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melani mcalister H H H H H H H Su√ering Sisters? American Feminists and the Problem of Female Genital Surgeries In 1985, when I was a student in Cairo, I went to hear a visiting American lecturer. Angela Davis was in town, speaking to an audience of about fifty women and men, under the sponsorship of the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association. Near the end of her lecture, Davis explained that she was in Egypt to research her contribution to an anthology commemorating the United Nations Decade for Women (1975–85). Each essay was assigned to a di√erent feminist from around the world who would focus on the condition of women in a country other than her own: Egyptian feminist Nawal El Saadawi would write about ‘‘women and education’’ in England ; Germaine Greer would cover ‘‘women and politics’’ in Cuba; and Davis had agreed to write about ‘‘women and sex’’ in Egypt. When Davis explained the purpose of her visit, there was an immediate outcry. Much of the audience was furious that Davis had agreed to focus on sex. They protested that feminists from the West, and American feminists in particular, were so obsessed with the veil, female circumcision, and sexual matters in general that they were distorting the real struggles of Egyptian women and their sisters in Africa and the Arab world. Though Davis insisted that she intended to take a critical view of the topic, to connect sexual issues to larger concerns, her listeners were not convinced, or, rather, it did not matter. By the mid-1980s they had grown deeply frustrated by this ‘‘interest’’ on the part of American women. As Davis eventually reported, one woman at a similar meeting minced no words: ‘‘Women in the West should know that we have a stand in relation to them concerning our issues and our problems. We reject their patronizing attitude . It is connected with inbuilt mechanisms of colonialism and a sense of superiority. Maybe some of them don’t do it consciously, but it is there. They decide what problems we have, how we should face them, without even possessing the tools to know our problems.’’∞ Davis tried hard in her essay to be sensitive to the issues of cultural Su√ering Sisters? { 243 domination that were so much on the minds of Egyptian women. In addition to writing on work, education, and divorce laws, she gave attention to women activists who organized against u.s. economic and political influence in their country. But, obedient to both her assignment and the dictates of the larger discourse about ‘‘Muslim women,’’ she also wrote in detail about the increasing practice of veiling and the decreasing practice of clitoridectomy. In doing so, Davis, an African American Communist, also implicitly took a stand that marked her in the eyes of Egyptian activists as American, as Western, perhaps even as imperialist. What Davis well knew, and what the anger of the women in Cairo made clear, was that any focus on female circumcision and veiling placed her in the middle of the heated debate between first and third world feminists about the global politics of feminism. In the 1970s and 1980s, American and European feminists were increasingly riveted by the practice of what is today generally referred to as ‘‘female genital cutting’’—practices that alter the labia major, the labia minor, and/or the clitoris.≤ For more than thirty years—from the early 1970s, when Ms. magazine began reporting the ‘‘outrage ’’ of clitoridectomy, concern about the sexual oppression of women in the Middle East and Africa has been a consistent issue for u.s. feminists. Ideas about the nature of Islam have never been far from this discussion, since, as I outline below, popular analyses in the United States and Europe have often linked Islam with the practice of clitoridectomy, even though it is not practiced in most Muslim countries outside of Africa. More broadly, the genital cutting debates have been conducted in the context of a general perception among Americans that Islam is particularly oppressive to women, so that a concern about women’s rights is often part of discussions of u.s. relationships with the Muslim world—from the fascination with the harem in the early part of the twentieth century, to the hostility provoked by the Iranian revolution in 1979, to the shocked reaction to the veiling and extreme seclusion of women in Afghanistan, which in 2001 became one central argument for the overthrow of the Taliban...

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