
be interfered with.  Ruby Rohrlich   rohrlich  @  gwis2.circ.gwu.edu

 
two cents on the issue:  The original post suggested to me that we
remember to view women as actors in their own culture, not "unfortunates"
we need to rescue.  Many of the actors in female circumcision are, of
course women, including the midwives and mothers who benefit and so
propagate the procedure.  Failure to recognize their real economic fears
of having a daughter no one will marry or losing the income from
performing the procedure points to our relative fat-cat status. Full
bellies breed our shock. The post did _not_ suggest to me that we accept
the procedure as non-sexist or that wishing it didn't occur was in its own
way benighted.
 
two:  today's Ellen Goodman column (I saw it in the Dallas paper;
it's called "Law helps eradicate a bad tradition,") discusses a human
rights activist in California who pressures new immigrants to cease the
procedure.  (She was subject to it while growing up in Ethiopia).
California has recently passed a law banning the procedure, and when this
activist mentions it to immigrants _they_ react with shock.  They say
"Wow, a law?  Why?  Isn't this our tradition?  Our culture?"  Others,
though, react with relief.
 
I think we're capable of remembering such situations involve actual human
beings, not "those people," while simultaneously abhorring the violence of
all kinds we learn to do to ourselves and other women.
 
p.s. the same edition of the paper reported that male circumcision has no
apparent health benefits after all but does lead to greater sexual
pleasure.  Any chance of men's groups agitating against _this_ tradition?
 
Diana York Blaine
Department of English
University of North Texas
dyb0001  @  jove.acs.unt.edu

 
    Two more cents:
 
    of course this terrain has been explored before, most famously in an
 exchange (of
sorts) between Audre Lorde and Mary Daly.  In the Fall '96 _On the Issues_ there
 is a very
powerful pictorial essay by Stephanie Welsh with text by Jennifer Ruth Hosek
 that does a lot to
refocus one's thinking on the question of genital mutilation.
 
 Welsh won a Pulitzer for her work, and found the ceremony leading up to the
 mutilation quite
moving, but as her pictures attest, the procedure itself is bloody and painful,
 and the support and
encouragement of one's mother and other women does nothing to dispel that
 gruesome reality.
 
 Interestingly, as Welsh documents, the young woman she photographed was told
 ("scolded")
to stop screaming, and that the mutilation didn't hurt.  I think Welsh's work
 really personalizes the
range of actors in  a way that can give one pause.
 
On the subject of males, a recent study I read indicated that circumcision
 *decreased* sexual
pleasure, have I misunderstood you, Diana?
 
    Edrie Sobstyl
    School of Arts and Humanities
    University of Texas at Dallas
 

 
I work every day with women who are genitally "altered." These women
seem neither happy about it nor empowered by it and certainly not
knowledgeable of its implications (cultural or historical).
 
The "sexual silencing" that represents extends across cultures and
even into our own; it seems that that alone is worth our interest and
study.
 
Stephanie
chastsg  @  dshs.wa.gov

 
On Thu, 3 Apr 1997, liora moriel wrote:
 
> It is also interesting when and where Western women choose to interfere
> with what goes on elsewhere; for trust me, they do. To deny sisters
> support is criminal: whether it be rape, murder or mutilation in the
> private or public sphere (war crimes or hate crimes or "passion" crimes)
> we should be there.  Why are women in Bosnia different from women in
> Rwanda in this respect?
> I, for one, am my sister's keeper.
> What I do agree with is that cultural changes should come from within.
> Support for those doing the anti-FGM work in countries where it is endemic
> is in my opinion the most effective way to go.
>
Re the above and previous posts, I am also stricken about
how much allure this topic holds on an emotional level
for Western/U.S. based feminists.
 
On a reasonably recent Women's Human Rights conference
that I attended there were two concurrent panels on one
afternoon. One, of FGM, was packed with people standing in the back,
the other, of poverty and economics, had five dispersed people in
a huge auditorium . I don't think
this is a coincidence and I think it does highlight that
human beings "care" much more about things they strongly
identify with in their own experience.  Poverty, hunger and lack
of water, etc. are usually not the experience of privileged
conference attendees/academia, but anything revolving
around sexuality is.
 
I am not against supporting African women/girls who are
against this practice, or teaching about it, but I think to understand it
better, it would be first well worth to analyze who is looking
at FGM and through what lens. This is what I understood from
Debeorah's post.  It's not that we should not support women
in Bosnia or Croatia (or to teach about it), but to ask
why is it that in the media (at least), one hears a thousand
times about the mass rapes in Bosnia and there is a huge
silence on the same process in East Timor and Guatemala
for example?  How do these imbalances affect the awareness
of the people teaching "human rights" of Other  women ?
what negative or positive interventionist policies have been
in effect from the West to the rest of the world and
how does academia perpetuate these policies?
 
Vera Britto

 
You're right about exoticizing FGM "under Western eyes" and the comparison
of body mutilations "here" and "there." Of note on this, a friend who was at
the international women's conference in Mexico some years ago tells me that
women from countries where FGM is prevelant asked women outside those areas
to take up the issue publicly to support their own campaigns against it.
        I think we should take cues for the kind of support we lend to local
issues from the feminists' there. Certainly, spotlighting FGM from countries
whose state-supported corporation policies wreak exploitative havoc where
FGM occurs, without going after those policies is the wrong way to go.
      beatrice    bkachuck  @  cuny.campus.mci.net
 

 
I find comments (abridged by me) below disturbing because it limits
students of women's studies in the U.S. to only studying their own
country.  The idea that western scholars are doomed to replicating
colonial attitudes when they study cultures other than their own will
lead only to increased provinciality. In fact, women's studies in the
U.S. has been criticized for spending too little time on the world beyond
the U.S.  Thus criticisms like this present no-win situations.  Clearly
there are topics of body mutilation that appear in the United States -
including Femald Genital Mutilation (it arrived with immigrants and is an
issue in several parts of the country where hospitals are being asked to
perform FGM surgery on girls).  None of that is a reason for not studying
what goes on elsewhere.  Surely blocking all international study as part
of women's studies is not going to HELP reduce attitudes of colonialism
in women's studies.  Joan Gundersen  CSU-San Marcos
jrgunder  @  coyote.csusm.edu
 
Deborah A. Elliston wrote:
>
>     I find it problematic that female genital mutiliation in Africa
> regularly reappears on this list as a locus of feminist research interest,
> and that it more generally is treated as a legitimiate topic of U.S.-based
> feminist writing. . . .  U.S.-based feminist scholars interested in FGM 
> would stand on
> much firmer grounder -- methodologically, epistemologically, and ethically
> -- if they looked to 'female mutiliation' in their own backyards:  Breast
> implants, anyone?  'Cosmetic' surgeries?  Belly tucks?  Liposuction?  And
> what of the variety of services provided to infants:  intersex sex
> assignment surgeries, for example, the surgical 'correction' of
> 'ambiguous' genitals?
>
> Deborah A. Elliston

 
I'm a 'white' US citizen and academic living in South Africa and working
among Zulu women since 1995, and before that in Lesotho on a
Fulbright, working among Basotho women 1992-94, before that at Smith
College for some years.  I have been reading contributions to this topic
with interest and am disappointed in the acrimony that seems to arise
between scholars on different 'sides' of the issues.  Is it really
necessary to insult and attack each other and call each other names?  Is
it not possible for 'feminists' to question, to discuss, and to explore
issues without insulting each other or without engaging in bad faith,
assuming the 'other' academic is mean-spirited, stupid, incompetent, or
politically uninformed?  While this strategy has been common among
scholars in the past, it seems to me to discourage cross-cultural learning
and exploration; it seems to me to frighten young scholars away from the
field of cross-cultural studies; it seems to make any venture into a culture
other than one's own so subject to vicious criticism that one had best
stay in her own back yard or better yet, speak only from within her own
house not even looking out the window.  From my position as a 'western'
woman situated among African women, I see many different attitudes
and responses to what might be called FGM or female circumcision
among Zulu and Basotho women, and I would like to contribute to the
discussion, not as an expert but as a woman on-site who hears and
sees and experiences, and attempts to report, different African women's
responses and attitudes, as well as my own.  I also want to encourage
other women who might like to look beyond their personal cultural
experiences to see what, who, and how the 'other', both within
themselves and in places beyond their windows, operates.  If, as bell
hooks writes, a feminist opposes all forms of domination, then we must
be careful as feminists not to dominate each other with name-calling and
vindictive attacks on each others' attempts to understand and define self
and other.
 
What I have found during my five years of living and working among
women in southern Africa, and given the faults of the lenses through
which I view what is around me, is that SOME Basotho and Zulu women
cherish the initiation process that includes clitoridectomy; they view this
process as part of their transit from childhood to womanhood; they enter
the circumcision schools voluntarily and are there engaged in 'training'
directed and administered by adult women of their own social groupings;
and they feel empowered by the process.  Among these women it is not
usual to expect sexual pleasure from heterosexual relations; many of the
women experience pleasure only with other women, often in the form of
kissing, and the clitoridectomy does not affect this pleasuring (unless, of
course, the operation turns septic; but in fact that seems seldom to
occur).   Other Basotho and Zulu women wouldn't go near a
'circumcision school'!  They view the schools as 'primitive' and 'barbaric'
and they view clitoridectomy as mutilation.  This difference is often
based on class, education, and exposure to 'western' thought, which
includes exposure to homophobia.  These more educated women often
view clitoridectomy and homosexual behaviour among women as equally
horrific.  Still OTHER educated Zulu and Basotho women call themselves
'feminist', reject clitoridectomy, and yet regret the passing of an
institutionalised form of women's initiation; not all educated Zulu and
Basotho women are homophobic, indeed some are lesbian, others
lesbian-and-gay-friendly.  Some uneducated poor women, or rural
women who are not poor but have had little exposure to 'western'
thinking, but who have been exposed to missionary forms of Christianity,
regard circumcision schools as 'heathen' but secretly seek out
clitoridectomy in an effort to be acceptable to 'traditional' women and men
in their villages.  There is absolutely no position from which one can
generalise a 'Zulu' or 'Basotho' point of view on the subject; the points of
view are many and complex.  And so the issue of FGM or clitoridectomy
is vastly more complicated that many people, in or outside Africa, realise,
and I am only privileged to hear this multiplicity of points of view among
TWO of the many hundreds (perhaps thousands) of cultural groups in
Africa.
 
Gina Oboler writes: Bottom line:  of course we can teach about
oppression in other cultures, but
we really should try to understand it thoroughly first, consider critically
what is really wrong about it and why, and how it compares to other
wrongs,
listen to the voices of the people it intimately affects, try to understand
it from their point of view, etc.  It is in failing to do those things that
we fail in cultural relativism -- not in the mere fact of having made a
value judgment.
 
I agree with this point of view but would add--clitoridectomy is not
always experienced as oppression; not only should we 'consider
critically what is really wrong about it and why', but we should consider
opening our minds to consider what might be RIGHT about it, from the
points of view of the women concerned.   I edited a book of short stories
called BASALI! STORIES BY AND ABOUT WOMEN IN LESOTHO
(University of Natal Press, 1995), and one of those stories, 'How She
Lost Her Eye', concerns a woman who actively sought admission to a
circumcision school.  It presents a point of view not represented in the
recent postings to WMST-L, and it might be enlightening to those who are
interested in what is, however, merely ONE way of looking at the issue
(not representative of ALL Basotho women).
Kendall
kendall  @  drama.unp.ac.za

 
    I have to say I am relieved to read the many complicating posts
which responded to my inital critical post about U.S.-based feminist
writing on FGM. I want to clarify, too, that I am a cultural
anthropologist:  I deal in cross-cultural representations.  So I am not
approaching the issues of cross-cultural investigation of and inscription
on FGM lightly when I go so far as to argue that U.S.-based feminists
should not be treating the subject.
    One of the gaps here, between practice and ideological
representation -- and Jean Potucheck articulated it quite eloquently -- is
that there are a variety of 'indigenous' stances on FGM, as well as
enormous variety in what counts as FGM and where, at what age it is done,
to what extent the girl/woman has a say in it, etc.  I am not arguing, nor
do I adopt a position, of radical cultural relativism:  my argument was
not 'all practices are equal and we can't judge them.' At some level I am
arguing precisely the opposite:  that the legacies of colonialism are so
naturalized that WE cannot escape them.  It is not, then, about the
practices but about epistemological ground (the 'where' from which we
speak) and the colonial legacies.  I was refusing to enter into an
evalution of the Good, the Bad or the Ugly with respect to FGM by arguing
that Western feminist liberal assumptions about our own 'free will' and
liberty have thus far made it impossible for U.S.-based feminists who have
written on FGM to extricate themselves from these very political and very
problematic processes of representation -- or even to acknowledge (or
analyze) the extent to which their representations are steeped in the
uneven historicities of these larger processes. At the same time I was, as
Vera Britto pointed out, trying to call attention to the politics behind
the choice -- of academics as well as American media -- to highlight FGM
as a particularly barbarous practice: what reesults from this is willful
ignorance of practices in which Americans engage and about which we know
much more, as well as the primitivization of African women.
    That said, I want to respond to the writers who interpret me as
saying that U.S.-based feminists cannot work against FGM.  I think
coalition-structured activism on FGM can work, but ONLY if it follows the
lead of indigenous activists and ONLY in a supporting role.  The problem
enters in when U.S.based feminists take the lead in constructing
interpretations of what FGM means, how it means, and what should be done
about it.  As I suggested initially, the choice to study/analyze FGM is a
foundationally political choice, and my reading of the U.S. feminist work
on this topic convinces me that it is all too often a choice undertaken
out of a kind of willful ignorance of the historical power of our
representations of non-Western women (and our own continuing investments
in those representations), as well as through the imperialist assumption
that women in the U.S. are on the cutting edge of freedom.
 
Deborah A. Elliston
Department of Anthropology
New York University
New E-mail (effective immediately):  deborah.elliston  @  nyu.edu

 
i agree with joan [Gundersen] that staying clear of studying women's problems
outside of u.s. borders is a lose-lose proposition. globally, women are looking
to other women for support and sharing. still, international women's issues
are not simply issues that are narrowly specific-cultures-bounded. Often
tricky situations of low unemployment, poverty, sexual exploitation, and
so forth are tied up with colonial histories, multinational corporations
and first-world economic domination. looking at non-U.S. women's problems
as THEIR problems is intellectually constricting. as other members of this
listserve have noted, women's genital mutilation needs to be considered
together with breast implants, face lifts, chin tucks, nose-jobs, not to
talk about stair-masters, wonderbras, and all those financially draining
and time-consuming artifices that might be otherwise spent on.....what?
shirley lim

 
        To move to the sharing and support Shirley suggests, and which
others have indicated, "Western" feminists would usefully read what diverse
women in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the rest of most of the world  say
about the topics and themes we teach and research, noting
conceptualizations, activism on issues,and topics not addressed in "Western"
literature. Reading what's said about "Western" feminism is also very
helpful. I'm not suggesting such reading is not done by any "Westerners,"
merely promoting it.   beatrice   bkachuck  @  cuny.campus.mci.net
 

 
I want to ask a different kind of question about this (I've asked it
before but gotten very limited responses) --
 
When precisely did this practice originate?  It is my understanding that
FGM has origins situated in time and space.  Why and when did it begin?
Has the practice escalated or changed?  Why?
 
I ask this in the context of the spread of anti-female religious cultures
-- in the context of what is happening in Afghanistan right now --
Islam as a religion is not necessarily anti-female; it is the type of
Islam that has been adopted in some countries that is, and the adoption
was for specific cultural reasons.
 
I guess I want to warn against romanticizing FGM as a cultural choice
without a good understanding of the historical and contextual reasons
for that choice.
 
In particular, there is a hazard in romanticizing traditions in Africa
that exist now "as if" they went back forever in time; as if the many
different nations and peoples of Africa were outside-of-time -- which
is precisely the way they were viewed by their colonial overlords.  One
of the tragedies of the European Occupation was the loss of a sense of
history -- we have to be careful that we do not continue to assume that
there IS no history there beyond the history that Europeans brought with
them.
 
Along those lines -- I read recently (do not know if this is so) that
in the Sudan, the practice dates back to what westerners call the
late medieval period.  Well, that would be during the Golden Age of
the Great Muslim Empire.  So I wonder if there is a connection between
the rise of a great civilization in the Mediterranean that practiced
enslavement -- and the very stringent type of FGM practiced in the
Sudan.
 
I just don't know enough about the history of those places to make an
educated guess.
 
What I am trying to do is to raise a question that can be answered with
a different type of scholarship -- and a type of history that is not
Eurocentric but a history of the people of a region.
 
If you can get a handle on WHEN and WHERE in time and space FGM (the
actual removal of a clitoris plus more stringent versions) became or
has been the norm, perhaps we can think in more sophisticated terms
about why a culture would adopt or permit the practice.
 
Mary Schweitzer, Dept. of History, Villanova University
(on leave 1995-98) <schweit2  @  ix.netcom.com>

 
Dear List-subscribers,
 
        This issue of "FGM" is bound to compel an awful lot of heartfelt
sentiment and fiery response, as well it should.  I'd like to make a couple
of simple points spurred by Deborah Elliston's original reply.  First, I
wish to underscore her final graf, particularly the part about the "back
yard."  She wrote:
 
>    Rather than promoting the further exoticization of African women
>from those few societies within which some women undergo FGM, rather than
>adopting the colonial assumption that it is in 'other places' that one
>finds the more radical practices which 'mutilate' female bodies and
>desires, U.S.-based feminist scholars interested in FGM would stand on
>much firmer grounder -- methodologically, epistemologically, and ethically
>-- if they looked to 'female mutiliation' in their own backyards:  Breast
>implants, anyone?  'Cosmetic' surgeries?  Belly tucks?  Liposuction?  And
>what of the variety of services provided to infants:  intersex sex
>assignment surgeries, for example, the surgical 'correction' of
>'ambiguous' genitals?
 
        I wish to underscore further that only the last item is really of
concern, directly, to genitalia, that it more often concerns "male"
genitalia (in this narrow sense), and that the list could be expanded almost
indefinitely if we all put our heads together.  The point is that female
genitalia, one way or another, are
scarified/altered/modified/mutilated/beautified/etc. __the world over__.  I
disagree with Deborah in her claim regarding "those few societies," but take
her points overall.  I hope that I am not putting words/ideas into her mouth
when underscoring that this is __not__ about taking cultural relativism to
its extreme conclusion, i.e., backing away from principled, committed
intervention when possible and desireable.  To that end, I would like to put
on the table other practices for our consideration, though the list is much
longer, including:
 
1) unnecessary episiotomies, done to the tune of who knows how many
gazillion per year, Here and There;
2) all manner of products, devices, practices, and beliefs regarding the
alleged youth, degree of lubrication, and attractiveness of vaginas; those
include everything from douching equipment and products and pubic hair
shaving and trimming practices; to vaginal cauterization to application of
all manner of substances into, onto, and nearby the vagina (alum, sawdust,
rags, hot stones, boiling water, etc.); to the manual evacuation of
perceived "excessive" lubrication (read: "evidence" of promiscuity, desire,
infidelity, etc.) to the use of "feminine hygiene" products;
3) often great age differentials at marriage/initialization of heterosexual
vaginal intercourse; i.e., the surprisingly patterned clusters of HIV
antibody seroprevalence in females, globally, that is a decade younger than
in males;
4) low levels of genital maturity if and when females (and often males)
begin lives of heterosexual intercourse;
5) contraceptive and other "barrier" methods for preventing pathogen
transfer; gels, creams, diaphragms, specula application; medical
experimentation on female bodies, etc.
6) an abyssmal level of ignorance on all fronts about HIV transmissive risks
cervically; currently, more is known about simian female cervical
transmissive risks than about female
 
        My overall point is that we should be pointing our students into our
own back yards __at the same time__ as we point them elsewhere, not one or
the other.
 
        I want respond favorably, too, to Rosa Pegueros' comment regarding:
 
>I cannot ignore the role of the elites in the maltreatment of their own people.
 
        So true, and focus upon this will help us avoid the extremes of
relativism.  This, in my opinion, is the key; this is what connects us in
our activisms, stances, questions, methods, forms of communication and
dissemination.
 
        Rosa also noted that
 
>The question I would pose to the list is, does teaching about abuse in
>foreign cultures necessarily involve exoticizing that culture?
>
        This is a neat trick if you can do it!, and/but the stakes rise
proportionately larger when "we" try to tackle "other" cultures in view of
the genitalia of their inhabitants.  In teaching about histories and
cross-cultural studies of menstruation-related practices, for instance, in
addition to voluminous reading, I have students go to the supermarket in
pairs or groups of three and study the ubiquity of "female" products, and do
content analyses of the, well, contents, everything from the proliferation
of the need to use them, the various sizes, contours, and days of the month
and __kind__ of days of the month on which they are supposed to be used, and
the encoded messages contained in the instructions themselves (i.e., the
"choice" not to touch one's own genitalia).  Ethnographic interviewing on
campus, in our own classrooms will show __similarities__ across time and
space, I am convinced.  Not for nothing was a particular kind of condom
__applicator__ (complete with miniature razor blade--no shit!) patented for
use here in the U.S. by American teens too shameful to touch their own penises.
 
        With regards to a portion of Marilyn's comments below,
 
>I think that we can carry cultural
>relativism to far.,
 
        I don't believe that we need to be __shackled by fears of__ carrying
cultural relativism too far, and I don't believe that the original poster
(Deborah) was going in that direction; I am admittedly a disciplinary
chauvinist (!), but not many anthropologists do that anymore, at least not
in the way that non-anthropologists often apparently perceive.
 
>I certainly agree that we should look at csomtic surgery interventions in a
>similar light and the cultural structures that underlay these actions.
>However - with the eception of intersexed children, must of the other
>cosmetic interventions are made on adults whio who actively sought them
>out.
 
        Here I completely disagree.  __Given__ a global patriarchy,
__given__ an abyssmally low degree of female sexual citizenship, etc., etc.,
the claim that "adults" are "actively seeking them out" is at the very least
an open empirical, philosophical, and practical problem.  This implied
assumption that Here people have Choices, and that There people don't, is
precisely why we need a road out of this conundrum; that road, I'm
convinced, is by seeing the systemic connections between the practices,
structures, strictures, beliefs, and ideologies.  "FGM" is global, in my
opinion, for fairly explicable reasons.  One needn't become hopelessly
relativist in sweeping it under the rug or hopelessly ethnocentric in
attempting to intervene against it.  Marilyn's suggestion that these issues
cross state and culture lines is a good one.
 
        Thank you for the space to express myself, and for help and
inspiration you've individually and collectively provided in the past.
 
        Lawrence Hammar
        15314 S.E. Rupert Drive
        Milwaukie, Oregon 97267
        E-mail: darudubu  @  teleport.com

 
To further this great discussion a bit, I wanted to indicate disagreement
about a deeply entrenched myth about the "origins" of genital mutilation
both in the U.S. and around the world
 
>>On Thu, 3 Apr 1997, Joan R. Gundersen wrote:
>>
>>Clearly there are topics of body mutilation that appear in the United States -
>>> including Femald Genital Mutilation (it arrived with immigrants and is an
>>> issue in several parts of the country where hospitals are being asked to
>>> perform FGM surgery on girls).  None of that is a reason for not studying
>>> what goes on elsewhere.  Surely blocking all international study as part
>>> of women's studies is not going to HELP reduce attitudes of colonialism
>>> in women's studies.  Joan Gundersen  CSU-San Marcos
>>> jrgunder  @  coyote.csusm.edu
>>>
        I disagree with this claim, if Joan means it arrived __first__.
Female genital (and other forms of bodily) mutilation well predate
substantial immigration to the U.S., if Joan is speaking here of late
1800s/early 1900s.  One source for all this is G.J. Barker-Benfield's __The
Horrors of the Half-Known Life__ (1976), see also his __Sexual Surgery__,
but the careers of Benjamin Rush (a signer of the U.S. Declaration of
Independence), of England's Isaac Baker Brown, of J. Marion Sims, the
self-styled "Architect of the Vagina," etc., show pretty clearly that the
forms may be different, but female (and male) genital mutilation is very old
in the U.S.  Ethnographically, of course, myriad forms can be found, some of
which seem to be fairly ancient, some less so.  Infibulation was practiced
by Early Romans both on animals and on females.  Some forms of "male
chastity belts" are still found in Southeast Asia, though, yes, rarely.
Recent estimates, however, indicate that upwards of 84 million females
around the world have been infibulated and/or "circumcised" (when the term
is used properly).  Of course, as I indicated in another post, this does not
capture the extent of episiotomies, etc., which in most cases can be
prevented with a less clinic-based, allopathically treated and monitored
pregnancy, i.e., with digital manipulation throughout the pregnancy, which
still isn't often taught in medical schools.
 
        For that reason, on that point, I agree with Deborah's original
posting, which indicated that
 
>>> >     I find it problematic that female genital mutiliation in Africa
>>> > regularly reappears on this list as a locus of feminist research interest,
>>> > and that it more generally is treated as a legitimiate topic of U.S.-based
>>> > feminist writing
 
        We haven't even covered clitoridectomies that are still performed in
the U.S. (and not just on "genitally abnormal" infants, see Money and
Ehrhardt's __Man/Woman, Boy/Girl__), or those that have been done
historically as antimasturbatory methods.  Or, more rarely, penectomies and
castrations, for the same purpose.
        I guess that my overall point is that when one looks at things
cross-culturally, one perforce comes to look at things historically, and
nothing that we've covered in this discussion doesn't also occur right here
in River City.
 
        Lawrence Hammar
        15314 S.E. Rupert Drive
        Milwaukie, Oregon 97267
        E-mail: darudubu  @  teleport.com

 
Let me be clear, what I was referring to was a specific set of
cultural practices involving the cutting of the clitoris (and in some
cases much more) as part of a rite of coming of age intended to make
women more marriageable.  Sudanese-immigrant families are now asking U.S.
doctors to help them continue their cultural traditions here in the U.S.
 The other surgical practices, including the cauterizations of the womb,
etc done in the late nineteenth century AND a whole range of other
body-altering practices practiced today have different cultural origins,
although some may serve similar cultural purposes (making someone more
marriageable).  As a historian of women, I teach about those, too.  I
don't even have pierced ears because I personally consider this bodily
mutilation for cultural purposes.
 
    What has bothered me throughout this discussion is sloppy reading
people make of each other's posts, and the projection of assumptions on
to the words of others.  Let me go back to the post that started all of
this.  It was a request for suggested sources on the historical origins
of a particular practice.  The responses made completely unwarranted
assumptions (as a later post revealled) that the person doing the study
had to be a westerner (it turned out to be an Ethiopian) outside the
cultures involved and approaching this as feminist activism (she had
done a senior thesis on the practice, not a tract for political action).
 Later posts made assumptions about what is currently taught in women's
studies courses about this particular cultural practice, assumptions
which were disproved by the very range of suggestions for approaching the
topic through the voices of the culture. Let me give an example. In the
early 1980s when I first began teaching an intro women's studies course
where FGM came up, I was team-teaching with a woman born in Egypt whose
specialization was the sociology of women in the Middle East.  Our first
women's studies faculty seminar approached the topic through literature
provided by her and a nursing instructor who brought in materials written
by nurses working in Africa which discussed the social effects on women
who did not participate in this custom (where practiced) and thus the
dilemma for nurses trained in western medicine who were trying to treat
the WHOLE patient and thus recognized the cultural issues.  The final
confusion I have seen is to conflate those who are feminists activists
and those of us who are feminist scholars (yes, scholarship is a form of
activism, and many of us are active in and out of the classroom, but
there is a difference between the scholar's approach and other forms of
activism).  The way topics like FGM are approached in the general press
may for very good reasons be quite different than the way it is
approached in the classroom.   Joan R. Gundersen    CSUSM
jrgunder  @  coyote.csusm.edu

 
Once again let me point out that the student who is studying this under her
own initiative is not a westerner.  I find it just as patronizing for folks
to say "How horrible of us westernizers to emphasize this!" By the way
Selamwit Yohannes, Ethiopian citizen, the student for whom I requested the
information on historical roots would like to express her thanks to all of
you who sent her citations.
 
**********************************************************
Jacqueline Wilkie             +  Women's Studies Coordinator
Luther College                +  Associate Professor of History
Decorah, IA 52101             +  wilkieja  @  martin.luther.edu
Phone 319 387-1369            +  fax 319 387-1107

 
On Tue, 8 Apr 1997, Jackie Wilkie wrote:
 
> Once again let me point out that the student who is studying this under her
> own initiative is not a westerner.  I find it just as patronizing for folks
> to say "How horrible of us westernizers to emphasize this!" By the way
 
I don't think it has anything to do with patronizing. Re assuming
the student was western, it's a very logic assumption. if this
were a listserv in ethiopia, i would assume that the student
was ethiopian and it could turn out to be a western student!
would that be patronizing? I think the problem lies with people who for
whatever reasons do not want to engage in self-reflection or a critique in
general of how issues (any issue, not just this one) are framed or
contextualized. A feminism that refuses to engage in a reflective critique
does not seem to stand on very firm ground to me.
 
Vera Britto
(fiatlux  @  umich.edu - http://www.umich.edu/~fiatlux)
...........................................................................
Le Bret: Si tu laissais un peu ton ame mousquetaire, la fortune et la
gloire...  Cyrano:  Et que faudrait-il faire? Chercher un protecteur
puissant, prendre un patron, et, comme un lierre obscur que circonvient
un tronc et s'en fait un tuteur en lui lechant l'ecorce, grimper par
ruse au lieu de s'elever par force? Non, merci! Non, merci! Non, merci!
Mais... chanter, rever, rire, passer, etre seul, etre libre... oui.
                "Cyrano de Bergerac" - Edmond Rostand

 
I am forwarding something from another list which adds to the discussion
we were having.  Marilyn
 
***************************************************************************
* Marilyn P. Safir, PhD         Internet:  msafir  @  psy.haifa.ac.il         *
* Associate Professor           Telephone: 972-4-8240929/21w 8245223/022h *
* Department of Psychology      Fax:       972-4-8240966                  *
* UNIVERSITY OF HAIFA           Telex:     46660 UNIHA                    *
* Haifa  31905, Israel                                                    *
***************************************************************************
 
In Our Own Image
by Alice Dreger, Ph.D. and Aron Sousa, M.D.
 
As women's rights advocates around the country celebrate the passage this
past October of a bill outlawing female genital cutting, a rite practiced
in several African cultures, we find ourselves deeply troubled. No, it
isn't that we want to see girls' genitals cut. No, it isn't that we are
extreme cultural relativists and believe that any culture's traditions or
beliefs should necessarily be treated as sacred. It is that the law
codifies an astounding double standard. For while the United States is
ready to stop African traditionalists from cutting girls' genitals, our
nation continues without justification to sanction genital cutting of girls
by U.S. doctors. And none of these girls even ask for it, as some of the
girls in Africa do.
 
What are we talking about? In our country, everyday, girls are born with
clitorises which are declared by doctors "too big" for a girl and so their
genitals are cut down in order to make them "look normal." Certain medical
specialists in the U.S. recommend that any clitoris over one centimeter
(about three-eighths of an inch) should be considered a candidate for
reduction surgery-for cutting.
 
When doing these "clitoral reduction" surgeries, surgeons try to retain as
much of the nerve tissue as possible in the hopes that they will not undo
the sensitivity of the clitoris, but it is not uncommon for these girls to
be left with hyper-sensitive or hypo-sensitive clitorises. Moreover, they
are also frequently left with feelings of doubt, shame, and confusion,
because some doctors advocate withholding from the child information about
the surgery and its purpose. Indeed, one Canadian medical student was
recently given a cash prize in medical ethics for a paper specifically
advocating that doctors out-and-out lie to some people born with certain
"intersex" conditions. Doctors continue to assume-without evidence-that a
good hushing-up will keep the child from dwelling on her doubts about her
body and its medical treatment.
 
There are several reasons a girl can be born with a clitoris that is bigger
than one centimeter, but the physiology is not worth going into here. The
important point is that the surgery to reduce an "enlarged" clitoris is not
done for any medical reason. That is, a clitoris more than one centimeter
long in itself presents no physical danger to the child. The justification
given for cutting is that, if such surgery is not done, the girl may wind
up deeply traumatized-perhaps so traumatized that she will have "gender
confusion" and will grow up to be a lesbian.
 
In fact, we can find no study which demonstrates that girls who are allowed
to grow up with big clitorises are deeply traumatized by the experience.
What we do have is plenty of "anecdotal" evidence that girls who have had
their clitorises cut without their consent grow up with feelings of shame,
freakishness, depression, and are often unable to achieve orgasm. Typically
nothing beyond the most cursory psychological counseling is offered or even
recommended to them or their parents. If the chief concern really is the
psychic health of these children and their families, why is this the case?
Is there a fear that a mental health professional will be unable to justify
such surgery? Is there a fear that, given deep reflection and thorough
analysis of the situation, we will have to recognize that the surgery
actually creates feelings of shame and confusion it claims to alleviate?
 
Even if there were a higher rate of lesbianism among girls left to grow up
with "big" clitorises, lesbianism should hardly be seen as the tragic
result of inadequate medical care. (Should we cut the genitals of any girl
"at risk" for becoming a lesbian?) The double standard is astonishing: The
African cultures which support female genital cutting employ the logic that
cutting will keep a girl loyal to her man. Advocates of the new law argue
this is a barbaric reason to cut a girl-and we would agree. Meanwhile some
U.S. doctors support female genital cutting specifically because it will
keep our girls from straying from our men-that is, from becoming lesbians.
 
We firmly believe that performing "cosmetic" genital surgery on any
individual without his or her consent is simply a bad idea. Doctors may
argue that the surgery is always consented to if not by the child then by
the child's parents. But this is exactly what the Africans argue on behalf
of their genital cutting. Why is it that we tell them they cannot cut
girls' genitals down to size for reasons of cultural convention?
 
So, we are not unhappy with the ban on female genital mutilation, but it
must be recognized that the ban stems out of and perpetuates an ugly double
standard, because this law is specifically aimed at Africans and not at
everyone who cuts girls' genitals for cultural reasons. The new law
prohibits Africans from upholding a brutalizing cultural standard of
genital conformity because it involves mutilation and risk, while
tragically our nation quietly polices its own standards of petite
clitorises. Surely this practice should not and cannot continue. It flies
in the face of the American value of human rights.
 
 
 
Alice Dreger, Ph.D. in History and Philosophy of Science, teaches Science
and Technology Studies at Michigan State University. She is the author of a
forthcoming book (published by Harvard University Press) on the history and
ethics of the biomedical treatment of human intersexuality. Aron Sousa,
M.D., is resident physician at Michigan State University.

 
Just a note. This is not a western list. I subscribed but and am in
South Africa although my immediate origin is western.  You may not
hear from folk located outside of the west  as much because of 1)more
limited access to computers; 2)more limited access to resources. But
we are here and should not be forgotten.
 
An international somebody

 
On Sun, 13 Apr 1997, Adande Washington wrote:
 
> Just a note. This is not a western list. I subscribed but and am in
> South Africa although my immediate origin is western.  You may not
> hear from folk located outside of the west  as much because of 1)more
> limited access to computers; 2)more limited access to resources. But
> we are here and should not be forgotten.
>
> An international somebody
>
i was surprised to see how much you misconstruted what i wrote.
it's kind of interesting too. there is a difference between
a western and a western *only* list. this is a western list,
but it's not a western only list.
 
i never wrote that non-westerners should be silenced or
ignored or excluded. in fact, if you ever read my original
post to the fgm discussion, and if you take care to
not distort what i wrote, you will note that i was
arguing for a more international, broader analysis and
self-reflection on fgm, neo-colonialism, feminism, etc.
 
the inequalities between west/non-west are inherent to
the internet and to "western" emails lists. there are many email lists
which are western, because they are based in the west,
and the most of the people who have access are "western",
the language is western, the topics, generally speaking,
come out of a western worldview, it is a western discourse.
 
this is not to say that
everything/everyone is western just because they are on
the internet or on this email list. or that people in
the west (or outside for that matter) are all clones of each other
who all think in the exact same "western/non-western" way.  to
imply that i wrote that
is a major (false) distortion on your part.
 
is it perhaps because you come from the west that you cannot
see how western this list is?  where does the need to distort
what i wrote come from?
 
Vera Britto
(fiatlux  @  umich.edu - http://www.umich.edu/~fiatlux)
[see earlier messages for sig. file]

See also Incorporating FGM into Courses .