Rising Anthills: African and African American Writing on Female Genital Excision, 1960–2000

Notes

Preface 1. The tradition of female genital excision (as opposed to medical, cosmetic or transgender surgery on women’s genitalia) is also upheld in the Middle East (Yemen, Oman, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar, and some areas of Saudi Arabia); by some population groups in Mexico, Columbia, Peru, Malaysia, and Indonesia; by the Bohra Muslims in India and Pakistan; and by some African immigrants in Europe, North America, and Australia (Dorkenoo 1995, 31–32). While various other types of ritual female genital modification exist (e.g., elongation of the clitoris or dilation of the vaginal orifice) (partial ) excision of the external parts of women’s genitalia is the most prevalent kind of traditional modification. In the West, female genital excision was practiced in the latter half of the nineteenth and the early twentieth century as a cure for female insanity, frigidity, or masturbation (see n.28, below); in our present “Surgical Age,” in which cosmetic surgery is “the fastest-growing ‘medical’ specialty” (Wolf 1991, 218), women’s genitalia have not escaped attention. This book, however, focuses on the ritual genital excision of women in some African population groups. As my discussion of the traditional 203 Notes discourses of female genital excision shows, I use “ritual” in the broader sense of a socially meaningful and routinely practiced procedure. 2. Until the mid-1980s the most commonly used term was “female circumcision,” in reference to its male counterpart, with which it is generally concomitant and to which it is often held to be equivalent. Since the United Nations International Decade for Women, “female circumcision” increasingly has been denounced as a deceptive “misnomer ”and “euphemism”(Stephen James 1994, 5) by opponents of the practice, most of whom have insisted on the term “female genital mutilation.”Although the Inter-African Committee on Traditional Practices Affecting the Health of Women and Children adopted the term in 1990, the extremely pejorative wording of “female genital mutilation ” has antagonized many African men and women, whether they support or denounce female genital excision, as they feel it reinforces the Western racist portrayal of Africans. For this reason, some activists and scholars have deliberately shied away from this derogatory label in their discussions of the practice and have used such terms as “female genital surgeries” (Gunning 1992; Obermeyer 1999), “(female) excision” (Lionnet 1994; Zabus 2007), “(female) genital cutting” (Carr 1997; James and Robertson 2002), “female genital operations” (Walley 2002) and “female ‘circumcision’” (Shell-Duncan and Hernlund 2001). I have opted for the term “female genital excision,” which I prefer to “female genital surgeries” and “female (genital) circumcision” because the former incorrectly suggests the genital operations tend to be performed in medicalized environments and the latter equally incorrectly implies the practice is surgically equivalent to male circumcision. The ritual genital operations performed on women vary greatly, but actual circumcision or the removal of the prepuce of the clitoris is rarely performed, and this also holds for clitoral nicking. The most common type of female genital excision, performed in about 80 percent of all cases, is “clitoridectomy” or the excision of the clitoris. In francophone sources this type is referred to as “excision,” a usage that is somewhat confusing , as the same term is also used to cover other types of genital operations, such as those involving the excision of not only the clitoris but also (parts of) the labia. Equally variable are the procedures that are designated by the Arabic term “sunna” (meaning “tradition”). The most extreme form of female genital excision is “infibulation” (from the Latin “fibula,” meaning clasp), also called “pharaonic circumcision” or “Sudanese circumcision,”which is widely practiced in Somalia, Sudan, and Ethiopia. It involves the removal of the clitoris, the labia minora, and the anterior two-thirds of the labia majora , the sides of which are then sutured, leaving a small posterior opening for the passing of urine and menstrual fluids. In this regard, I find also the term “female genital cutting”rather misleading, as it appears to suggest a surface wound rather than the (partial ) removal of the external parts of women’s genitalia. In addition, “female genital cutting”is grammatically less versatile than “female genital excision.”While the past participle “excised”can be used to build the past tense (“she has been excised”), as an adjective (“an excised woman”) and as a noun (cf. the English title of Accad’s L’excisée, The Excised), “a cut woman” is a rather awkward formulation, and “the cut” would be assumed to...