Lisa Wade got it right!!! Rethinking female circumcision is a must!

I heard about Lisa Wade sometime last year after the publication of Seven Things to Know About Female Genital Surgeries in Africa by the Public Policy Advisory Network on African Female Genital Surgeries - to which I was a co-signatory.  Lisa Wade, PhD is associate professor and chair of the sociology dept at Occidental College in Los Angeles.  She was one of the few bold scholars to highlight the PPAN report, and question the  lack of media coverage of this important document right before the UN General Assembly unanimously voted on a non-binding resolution to ban Female Genital Mutilation in December 2012. 

In fact, Dr. Wade has written critically and lectured quite a bit on western media representations and the politics of Female Genital Cutting (FGC).  I have never met her personally but am now pretty familiar with some of her poignant writings.  Her popular website, Sociological Images, receives about 500,000 visits per month.  Wade's article "Rethinking a Zero-Tolerance Approach to Female Genital Mutilation" on the blog Society Pages references my own work and position on reframing the female circumcision debate.  

My favorite line: "if we care enough about African women to be concerned about the state of their genitals, we must also be willing to pay attention to their hearts and their minds.  Even, or especially, if they say things we don't like."

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