Hysteria
Why the Term Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) is Ethnocentric, Racist and Sexist – Let's Get Rid of It!
As a scholar and feminist activist who also happens to be a proud and empowered circumcised African woman, I am often castigated by mainstream (and radical) feminists about my support for the rights of women and girls who choose to uphold our ancestral tradition of female circumcision (this is the term preferred by most of us because of the parallel with male circumcision, which is important to our cultural frameworks of gender parity). This week, leading up to International Women’s Day, I am launching a new digital and print women’s quarterly called SiA and the Shabaka Stone Magazine, which is aimed at empowering other circumcised women and girls who also reject the term Female Genital Mutilation (FGM). Additionally, I have been working with other women to launch African Women are Free to Choose (AWA-FC). AWA-FC is a movement that challenges ethnocentric, racist and sexist representations that underlie the term FGM and to advocate for the same basic human rights to equality, dignity and self-determination for circumcised women and girls that are enjoyed by every other human being in the world. Here, I argue why there should be zero-tolerance for the term FGM.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO) the term FGM “comprises all procedures involving partial or total removal of the external female genitalia or other injury to the female genital organs for non-medical reasons”. For the past thirty or so years, the term FGM has been mainly applied to African or non-western women and girls who have undergone customary or traditional genital surgeries. However, during this same period and especially so in the last ten years, many western, mainly white, Anglo-Saxon women and girls have undergone “procedures involving partial or total removal of the external female genitalia”. Some of these procedures are even covered by the national health systems in Europe, Australia and Canada to name a few.
These ‘white’ female genital surgeries include what is popularly referred to as labiaplasty (trimming or removal of labia minorae), as well as an entire menu of external and internal genital surgeries the media does not report on, such as clitoroplexy (clitoral hood removal or reduction) and clitoroplasty (clitoral reduction) or combinations of these procedures. These white female genital surgeries are also performed on teenagers or young girls (as young as 10 and 11) and yet they are not considered FGM but FGCS (Female Genital Cosmetic Surgery).
So, this means that white FGCS is perfectly legal even if some question the ethical basis of such practices while FGM is condemned and there are global campaigns to criminalise the communities involved. A review published in 2012 by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists concedes that many FGCS procedures compare anatomically with types of FGM. And, like white women and girls who opt for so-called FGCS, most of us African women and girls view our traditional genital surgeries as aesthetic improvements and not ‘injury’.
Although the WHO definition of FGM must by definition also apply to so-called FGCS, there continues to be a legal and ethical differentiation between these similar practices. Defenders of the distinction usually stress that FGM is ‘dangerous’ or involves ‘non-consenting’ girls . However, the highest quality medical and empirical evidence does not support either assertion. We know through controlled studies that there is very little variation in reproductive and sexual health outcomes between circumcised and uncircumcised women (Public Policy Advisory on Female Genital Surgeries, 2012) and there is ample documentation that white adolescent and pre-adolescent girls in Britain and other western countries undergo external genital surgeries for non-medical reasons. So, if the health consequences of FGM are exaggerated and FGCS are also performed on minor girls, why is there a continued distinction between these practices?
One might argue that it’s not about race at all, that FGCS takes place in clinical or sanitised medical settings and this is less dangerous or more humane than FGM, which occurs in obscure, dirty parts of a dark Africa with rusty knives and razor blades wielded by toothless, old women bent on permanently destroying female sexual pleasure. Even if this grizzly media caricature of FGM were true (and there is no medical evidence yet to support that female genital surgeries performed in clinics are safer than those performed in traditional or non-clinical settings), the WHO definition of FGM does not discriminate between where, how and by whom a procedure on the external female genitalia is performed. Further, in most western countries, adult African women are denied any form of genital surgeries even for purely aesthetic reasons. And, in all cases medicalisation of traditional surgeries preferred by African women is prohibited by WHO.
One might still insist that it’s absolutely not about race – even though adult African women are prohibited from FGCS or any form of medicalisation of customary genital surgeries – but that FGM involves coercion while FGCS is freely chosen. However, the WHO definition makes no reference to agency (or lack thereof) with respect to “the partial or complete removal of the external female genitalia”. And, this is for good reason. We know (and so does WHO) from survey after survey in country after country that the vast majority of affected African women are in favor of the continuation of our customary female genital surgeries.
We also know that white women and girls freely choose genital surgeries to improve the appearance and structure of their external genitalia. So, there is no reason to automatically presume that African women and girls are any more brainwashed or coerced than white women and girls who supposedly exercise free choice. Unless, of course, it really is about race and ethnicity. Perhaps, in the eyes of white male patriarchy (which disconcertingly includes mainstream and radical white feminists who want to police the genitals of African and other non-white women and girls yet ignore female genital surgeries within their own communities), circumcised African females are somehow inherently incapable of exercising free choice or we come from societies that prevent us from doing so. In both cases anti-FGM activists make assumptions based on race, ethnic, religious, socio-economic, cultural and geographic differences that have no relevance to the WHO definition of FGM, which clearly focuses on physical descriptions only.
For these reasons – that FGM applies to and criminalises only African or non-white girls and women respectively while FGCS legitimises very similar procedures for white women and girls – anti-FGM campaigns are racist and ethnocentric.
As for the sexism in the term FGM, this too is obvious. Genital surgeries on males – adults and children – are perfectly legal and not officially referred to as ‘mutilations’ even though there is a growing number of detractors and campaigners against these practices. Let me add that there is no medical evidence that supports the idea that male circumcision is less harmful, less painful, less traumatic etc. than female circumcision practices. Also, there are no distinctions made between traditional or customary male circumcision versus those procedures that are hospital based.
What I am against, and African Women are Free to Choose is organising to contest is the racism and sexism that underlies anti-FGM campaigns. We stand for the equality of African women and girls with western or white women and girls as well as men and boys globally. We resist the singling out of African women and girls as ‘mutilated’ as well as the criminalising and policing of only our bodies with respect to non-medical genital surgeries. The notion of FGM is a discriminatory one – an outright breach of our basic human rights to equality, dignity and self-determination. Ours is not an argument about
child rights versus parental prerogatives or cultural rights versus human rights but an insistence that universal human rights must be in principle and practice, universal.
For more information about HYSTERIA, check out this Feminist & Women's Studies Association (UK & Ireland) Blog
Exposing the Tricks and
Tricksters of Anti-FGM
Campaigns
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This is Sierra Leone, March 3, 2014: More than twenty years ago, circa 1994, I was sitting in a small seminar room in the heart of London, with about ten or so other people. The topic of discussion was the eradication of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM). Everyone, including me, seemed quite serious and rather perplexed listening to the moderator’s accounts of this horrific hitherto unknown crime against girls and women in Africa.
A few minutes into the meeting, an East African looking woman burst through the doors, visibly shaken. She sat down in the back. As the moderator fielded questions from the meeting participants, the woman stood up, held up a huge poster with scotch-taped photos of a naked woman, eyes blindfolded and legs spread wide open. “This is what they did to me! These people did this to me. They ripped my body and butchered my genitals. I will never forgive the men who mutilated me like this, like a wild animal!!” What? I thought. Seriously?
The outburst reminded me of the gruesome posters of aborted fetuses with the words “baby killer” and “abortion = murder” that were thrust in my girlfriend’s face by far-right anti-abortion activists at the women’s health center I attended with her for her check-up and consultation.
But the East African looking woman who sat behind me in the seminar room hurling words of hate and anger about her genital mutilation looked nothing like the anti-abortion activists who harassed me and my friend at the clinic in the U.S.
And I was no longer in America but was a wide-eyed, twenty-something year old postgrad in the U.K. I attended the seminar on FGM after seeing an announcement to join a group of people to discuss a new movement that was going to be launched to combat the practice.
FGM was a term I only became familiar after arriving to the U.K. – I watched the TV documentary, Warrior Marks, that was co-produced by Alice Walker and my life was never the same again. I came to this FGM meeting to see for myself what was really going on. Female circumcision is mutilation? Seriously? You see, at that time, just a few years earlier I had gone to Sierra Leone with some female relatives to be initiated into Bondo – a traditional women’s association that is known in much of West Africa. It was a powerful, positive experience (albeit physically painful) that shattered everything I thought I knew about female sexuality and being a woman of African, or more precisely Kono, descent.
I was troubled by the Warrior Marks film, as well as the book by Alice Walker, Possessing the Secret of Joy, and the representations in both of African female initiation as “mutilation” and “torture”. I made up my mind to write a magazine story questioning this new FGM movement.
So, I walked into FORWARD’s office the next day to see if I could interview Efua Dorkenoo, the Ghanaian lady who was the office’s London director and had led the seminar the night before. When I opened the door, I nearly lost my balance in utter shock at what I saw. The woman sitting at the reception desk smiling at me was the same woman who had burst into the seminar room the night before.
Except she didn’t look unkempt, disheveled and victimized. She was wearing a nice suit, fresh makeup and swept up hair. Where was the woman from the night before who acted like she came randomly off the street upon hearing that there was a meeting about this new movement to ban FGM?
How can the crazed and desperate looking woman also be this quiet, friendly and attractive young lady working as front desk reception for the FORWARD office? Why did she misrepresent herself or fail to present herself properly to us bewildered seminar participants?
I finally did get to see Dorkenoo that morning. We talked for more than two hours. Sitting before Dorkenoo’s affable and maternal demeanor, I felt like I was talking to one of my aunts. I confided in her that I had been through Bondo and was circumcised but that I did not experience it as mutilation and that I didn’t know anyone in my family who would even recognize themselves as mutilated women.
Aunty Efua closed the door. She confided in me that she did not come from an ethnic group in Ghana that practices female circumcision so she could not really refute my experience. But, she said, the anti-FGM movement had already started. She said she understood where I was coming from – she knew many Sierra Leonean women who mentioned Bondo and that all of us seemed to say the same thing about empowerment. But, she emphasized, her hands were tied. Lots of money was being invested. She said she just accepted an offer for a consultancy at WHO. Perhaps I could join her as her research assistant. This would be good for my resume. Seriously? Well, my reply was thanks but no thanks. I waved gingerly goodbye to the FGM “victim” at the reception desk and went on my way. I went on to publish my first article in 1995 in Pride magazine, a popular black women’s monthly, and defended the rights of circumcised women. Dorkenoo responded in an editorial in the following month’s issue repeating – now publicly – that she wanted me to join the anti-FGM camp. Thanks but no thanks.
Since then Dorkenoo has made a successful anti-FGM career for herself and has been decorated by the Queen of England for her great service to the crown. But, I see aunty Efua is still up to the same tricks she mastered at FORWARD – fooling a gullible, witchhunt mode British population into seriously believing her ruses.
This time, another East African lady, Leila Hussein, played the lead role of trickster to see how many people would sign a pro-FGM petition. They claimed and the British headlines followed suit, that 18 people signed Hussein’s request to protect her rights to her culture after she told them, “its just mutilation”. No one questioned whether the signatories were indeed random folks from right off the street and not partakers in the hoax (like the FGM victim/receptionist from 20 years ago).
My cynicism about Efua Dorkenoo and Equality Now is in no way to trivialize the experiences of African women who really feel they are victims of a what they see as a cruel and outdated tradition. In fact, it is very likely that despite her Oscar like performance in the seminar room, the young East African female receptionist from 20 years ago was a genuine opponent of female circumcision.
Indeed, there are also some men who feel that neonatal male circumcision – whether traditional Jewish or Muslim procedures or routine medical surgeries – constitutes physical and psychological trauma and a violation of their human rights and they call it Male Genital Mutilation (MGM).
I am not opposed to the rights of genuine dissenters to name their experiences and give voice to others who feel the same way. Giving voice to those who have been silenced is what I do now as an advocate for the majority of circumcised women. What I do contest and try to expose are the deceptions, manipulations and racist propaganda favored by anti-FGM campaigns.
As a supporter of both female and male circumcision, I believe it is time to denounce the flagrant racism and sexism that inspire anti-FGM campaigns, such as Equality Now, and anti-semitism that underlie MGM campaigns as well as the obvious Islamophobia that characterizes both anti-FGM and anti-MGM campaigns. If we are disgusted by the dubious tactics and demonizing language of radical Right to Life advocates, why do we tolerate the use of the same contemptible, psychological weapons against circumcised African women and girls who support their traditions?
We can and must work together as equals in a global society to promulgate global policies that do not discriminate against groups or individuals because of their gender, sex, ethnicity, country of origin, religion and so on. We must find solutions that do not deny the basic human rights of either supporters or opponents of non-medical genital surgeries.
After I politely refused Dorkenoo’s inducement back at the FORWARD office all those years ago she asked, “so, why don’t you launch your own counter movement?” That seemed like such a farfetched idea twenty years ago. But I guess life has its own way of working things out.
-
- Saving Women's Lives
- John Hopkins Safe Surgery
- and Anesthesia in Sierra Leone
Exposing the Tricks and
Tricksters of Anti-FGM
Campaigns
This is Sierra Leone, March 3, 2014: More than twenty years ago, circa 1994, I was sitting in a small seminar room in the heart of London, with about ten or so other people. The topic of discussion was the eradication of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM). Everyone, including me, seemed quite serious and rather perplexed listening to the moderator’s accounts of this horrific hitherto unknown crime against girls and women in Africa.
A few minutes into the meeting, an East African looking woman burst through the doors, visibly shaken. She sat down in the back. As the moderator fielded questions from the meeting participants, the woman stood up, held up a huge poster with scotch-taped photos of a naked woman, eyes blindfolded and legs spread wide open. “This is what they did to me! These people did this to me. They ripped my body and butchered my genitals. I will never forgive the men who mutilated me like this, like a wild animal!!” What? I thought. Seriously?
The outburst reminded me of the gruesome posters of aborted fetuses with the words “baby killer” and “abortion = murder” that were thrust in my girlfriend’s face by far-right anti-abortion activists at the women’s health center I attended with her for her check-up and consultation.
But the East African looking woman who sat behind me in the seminar room hurling words of hate and anger about her genital mutilation looked nothing like the anti-abortion activists who harassed me and my friend at the clinic in the U.S.
And I was no longer in America but was a wide-eyed, twenty-something year old postgrad in the U.K. I attended the seminar on FGM after seeing an announcement to join a group of people to discuss a new movement that was going to be launched to combat the practice.
FGM was a term I only became familiar after arriving to the U.K. – I watched the TV documentary, Warrior Marks, that was co-produced by Alice Walker and my life was never the same again. I came to this FGM meeting to see for myself what was really going on. Female circumcision is mutilation? Seriously? You see, at that time, just a few years earlier I had gone to Sierra Leone with some female relatives to be initiated into Bondo – a traditional women’s association that is known in much of West Africa. It was a powerful, positive experience (albeit physically painful) that shattered everything I thought I knew about female sexuality and being a woman of African, or more precisely Kono, descent.
I was troubled by the Warrior Marks film, as well as the book by Alice Walker, Possessing the Secret of Joy, and the representations in both of African female initiation as “mutilation” and “torture”. I made up my mind to write a magazine story questioning this new FGM movement.
So, I walked into FORWARD’s office the next day to see if I could interview Efua Dorkenoo, the Ghanaian lady who was the office’s London director and had led the seminar the night before. When I opened the door, I nearly lost my balance in utter shock at what I saw. The woman sitting at the reception desk smiling at me was the same woman who had burst into the seminar room the night before.
Except she didn’t look unkempt, disheveled and victimized. She was wearing a nice suit, fresh makeup and swept up hair. Where was the woman from the night before who acted like she came randomly off the street upon hearing that there was a meeting about this new movement to ban FGM?
How can the crazed and desperate looking woman also be this quiet, friendly and attractive young lady working as front desk reception for the FORWARD office? Why did she misrepresent herself or fail to present herself properly to us bewildered seminar participants?
I finally did get to see Dorkenoo that morning. We talked for more than two hours. Sitting before Dorkenoo’s affable and maternal demeanor, I felt like I was talking to one of my aunts. I confided in her that I had been through Bondo and was circumcised but that I did not experience it as mutilation and that I didn’t know anyone in my family who would even recognize themselves as mutilated women.
Aunty Efua closed the door. She confided in me that she did not come from an ethnic group in Ghana that practices female circumcision so she could not really refute my experience. But, she said, the anti-FGM movement had already started. She said she understood where I was coming from – she knew many Sierra Leonean women who mentioned Bondo and that all of us seemed to say the same thing about empowerment. But, she emphasized, her hands were tied. Lots of money was being invested. She said she just accepted an offer for a consultancy at WHO. Perhaps I could join her as her research assistant. This would be good for my resume. Seriously? Well, my reply was thanks but no thanks. I waved gingerly goodbye to the FGM “victim” at the reception desk and went on my way. I went on to publish my first article in 1995 in Pride magazine, a popular black women’s monthly, and defended the rights of circumcised women. Dorkenoo responded in an editorial in the following month’s issue repeating – now publicly – that she wanted me to join the anti-FGM camp. Thanks but no thanks.
Since then Dorkenoo has made a successful anti-FGM career for herself and has been decorated by the Queen of England for her great service to the crown. But, I see aunty Efua is still up to the same tricks she mastered at FORWARD – fooling a gullible, witchhunt mode British population into seriously believing her ruses.
This time, another East African lady, Leila Hussein, played the lead role of trickster to see how many people would sign a pro-FGM petition. They claimed and the British headlines followed suit, that 18 people signed Hussein’s request to protect her rights to her culture after she told them, “its just mutilation”. No one questioned whether the signatories were indeed random folks from right off the street and not partakers in the hoax (like the FGM victim/receptionist from 20 years ago).
My cynicism about Efua Dorkenoo and Equality Now is in no way to trivialize the experiences of African women who really feel they are victims of a what they see as a cruel and outdated tradition. In fact, it is very likely that despite her Oscar like performance in the seminar room, the young East African female receptionist from 20 years ago was a genuine opponent of female circumcision.
Indeed, there are also some men who feel that neonatal male circumcision – whether traditional Jewish or Muslim procedures or routine medical surgeries – constitutes physical and psychological trauma and a violation of their human rights and they call it Male Genital Mutilation (MGM).
I am not opposed to the rights of genuine dissenters to name their experiences and give voice to others who feel the same way. Giving voice to those who have been silenced is what I do now as an advocate for the majority of circumcised women. What I do contest and try to expose are the deceptions, manipulations and racist propaganda favored by anti-FGM campaigns.
As a supporter of both female and male circumcision, I believe it is time to denounce the flagrant racism and sexism that inspire anti-FGM campaigns, such as Equality Now, and anti-semitism that underlie MGM campaigns as well as the obvious Islamophobia that characterizes both anti-FGM and anti-MGM campaigns. If we are disgusted by the dubious tactics and demonizing language of radical Right to Life advocates, why do we tolerate the use of the same contemptible, psychological weapons against circumcised African women and girls who support their traditions?
We can and must work together as equals in a global society to promulgate global policies that do not discriminate against groups or individuals because of their gender, sex, ethnicity, country of origin, religion and so on. We must find solutions that do not deny the basic human rights of either supporters or opponents of non-medical genital surgeries.
After I politely refused Dorkenoo’s inducement back at the FORWARD office all those years ago she asked, “so, why don’t you launch your own counter movement?” That seemed like such a farfetched idea twenty years ago. But I guess life has its own way of working things out.
Sierra Express Media, July 2, 2012: As I approached the Dulles International Airport gate for my flight to Brussels (where I would transit for another flight to Sierra Leone), I was stunned that all the seats were taken. (Photo: Johns Hopkins Safe Surgery and Anesthesia in Sierra Leone, physician and nurse anesthesia educators)
My eyes scanned the waiting area for the telltale signs of an outlet, tracing any accumulation of laptop cables coming from one direction. I walked over to one pole where I saw cell phones, iPads and all sorts of electronics plugged up to all the available outlets… and frowned.
I looked around for an available seat, at least to rest my legs and use whatever battery time I had left on my pink Acer mini notebook. An attractive African-American gentleman looked up at me from his seat and seemed to sense my discomfort and slight annoyance. He lifted the backpack that took up its own seat next to him and pointed me to the empty space.
I smiled, finally. “You heading for Brussels?” he asked. I noted his purple bracelet, Omega Psi Phi. My mind flashed back to some of the fine Omega fraternity brothers from way back when I attended a private, predominantly white university in Washington, DC.
These were the kind of guys me and my African and Caribbean friends would see at the club on Saturday night but dare not speak to; we simply weren’t worthy of such black male fineness back then (or so some of my girls commiserated): Definitely not uppity enough to even look in their direction.
So, we stuck with the slick-haired, well-dressed, limited English speaking European and Middle-Eastern guys who were into just about any sister, especially direct from the sub-continent (our African brothers were busy pursuing white girls…).
“Yes,” I replied. “But only transiting.” “Oh, well me too… you can sit here,” he seemed to declare with pride. “Thanks,” I said and sat down obligingly. Read more...
Well Body Alliance
Implementing the First Lady's Wish
in Royal Kono District of Sierra Leone
Newstime Africa, July 13, 2012: They were two unlikely roommates at Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, New York. Dan Kelly was born and raised in the Washington DC and Philadelphia areas. He never lived in poverty but was compelled to tackle health disparities in Africa. Issa Toure came to the US as a refugee during the civil war in Sierra Leone, West Africa, and obtained scholarships to attend college and medical school. Their backgrounds fueled their friendship, so after his third year of medical school when Dan left for Sierra Leone, Issa connected Dan with Bailor, a childhood friend.
Bailor Barrie came from a poor family and attempted to attend Sierra Leone’s only medical school through the civil war. Working together in Sierra Leone, Dan and Bailor found that they shared the same passion, serving the poor and providing them with the best healthcare possible. . The two friends fulfilled this shared passion in 2006 when they moved to Kono and started a rural clinic to assist the treatment and transition of amputees in the war’s epicenter. . They met with the necessary traditional authorities to obtain land to build the clinic and then returned to the US to look for financial assistance from generous donors. Read more...