A New Debate on Female Circumcision [Tierney Lab]

Should African women be allowed to engage in the practice sometimes called female circumcision? Are critics of this practice, who call it female genital mutilation, justified in trying to outlaw it, or are they guilty of ignorance and cultural imperialism?

Those questions will be debated Saturday morning in Washington at the American Anthropological Association’s annual meeting.

Representatives of international groups opposed to this procedure will be debating anthropologists with somewhat different views, including African anthropologists who have undergone the procedure themselves.

As the organizers of the AAA panel note:

The panel includes for the first time, the critical “third wave” or multicultural feminist perspectives of circumcised African women scholars Wairimu Njambi, a Kenyan, and Fuambai Ahmadu, a Sierra Leonean.

Both women hail from cultures where female and male initiation rituals are the norm and have written about their largely positive and contextualized experiences, creating an emergent discursive space for a hitherto “muted group” in global debates about FGC [female genital cutting].

Dr. Ahmadu, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Chicago, was raised in America and then went back to Sierra Leone as an adult to undergo the procedure along with fellow members of the Kono ethnic group.

She has argued that the critics of the procedure exaggerate the medical dangers, misunderstand the effect on sexual pleasure, and mistakenly view the removal of parts of the clitoris as a practice that oppresses women.

She has lamented that her Westernized “feminist sisters insist on denying us this critical aspect of becoming a woman in accordance with our unique and powerful cultural heritage.” In another essay, she writes:

It is difficult for me — considering the number of ceremonies I have observed, including my own — to accept that what appears to be expressions of joy and ecstatic celebrations of womanhood in actuality disguise hidden experiences of coercion and subjugation.

Indeed, I offer that the bulk of Kono women who uphold these rituals do so because they want to — they relish the supernatural powers of their ritual leaders over men in society, and they embrace the legitimacy of female authority and particularly the authority of their mothers and grandmothers.

You can read more about this in Dr. Ahmadu’s essays or in this critique of the global campaign against female genital mutilation, written by another participant in Saturday’s discussion, Richard Shweder of the University of Chicago.

Dr. Shweder says that many Westerners trying to impose a “zero tolerance” policy don’t realize that these initiation rites are generally controlled not by men but by women who believe it is a cosmetic procedure with aesthetic benefits.

He criticizes Americans and Europeans for outlawing it at the same they endorse their own forms of genital modification, like the circumcision of boys or the cosmetic surgery for women called “vaginal rejuvenation.”

After surveying studies of female circumcision and comparing the data with the rhetoric about its harmfulness, Dr. Shweder concludes that “‘First World’ feminist issues and political correctness and activism have triumphed over the critical assessment of evidence.”

If I were asked to make a decision about my own daughter, I wouldn’t choose circumcision for her. But what about the question raised by these anthropologists: Should outsiders be telling African women what initiation practices are acceptable?

Sexual Consequences of Female Initiation Rites in Africa

Lucrezia Catania is a gynecologist and sexologist in Florence, Italy, at the Research Center for Preventing and Curing Complications of FGM/C (Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting).

For more than two decades, the center has been treating women who have undergone these procedures, especially those with complications from the type called infibulation.

Dr. Catania says that she and her colleagues were surprised themselves at the results of four studies they published last year, in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, examining the sexual responses and attitudes of women who had undergone various forms of FGM/C.

The majority of the women in the study had undergone infibulation, an extreme (and relatively uncommon) form of genital alteration in which part or all of the external genitalia are excised and the vaginal opening is partially sealed.

(Dr. Catania notes that in the various forms of FGM/C, when an external part of the clitoris is excised, an internal portion of it remains because it is not possible to uproot the entire organ.)

Here’s a summary of Dr. Catania's investigation:

Our findings suggest, without doubt, that healthy ” mutilated”/”circumcised” women who have a good and fulfilling relationship, may enjoy sex and have no negative impact on psychosexual life (fantasies, desire and pleasure, ability to experience orgasm ).

The majority of the interviewed women reported that sex gives them pleasure. Women claiming to achieve orgasm described the effects that characterize the greatest moment of pleasure that they would define as orgasm giving detailed descriptions: involuntary pleasurable rhythmic contractions of the vagina, pulsations of internal genitals, and the feeling of warmth all over the face and the body.

The possibility of FGM/C women enjoying sex represents an enigma for Western people. At the beginning of our investigation, we were incredulous regarding the results we had obtained. Human sexuality depends on a complex interaction of cognitive processes, relational dynamics, and neurophysiological and biochemical mechanisms.

The cultural meaning of the FGM/C in the samples of the present studies was often positively connoted because the women who went through this dangerous experience felt heroic, honorable, and special.

Some women reported fearful childhood memories and displeasure with their present condition; nevertheless, the vast majority of them reported feelings of happiness the day after the operation and showed pride in their present condition.

Also, the body image/genital image is culturally influenced: women in the present studies considered the intact genitals awful and dirty, and they considered women with intact genitals not fully female, with a highly developed sexuality, and they believed that uncircumcised women cannot be faithful.

Surprisingly, the same study on sexuality conducted on the new generation (young girls with various types of FGM/C) reported presence of orgasm but with less frequency compared with the group of adults.

These young ladies were living in Italy but had been circumcised/infibulated in their country during childhood.

As children in their own country, they experienced positive feelings about FGM/C and a sense of female completeness; they lived in a setting of social acceptance, felt family love and thought that FGM/C was “something that testified beauty and courage.”

Growing up in Western countries, their experience was transformed and given negative meanings: female mutilation, social stigma; they were depicted as victims of family violence and barbarity. Their sense of beauty changed into ugliness.

The social stigmatization and the negative messages from the media regarding their “permanently destroyed” sexuality provoke negative expectations on the possibility of experiencing sexual pleasure and provoke negative feelings about their own body image.

The social criticism and the negative cultural meaning regarding their experience cause distortion of their cultural values and they undergo a sort of “mental/psychological” infibulation which could result in iatrogenic sexual dysfunction.

In FGM/C women, when their culture makes them live their “alteration/modification/mutilation” as a positive condition, orgasm is experienced.

When there is a cultural conflict, the frequency of the orgasm is reduced even if the anatomical and physiological conditions make it possible.

Sexologists should pay attention to sexual education when it is conditioned by cultural influence as it can change the perception of pleasure and can inhibit orgasm.

tags: africa  circumcision  women  genital  culture  imperialism  

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