For over three decades now, there has been quite the uproar over the largely African practice of female circumcision better known under its current epithet as ‘Female Genital Mutilation’ (FGM). Understood as a sinister and culturally backward practice in the West, a number of mainly immigrant African parents have been prosecuted for offending the bodily integrity and health of their children (a prominent example being the clash between the Malian practice of ‘FGM’ and French law). It is argued to be a crime that is not only inflicted on prepubescent girls, but also a ‘horror’ inflicted on the female perpetrators themselves (usually mothers) given that they have ‘no choice’ but to conform to the cultural norm of mutilating their daughters.
Here I will treat some of the concerns raised by the French feminist scholar Francoise Lionnet who has interpreted the above discourse of bodily rights as being inherently sanctimonious, universalizing and perceptually hegemonic. Lionnet argues that the practice of female circumcision is a complex psychosexual phenomenon. Paraphrasing some of Michel Elrich’s concerns, the author writes that female circumcision is “embedded in a cultural context that encodes it as a beautifying and enriching phenomenon without which girls do not become women and will therefore never be able to marry, have some degree of economic security and lead ‘full’ female lives” (p. 371). In other words, female identity is not necessarily biological, but the result of a cultural process that women must go through (p. 375) in which clitoral circumcision is a fundamental part of.
The source of the conflict, according to Lionnet, is not really rooted in notions of ‘universal’ rights (which I will get to in a moment) but in an inherent conflict between the power of Malian culture (for instance) in investing “meaning in the individual body” that happens to be at odds “with the French State’s power to construct that body’s biological integrity according to modern notions of individual rights” (p. 376). This means that the conflict is rooted in the “conception of identity as subordinate to either the state (France) or the ruling patriarchy (in Mali) that governs the (il)legitimacy of parental behaviour” (p. 378) and not the opposition between a ‘cruel’ cultural value and a universal one, but between “two different communities, one of which would like to believe that its culture is a ‘universal’ one” (ibid).
Now what about the question of universal human rights? Lionnet implies that the discourse of universal human rights, at least in the case of female circumcision, is problematic and based on faulty perceptions and even moral duplicity. In other words, it assumes that female circumcision is the “only culturally sanctioned form of violence that deserves to be denounced, whereas we know that many other forms of violence are not repressed by law in the Western context, and that some of our own practices are objectionable and shocking to Africans” (p. 373). A recurrent example that the author presents is that of abortion since it is a good illustration of the “cultural conflict between the rights of the individual to bodily integrity on the one hand, and [the female’s] need to be satisfactorily integrated into a community on the other” (p. 372). It is important to note that the example of abortion is not framed within the view of whether or not a foetus is an individual, but in a view where pregnancy is seen as a ‘natural’ “consequence of female sexuality, just as we might see the clitoris as a ‘natural’ part of the female body” where “abortion, like excision, simply imposes cultural constraints on physical reality, and both procedures can arguably be defended by their proponents as cultural steps taken to avoid biological determinism” (p. 374).[1]
What this implies is that the notion of “radical individualism” on which the notion of universal human rights to a large extent depends upon is meaningless. It is meaningless as it assumes that individual choice in the Western context is unmediated as opposed to the mediated choices (if they may even be called a choice) of African mothers who circumcise their daughters. How can one assume, for example, that socio-economic realities and socio-cultural discourses (e.g. the pursuing a successful career, education, consumerism, ‘autonomy’) do not shape the so-called ‘individual’ choices that both men and women make in regard to abortion or with any other matter? Is this not, on some level, an act of conforming to the traditions of a community where in this case it is Western instead of African?
[1] Here, unlike Lionnet, I would also argue that the question of the foetus as an individual is also relevant to the debate. If the foetus is considered an individual, then how is the mutilation of a clitoris any more ‘barbaric’ than the killing of a baby in a womb, either by suctioning it out, or burning it with chemicals? Or how is a culture any less ‘cruel’ than one that induces its social members to mutilate their bodies (i.e. plastic surgery) for the purposes of beautification?
Bibliography
Francoise Lionnet. Feminisms and Universalisms: "Universal Rights" and the Legal Debate Around the Practice of Female Excision in France. in Feminist Postcolonial Theory ed. Reina Lewis & Sara Mills (New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 368-380
