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What Is This Thing About Female Circumcision? Legal Education and Human Rights
Kate Green and Hilary Lim Social & Legal Studies 1998 7: 365 DOI: 10.1177/096466399800700303 The online version of this article can be found at: http://sls.sagepub.com/content/7/3/365

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WHAT IS THIS THING ABOUT FEMALE CIRCUMCISION? LEGAL EDUCATION AND HUMAN RIGHTS
KATE GREEN AND HILARY LIM
School of Law,

University of East London,

UK

ABSTRACT The article explores the construction of Female Circumcision as the epitome of the challenge of cultural pluralism to universal human rights within human rights pedagogy. Three particular features of this construction are investigated. First, the horror of the practice seems to render other challenges invisible. As a result, it appears that the west is the place of normality, and other peoples have instead culture and tradition. Second, it is sited in a mythical Africa, fixed as one place and one time, with one victim, which includes not only the passive child but also the dangerous African seductress. Third, the pedagogic construction implicitly relies on the notion of the wests rational and autonomous human being. Among the many possibilities for discussion here, the article focuses on the two most significant to the argument: the child and the body. The article concludes that the pedagogic construction of Female Circumcision undermines the whole enterprise of gaining a deeper understanding of cultural pluralism and universalism. Incorporating discussion of body practices common in the west, including male circumcision, equally presents the danger of creating simple objects of study. A way forward is consciously to seek in the classroom the multilayered awareness which is necessary to recognize our own limitations.

INTRODUCTION

HERE IS
t

we believe, a sense in which Female Circumcisionl has become the obvious site upon which to explain to university students conflicts and tensions surrounding claims to the universalism of human rights. The debate over female circumcision figures in the major texts and in many classrooms as texts and teaching practices construct and reflect one

SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES 0964 6639 (199809) 7:3 Copyright © 1998 SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi, Vol. 7(3), 365 365-387; 004928

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another. Thus, for example, Steiner and Alston (1996: 241) chose it as their illustration of a chapter on What are Rights? Cultural Relativism, on the basis that [t]he questions posed by challenges to this cultural practice and the responses by Africans and others raise troubling issues about cultural relativism, as well as about the reach of human rights norms to non-governmental practices. In an article we have frequently used in our own teaching, Michael Freeman (1995a) also explores cultural pluralism, promising to use four illustrations : child marriage, chastisement, child labour and female circumcision. However, when he comes to his analysis of the pluralist approach only one of these four is addressed in detail: Female Circumcision. This pedagogic practice is not raised as a matter of critique, but simply as a matter of record. We argue here that the issue has now become so embedded into the universalism/cultural relativism debate that any theoretical writer - even one from another tradition - may feel obliged to engage with it. Thus, for example, the African writer An-Naim (1994: 64) in his discussion of The Best Interests of the Child addresses the issues which the western reader may assume are among the most important: child labour, corporal punishment and female circumcision. Thus are the texts produced and reproduced and the discursive fields of academic subjects mapped out. So, what is this thing about Female Circumcision? If the phenomenon has become a prime exemplar in the western debate over universal human rights and cultural relativism, why is it that it is this, rather than, for example, domestic violence or infanticide, which has become so magnetic to law lecturers ? Why is this intimate practice exposed so freely to the public gaze of students in the domain of western legal education? Our aim in this article is to investigate the construction of Female Circumcision as British legal educations epitome of the contest between universal human rights and cultural pluralism. We argue that the very selection of this as the test case for the plurality/universalism debate in the universities derives from a western-centred universalism: the model for debate is constructed by unarticulated assumptions which are not displaced by the acknowledgement of the existence of the histories of colonialism, or other attempts to place the debate in some sort of cultural context. On the whole,
as

Fraser

(1995: 312)

comments:

The institutional context ... is one which oppresses and silences under the mantle of openness, which colonizes under the rubric of academic freedom and which instils in its members an ideal of justice while perpetuating a whole series of oppressions and colonizations.

deny that both Steiner and Alston, for example, make use of beyond the realms of law. Indeed, the very quantity and variety of books and articles on this subject is remarkable. They vary from the human rights academics such as Lewis (1995) to those like Freeman (1995a, 1995b) and Roche (1995), who focus upon children, or Bibbings (1995) whose major interest is the family, to the outright polemics of
We would
a

not

range of materials far

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Dorkenoo (1995) and Hoskens (1993). However, it is this very gathering together of the relevant literature in the human rights text, and the form that it takes, which constitutes Female Circumcision as an academic artefact: the weeks required reading, the seminar question and the subject of assessment are pre-packaged to set the boundaries of the discussion. We are not in this paper engaging in the debates over the rightness or wrongness of Female Circumcision; in a sense we are doing little more than seeking to observe the unobserved within university teaching practices. In doing so, we do not intend to trivialize the pains and problems of female genital surgery, so clearly expressed by Alice Walker:

crying over the lives of women and children whove been dead, some of them, thousands of years ... as well as mourning the lives of those Ive encountered, whose suffering is apparent. I grieve, as well, for all those children whose future holds a day of seizure, of being pinned down by adults known and unknown, and brutally hurt. (Walker and Parmar, 1993: 82)
The difficulty of writing on this subject cannot be overstated. An African American woman approaching the subject, Kay Boulware-Miller (1985: 176)

Ive been

eloquently expressed her own feelings:

My initial responses to this issue were ambivalent and confused. As a woman, I felt rage that the practice helps solidify and preserve society by the violation
of female bodies; as a Black, I felt a perverse pride that an African tradition had to hold its own amid invasive values of beauty, morality, and selfworth ; and as a mother of a little girl at the age of most who are circumsized I felt threatened by a vividly-imagined, but never-to-be-known, loss.

managed

as white western academic women means that necessarily tightrope, seeking to avoid the very assumptions and oversimplifications which we identify within much of this pedagogy of human rights. When Mary Daly (1984) wrote from an essentialist feminist location she found it relatively simple to speak about female genital surgeries. Most academic writing now seeks to avoid such a degree of essentialism and feminist authors in particular struggle with peoples right to speak, with the need to engage with the Other fully, alongside the seeming need to contribute. As we traversed the wire of this writing, slipping, sliding and wobbling along the way as our friends warned us not to speak, or that we had no right to speak, we became increasingly aware that we had to speak. Not to make the attempt would be to continue implicitly to accept our white academic privilege. Resistance to Female Circumcision is widespread both among individuals and womens groups, often at considerable personal cost, but we can do little directly to support the work of women in their individual locations who are seeking to eradicate or minimize harmful effects of genital alteration and, in any event, some activists are strongly opposed to western participation in campaigns as, at best, counterproductive2 and, at worst, hypocritical (Lewis, 1995: 25). However we can use our location to disrupt the

Our location

we

walk

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construction of Female Circumcision as a teaching tool, to dismantle this part of His Masters House (Lorde, 1984: 112). We identify several features which enable this construction of Female Circumcision as the object of academic human rights theorizing. First, Female Circumcision is often perceived as so barbaric, so extreme a physical intervention in the body of another, that no justification for its place at the head of the list of child or human rights violations needs to be made; it is as if the shock of it calls up an instant reaction which prevents consideration of any wider implications. As a result, no other issue of cultural pluralism requires

attention, or seems capable of serving as an example. Second, the issue is seen as a simple one because it is assumed in practice, that there is one form of female circumcision, which takes place in one

location, and has one timeless victim. Some writers do identify the complexity of the phenomenon, in terms of, for example, the variety of possible operations, the geographical spread across the world, the variations in pracof the different lives of the many women concerned. acknowledgement can be erased in some texts focus on the worst case. Annas (1996), for instance, while admitting that female genital mutilation takes a variety of forms, concentrates on those which are of most concern among health professionals, that is the more invasive surgeries. In all, the cumulative effect of legal educations spotlight on Female Circumcision tends to produce a cartoon figure: the black African woman-child the most oppressed and repressed, deformed and suffering of all humans. At the same time, paradoxically, the constructed teaching topic of Female Circumcision represents part of a continuing western constitution of an Exotic Female Other (Engle, 1995) the sexually desiring and always-available African woman. Third, we argue that western conceptions of the human being are also unwittingly imposed within this construction. For example, notions of childhood and of the natural or normal human body serve to constitute the mutilated African child. These operate to close down any discussion of other body practices, whether or not perceived as normal in the west, such as tattooing, piercing and other physical or psychic inscriptions. Turning the camera back on to the west in this way, we discover more about the wests (re)constitutions of its Others, essential to an understanding of the general debate about cultural pluralism and universal values: Perhaps of equal relevance is the question of what the (small) war waged by feminists and the various international interest groups against all forms of female circumcision tells us about our own cultural biases and insecurities (Hicks, 1993: xiii). Combined together, the horror of cruelty, the various simplifications and the covert impositions of a western understanding of the human being and its world create and maintain the Other as forever and inevitably different from us: tice
over

time,

or

However, this

It is difficult
we start to

to see the world except from ones own perspective ... as soon as think about people who are not ourselves we lapse into the language

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of Othering and, as one urges oneself to consider Others or to see the Other side of the question, those who are not like me can start to slide into a homogenous mass of difference from me. (Shurmer-Smith and Hannam, 1994: 89)

THE SHOCK OF FEMALE CIRCUMCISION

The first reason we suggest for the choice of Female Circumcision as the test case for the debate about cultural relativism-versus-universalism is the assumption that the practice is so cruel and primitive that no more justification needs to be offered. The practice is compared not just with child torture, but with cannibalism and slavery (Eisler, 1987: 295-6, 1990: 202). Referring to it as female genital mutilation makes this analogy more likely; no one would choose to be eaten, enslaved or mutilated. By this process, these different practices are amalgamated into the traditions of cruel and primitive peoples, as in Baroness Gaitskells remarks in the House of Lords debate on the Prohibition of Female Circumcision Act 1985 (intended to prevent such operations being performed in Britain3):
The primitive attitude to female circumcision rests not only on tradition, but on the male desire for the female to be pure for him.... That is not only the most cruel, but also ... the most primitive, and the most important aspect of the matter which we should reject. (Hayter, 1984: 325)

This primitive and ignorant quality is reinforced when it is stressed that it is normally women who perform the operations, or that it is the mother who holds the child down. The implication is that men get women to torture other women and children on their behalf, and that the unfortunate perpetrators are wholly ignorant and unaware of what they are doing. In addition, the choice of the word traditional widens the distance between Them and Us: it is They who have traditions, who are primitive or barbaric in Their social behaviour. This is reinforced in the Prohibition of Female Circumcision Act 1985, which creates by section 2(2) a defence of necessity on the grounds of physical or mental health, but excludes consideration of any belief about the requirements of custom (Bibbings, 1996: 187). Similarly, in the economy of human rights teachers, culture seems to have come to mean Other culture, while the west, the world of the universal standard, seems to be perceived as culture-free. Alternatively, if the west does have culture it is about rational choice, whereas Their culture is founded upon irrational ignorance. Thus, when human rights authors refer to Female Circumcision as an aspect of culture they often obscure the reality that to the people involved this is not just about choice of home decoration or music but is a fundamental aspect of identity, an essential gendered belonging to ones

community.
Furthermore, not only is Female Circumcision perceived as the most barbaric of traditions, but the story is endlessly retold in a way which most resonates psychically with the western reader - it may have become less

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politically
western

correct

for

western

academic

men

to

discuss the intimacies of

womens

bodies, but there is a prurience in the detailed descriptions

of processes and outcomes of Female Circumcision. The most extreme is Lantier, who in La Cite Magique et Magie en Afrique Noire (cited by Thiam, 1986: 57-8) includes what can only be described as pornographic detail of the operations and of wedding nights in which the woman is the bloody recipient of masculine desire. Even in the less overtly voyeuristic version of the story, as told for example by Dorkenoo (1995: 1-2), the lack of hygiene and anaesthesia in some traditional circumcisions - the blunt knife, the suturing thorns and a childs screams from a mud hut - play an important part in the sensationalism; if all these tales were relocated to a western-style operating theatre, much of the emotional force would be lost. The Hoskens Report, which is overtly directed towards ending the practices, tries to refrain from prurience but in its references to some brides prenuptial encounter with the little knife also suggests more than the author might wish (Hoskens,1993: 118). Roche (1995: 295) notes a concern similar to our own: ... notions of harm are easily launched against the practice, often fed by lurid and &dquo;primitive&dquo; accounts of what it entails. Even Akers (1994), in her article discussing some of these difficult issues, is unable to resist providing an account. However, other stories may also be told. For example, one may contrast these standard accounts with Amans description of the pain of her own operation and its immediate aftermath which is placed in the context of her whole life, where the humane interest of family and the wider community is plain (Aman, 1994: 52-60). Also, Lewis (1995: 29) explains that African feminists reject some western feminist portrayals of African mothers and traditional practitioners as callous or even cruel where she cites a description by Janice Boddy of infibulation which emphasizes the love and concern for the childs well-being on the part of all the women involved in the surgery, including the midwife. On the other hand, while researching this article we came across the personal story of a Jewish man, David Flusfeder (1996), who said that although he did not believe in God, and in the eyes of Orthodox authorities his son was not Jewish, he felt strongly the need to have the child circumcized. His story described his struggles with his own feelings, his difficulties in finding someone to carry out the operation, and in coping with the childs pain afterwards. It would be all too easy to produce a bloody and emotive account by editing out David Flusfeders descriptions of his ambivalent feelings and making both doctor and parents appear indifferent to the babys

pain.
In

addition, the story-book characters of the child, the old

woman

(the

grandmother) and the enfolding domesticity add to the terror in a way which reflects western childhood nightmares of Little Red Riding Hood or Grimms fairy tales. The familiar becomes the most threatening, the greatest danger hides within the home. The story achieves the maximum shock effect because of our deeply buried childhood terrors. Some of these modern childhood stories are rooted deeply in a 19th

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century western imaginary in which Africa is reproduced as the site of terrible emotions ... whence all the abominations originated (Doring,1997: 13). For example, Doring, drawing upon the work of Bratlinger (1988), argues that from the 1840s there was an intersection of two discourses such that the leading proponents of a liberal humanism which sought legislative reform in Britain to abolish slavery were also the purveyors of a rhetoric of abomination (Doring, 1997: 13). Africa was perceived as the home of a host of horrors which now that the legislative home battle had been won, was urgently in need of British enlightenment and moral correction(Doring, 1997:13). He quotes from an interview with Dabydeen where the latter refers to a painting by Turner - Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying
-

Typhon [sic] Coming On - painted in 1840:

there is something very voyeuristic about Turners response to all that blood and mayhem, in the same way that slavery provided the horror that fed into the Gothic novel at the turn of the 18th century: all that horror and Neo-Gothicism partly fed on the descriptions of slavery, the shark, the broken nigger, the blood. (Doring and Hartung, 1995: 43)
...

representations and their location in Africa have survived into the postcolonial period, a point which will be developed in the next section. The nightmare stories regularly appear in the textbooks and academic articles used by students and, placed alongside torture and slavery, create a picture of a shocking violation carried out by primitive and ignorant women in traditional cultures. This process distances Them from Us, and covertly projects our own fears into faraway places: this is the worst thing and no more needs to be said to justify its status as the exemplary challenge of plural cultures. As Morley and Robins (1995: 215) argue:
Such
_

the first spontaneous reaction to a stranger is to imagine that his difference from our own normality, necessarily takes the form of inferiority - that he is not really human, or, if human, represents a savage or barbarian form of human...

ity.
However, it is necessary to remember that each of us is the Others barbarian

(Morley and Robins, 1995: 190).

SIMPLIFICATION
THE POWER OF THE CATEGORY

The apparent simplicity of the term Female Circumcision (or Female Genital Mutilation) in human rights pedagogy renders invisible the wide variety of different local practices, their changes over time, their varying effects in the lives of the girls and women concerned. Even the most technical and apparently precise term, clitoridectomy, conflates into a single operation a

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multitude of different practices (Lightfoot-Klein, 1989: 261) and anatomies (Moore and Clarke, 1995). Dorkenoo (1995) also claims, without specific justification, that there is a need for standardisation in this area. Accompanying these listings there are sometimes medical text style line drawings of the standard female body parts, which also reduce all circumcized women to one simple diagram. Western medicine and law unite in their attempt to organize the infinite variety into a watertight scientific hierarchy as most writers develop their own ranked classifications:4 It is as though everyone is Western, physically similar, young and white and/or race is anatomically inconsequential (Moore and Clarke, 1995: 292). As we have already mentioned, some of those who do initially categorize a variety of different practices nevertheless still tend in their texts to refer to a single overarching concept. Female Circumcision can become an ambiguous term, referring both to the whole variety of interventions and also to the most serious forms. The ambiguity permits the construction of a simple unified concept of Female Circumcision which can be used, where rhetorically convenient, to refer only to the most radical operations. However, we are not here making a plea for better definitions or finer classifications. Rather we wish to destabilize the will to certainty and missionary zeal in which western law and medicine are allied. At best they produce a strictly defined series of graded acts of barbarism; at worst they reduce an infinity of practices, experiences and cultures to the conveniently solitary figure of their chosen victim. In pointing to the dangers of this legal-medical alliance, and in our exploration of their discourse, we wish to identify these simplifications, seek out the messages which they carry, and wonder who these messages serve. For, when too many sentiments are rolled up into one catch-all term they need teasing apart rather than swallowing whole, lest something very nasty indeed is ingested (Shurmer-Smith and Hannam, 1994:

44).
Far from being a corrective, the scientific labelling and ranking seems even odder in light of the fact that in reality not very much is known by westerners about female genital alteration. For example, Hicks, in her study, points out that there is relatively little detailed knowledge about the various techniques. She refers to unclear sources and unreliable statistics (Hicks, 1993: 115) and states:
The reason for the scarcity of information about infibulation may relate to the initial, and often only, reaction of many researchers to this practice, which is to view it as an act of violent and unnecessary mutilation of female children. Another (and perhaps more valid) reason may be related to the gender of the researchers - which until recently has been primarily male. (Hicks, 1993: 12)

Since many of the researchers had as their objective the elimination of all types of female circumcision, the value of any information they have gathered is necessarily rendered problematic even within its own discourse.5She also remarks that the paucity of specific data does not allow the more exact

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detailed delineation (Hicks, 1993: 12). In addition, texts still rely on old reports, of dubious value even when they were first published. Further, it is impossible to overestimate the challenge in this field to those seeking to carry out western social scientific or medical research. An example is Huda (1996:55), a Bangladeshi woman researching marriage in rural Bangladesh, who notes: In all honesty, one of the dangers of this sort of field research is that the respondent may pick up subtle nuances as to how the researcher wishes them to respond and respond accordingly.... She also indicates that the thought is ever present that some women would give different answers to the same questions if I went back to them (Huda, 1996: 55).6 On the other hand, given the enormous importance of circumcision in the lives of many women in, for example, the Sudan, it is likely that women would lie to an interviewer rather than admit to not being appropriately circumsized. Similar doubts must obtain regarding reported accounts of their suffering, their views on, and experiences of, sexual pleasure (LightfootKlein, 1989) and their intentions for their daughters. Nor is it possible wholly to rely upon the accounts of local health professionals, since they may be aware that the practice is illegal, and/or because it represents an essential part of their own livelihood.
or

THE POWER OF LOCATION

simplification of Female Circumcision relates to its siting: it is located on the map in the space marked Africa. In a sense Africa has become the discursive space in which Female Circumcision is practised and all Africas communities and differences are rendered down for university students to an area the size of the Isle of Wight: places do not exist in a sense other than culturally, and as a result ... they can appear and disappear, change in size and character, and even move about according to the way in which people construct them (Shurmer-Smith and Hannam, 1994: 13). Even those who acknowledge that Africa is not the only site of Female Circumcision, or that within Africa there are different traditions, tend to gravitate towards using - as they do in relation to the variety of operations - a single model in Africa which separates Them from Us and gives the story of Female Circumcision the maximum dramatic effect. Annas (1996: 326), for example, finds it necessary to point out only in a footnote that [a]lthough most documentation on female genital mutilation focuses on the existence of the practice in Africa, female genital mutilation also occurs in Malaysia and Indonesia. Similarly Akers, having stated that female genital mutilation is a term used to denote surgeries carried out upon women in Africa and the Middle East, adds that the practice is common in the Muslim populations of Indonesia and Malaysia (1994: 27). However, her examples and stories are all drawn from Africa. As suggested in the previous section on story-telling, the west projects its own fantasies - both of terror and of pleasure - on to Africa and also thereby
A further

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it as a real place: In contrast to the representation of the Orient cruel and hostile is an alternative image of it as a place of passion and sensuch representations turn upon our fantasy, not their practice... suality (Shurmer-Smith and Hannam, 1994: 20-1). Western mens exploration of this imaginary Africa can be seen as a part of the imperial adventure: ... the journey into the interior is, like almost all colonial journeys, figured as a journey forward in space but backward in time. As the men progress, they enter the dangerous zones of racial degeneration (McClintock, 1995: 242). Leaving safely behind their corseted and domesticated Others - mothers, sisters, wives - the white explorers were drawn into their fantasy of this Exotic Female Other whose sexuality was simultaneously an allure and a threat to their male power (Showalter, 1987). White female explorers agreed with their male counterparts as to the superiority of the white race,7 but the black woman represented for male explorers forbidden fantasy never to be indulged - except metaphorically. Africa itself, [was] persistently depicted as &dquo;female&dquo;, waiting to be opened up, penetrated, conquered, serves to underline the masculine features of the white mans testing of his virility (Segal,
constructs
as
...

1990: 172-3).
This

image, formed through the alliance of western explorers, writers and myth in western cinema in The Crying Game and

scientists, still exerts its seductive power. bell hooks, for example, reveals the
endless repetition of the The Bodyguard:

Both films suggest the feeling of taboo caused by unknowing, that actual knowledge of the other would destroy sexual mystery, the feeling of taboo caused by unknowing, the presence of pleasure and danger ... the sexual allure of these two black females is so intense that these vulnerable white males lose all will to
resist.

(hooks,

1994:

57)

This mythical black woman is the vessel that contains the heart of Africa, of darkness and Otherness; Rider Haggards Ayesha is still more terrifying, more desirous and more mysterious than any other human. She remains potent in anthropological writings on Female Circumcision. The explorers of this unmapped territory seek to expose and possess her secrets, including the intimate secret of her sexuality. At the same time, they may seek to save her, become her bodyguard, keeping a safe distance but nevertheless remaining in thrall:

keeping with a colonizing mindset, with racial stereotypes, the bodies of black men and women become the location, the playing field where white men work out their conflicts around freedom, their longing for transcendence. It offers a romanticized image of the white colonizer, moving into black territory, occupying it, possessing it in a way that affirms his identity. (hooks, 1994: 59)
In

Nineteenth-century medicine reinforced this view. For example:

In the view of Robert T. Morris, an American gynaecologist of the late nineteenth century, the proportion of white women with normal sexual organs is small but, in his opinion, among black and Indian [native American] women

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he

was sure

that the clitoris

was

&dquo;free&dquo;

siveness.

(Showalter, 1987: 130)

leading to their greater sexual respon-

The writing of Jaques Lantier, cited earlier in relation to the sensationalizing of Female Circumcision, contains both these images of the black woman, victim and temptress. Following his detailed description of reported practices of the Kikuyu, whose form of female genital alteration is reputed (by men) to increase womens capacity for sexual enjoyment, he writes that the mind boggles at the erotic skills of the Kikuyu (Thiam, 1986: 85).gAt the same time in his writing, the Kikuyu woman on her wedding night is the epitome of female victimhood: he wields the knife, she lies before him as his passive and terrified victim.
THE POWER OF TIMELESSNESS
,

There is

not only just one place called Africa, the one mud hut, but also the place on the map marked Africa is peculiarly timeless, and it is as much for

this reason as for any other that the Exotic Female Other remains active behind the veil of modern writing. Africa in the discourse on Female Circumcision is the same Africa in 1997, 1897 and 1797: colonial discourse catches its version of the moment and fixes it in its Museum of Mankind, in an anachronistic space (McClintock, 1995: 242): In the last decades of the nineteenth century, panoptical time came into its own. By panoptical time, I mean the image of global history consumed - at a glance - in a single spectacle from a point of privileged invisibility (McClintock, 1995: 37).9 Much of the writing about Female Circumcision treats it as an unchanging and unchanged tradition. Nevertheless, it is clear that there are changes over time; for example, Lightfoot-Klein (1989: 261) claims that infibulation is probably being carried out now on younger girls than previously, and pharaonic circumcision has only recently been introduced (by the elite class) into Uganda. Thus, in the pedagogy, Female Circumcision is constructed not only as a shocking act of primitive peoples but also as a singular practice. However, a careful reading of the literature indicates that there is not one Female Circumcision : a more accurate expression would be female circumcisions. When Female Circumcisions appear as a unified practice modelled on one exotic body, in a single fantasized place and time, the struggle and the unevenness disappear; obliterated also is the vast emotional investment of the west in its Africa. Even though the texts may formally acknowledge the list of operations, places and times, and a range of views about them, in the human rights pedagogy Female Circumcision emerges free from all its many complexities to become an easily digestible weeks study.
I

THE HUMAN BEING

IN THE

WEST

We

perceive a third feature of the human rights pedagogy which enables the construction of Female Circumcision: assumptions about human nature and

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society which are immanent in the discourse. These include the notion of the rational and autonomous individual which lies at the root of much western human rights theorizing. It is not possible to address here the myriad ways in which this figure makes its appearance, but we focus simply on two examples which are particularly significant for our argument about the construction of Female Circumcision in human rights pedagogy: the child and the body. In both of these, because of the constraints of space, we are merely scratching the surface of much wider and more complicated issues. We do not here consider further the issue of consent, although of course it is the other side of the coin of the rational and autonomous being, because, once social forces in inscription are acknowledged, questions of consent and choice may be strained beyond analysis: it would require at least another article of this length to begin to untangle the simple word consent and yet another to unpack it in relation to the child. For similar reasons, we are not here entering the comparison arena, as do Bridgeman and Millns (1998), Bibbings (1995) and Annas (1996), in an attempt to position Female Circumcision alongside eurocentric practices such as cosmetic surgeries.
THE CHILD

It is implicit in modern western assumptions about the human being that the young humans are not autonomous, as Hoyles and Evans (1989: 10) argue:
Our present

sexual,

as

such as work or culture ... it is difficult to look at children and avoid the power of myth as it has been developed ... it is set in the structures which control childrens lives, such as the school and the family.

myth of childhood portrays children as not being political or depending wholly on adults, and never engaged in serious activities

The effect of the myth is that what Hoyles and Evans (1989: 32) refer to as the child-study industry devotes itself to policing the borders between adulthood and childhood, investigating the differences in an attempt to maintain the division. This ideological childhood is characterized by its incompetence and dependency, passivity, innocence and irrationality. Indeed, recent British legislation requiring parents and courts to consult the child is a public recognition of the fact that, by definition in this culture, the Child has no voice worth listening to. This western childhood is a series of temporary stages within a mythical Garden of Eden, inhabitation of which is perceived as necessary to the development of the responsible pursuit of adult work and pleasure. First denied a voice, then gradually to be consulted - only to be overruled if the responsible adults do not agree with her - the Child is thus placed where she may never challenge the imposition of childhood. As a result, she is by definition unable to make any contribution to the creation of her own world. In much human rights discussion of Female Circumcision the immediate

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victim of female genital alteration is usually described as a child. However, the western construction of one particular view of childhood, has been and continues to be exported as &dquo;correct childhood&dquo; (Jenks, 1996: 122):

anthropologists continue to exclude children by representing them as appendages to adult society.... The problem of their inaudibility remains. The study of children as actively engaged in the production of meaning in their own social lives has been overlooked.... While recent efforts by feminist researchers have targeted this issue for women, children, on the other hand, remain invisible. (Caputo, 1995: 22-3)
...

This is

especially marked in the case of the female Child whose passivity and vulnerability are particularly stressed, for example as Patricia Williams (1991: 175-6) notes in relation to analyses of the experience of a young American rape victim, Tawana Brawley: [she] herself remains absent from all this. She is a shape, a hollow, an emptiness at the centre.... There is no respect or wonder for her silence. The world that created her oppression now literally
countenances it.... She continues: [i]n the face of all this, there is some part of me that wanted this child to stay in hiding ... It feels as if there are no other options than hiding and exposing ... there is no medicine circle for her, no stable place to testify and be heard.... Thus secreted within the western academic discourse on Female Circumcision is the wests powerless child, passive and vulnerable, irrational and innocent. Indeed, the imposed characteristics ensure her unhappiness:
...

Without the image of the unhappy child, our contemporary concept of childhood would be incomplete. Real children suffer in many different ways and for many different reasons, but pictures of sorrowing children recall those defining characteristics of childhood: dependence and powerlessness. (Holland,

1992: 148)

referring here to media images of poor children in reports of foreign famine, war and disaster, but the point is just as clearly made with respect to the picture of the passive victim of Female Circumcision painted in the texts. As Holland (1992: 150) argues: Third World suffering acts to secure our sense of First World comfort by assuring us that we have the power to help, and the appeal is to the competence of Western civilisation as the nurturing mother, the Mother Countries. However, this western Child is merely one local cultural construct, albeit a dominant one which is automatically projected elsewhere. There are child...

Holland is

hoods in other worlds, both historical and contemporaneous. The most wellknown analysis of the western concept of childhood comes from the French historian Phillipe Aries. Although his work has been the subject of methodological critique, his interpretation of an early 17th-century painting of a male circumcision scene is important in relation to the modern debate on Female
Circumcision:
The scene of Circumcision is surrounded by a crowd of children, some of them with their parents, others climbing the pillars to get a better view. For us surely

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378
,

something strange, almost shocking, about the choice of the Circumcision as a festival of childhood, depicted in the midst of children. Shocking for us, perhaps, but not for a present-day Muslim or for a man of the sixteenth or early seventeenth century. (Aries, 1996: 103)
One does not need to deny the methodological problems in Aries work in order to accept the historical and cultural contingency of childhood. Nevertheless, in the universal rights debate, as Jenks (1996: 122) states, children themselves remain enmeshed in the enforced commonality of an ideological discourse of Western childhood. Because the western Child is automatically and unilaterally imposed on all children, western adults become able to express their concern about any aspect of the life of any young human being - but especially of girls - and from any distance. Thus, just as circumcized women are silenced by the implications of barbarity and the simplifications of the academic construct of the victim of Female Circumcision, so too the voices of children are excluded by the imposed construction of the Child. The importance of this must not be underestimated, particularly when combined with issues of natural reproductive bodies.

there is

THE BODY

already suggested, the wests ability to slough off its own cultural practices, reproducing itself as the home of universal human rights, allows it to present what it identifies as non-western practices, or culture, as automatically associated with the Over There. One of the multiplicity of ways in which the constant remaking of the west as beyond culture takes place is through the fabrication of the body of the African woman as a discursive object. However, the understanding of the human body which is implicit in this construction is a western one, and in this section we begin a location of Female Circumcision in the context of dominant western understandings of the body. At the same time it is important to recognize that there are many other issues here in relation to the body, in particular, natural sexuality, pleasure and pain, notions of identity and the question of informed consent to interventions but it is not possible also to address these here. Populist knowledges of the body in the west are, not surprisingly, contradictory and ambiguous. Two particular understandings are immediately obvious in popular discourse. One is the assumption that the body is malAs
an individual can choose to improve upon the real flesh and bones in order to achieve what nature really intended. Here cosmetic surgeries and body decorations are part of a consumer society, in which body parts can be purchased from the catalogue, arranged and rearranged. A second understanding focuses on the western belief in a natural body: the body must be kept whole, clean and healthy - the unadulterated temple of the pure mind. As Naomi Wolf (1990: 289) concludes in relation to womens

leable, that

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bodies: [W]e serve ... ourselves ... by insisting on a new female reality... , the female body with its own organic integrity that must be respected.10 At another level, there lies a third understanding of the body: in the western medical tradition a malfunctioning body part renders the remainder of the person invisible; the tradition also constructs that body part as the object of science which medical practitioners may then police. For example:
The mouth with teeth is not a universal, discrete phenomenon as has often been supposed. It is the object and effect of dental practices: observation, recording, discussion, organization of the surgery, and the existence of the mouth and teeth
are

mutually constitutive. (Nettleton, 1992: 28)111

In the medicalized discourse of human rights on which the pedagogy of Female Circumcision is often based, the body of the genitally altered woman may become merely a reproductive unit, and Female Circumcision(s) are then judged by the west according to their alleged pathological effects upon child bearing. The World Health Organisation (1997) in a recent factsheet, entitled Female Genital Mutilation emphasizes adverse effects on a healthy reproductive life as does the Hoskens Report (1993: 37), which argues that female genital mutilation is associated with high infant mortality rates and infertility. In this focus upon the woman as a walking womb, the fact that infibulations and some other genital alterations not only impact dramatically at the time of the operation and in childbirth, but also have consequences upon women in their everyday lives, is passed over. Hicks (1993: 188) has argued that there is no sufficient reason to presume that infibulation is a major, much less the primary, cause of general ill-health, sterility or even death amongst the majority of women occupying areas where the practice of infibulation is known to be the norm. At the same time, Female Circumcision may cause regular pain from the pressure of urine or menstrual blood, and prolonged periods of time necessary for excretion, as well as the danger of kidney or other infections. Daily bodily functions many women take for granted become an unremitting cause of concern. However, it is what Trinh (1989: 97) calls the old Woman image repertoire which says She is a Womb, a mere babys pouch, which often trails through the academic discourse on Female Circumcision.

DOING CULTURAL PLURALISM Our aim has been to question the obvious selection of Female Circumcision the appropriate site for academic discussions of the debate between universal and plural human rights, and to explore ways in which the constructed
as

pedagogic object undermines the enterprise. Female Circumcision is effectively presented as a simple model of the highly complex debate on universal values but in fact it is hard to imagine an exemplar which enmeshes the student in an area more difficult to negotiate.

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Of course, Female Circumcision is an example of cultural plurality in action. However, if it becomes the only or primary example then the complexities and contingent nature of the discourse are obliterated. Even if the discussion includes an African voice, or includes brief mentions of child labour, for example, the dominant ideology still prevails: to add difference and stir does not work because doing cultural pluralism requires more than quoting other peoples ideas but then still reaching the same old conclusions:
...

the greatest task ... is

not

the

topics which were once thought inappropriate, but a much more radical transgression, that of understanding and fusing into all of the illogics and anti-logics that inform our engagement with the world and the people in it. (ShurmerSmith and Hannam, 1994: 224)

piling up of more and more case studies on

If the pedagogy fails to subvert Female Circumcision as a discursive object it only reflects but also endlessly reinforces the imperial standpoint. The task for western academics, ourselves and others, is to teach only through an explicit consciousness of the wests covert imposition of its world-view on every aspect of the subject. As a part of this consciousness, it is essential that we seek to turn the camera back more specifically upon the west as a cultural space, to explore the world we inhabit as a site of cultural practices just as the west explores Other worlds. This is a difficult process, which involves entering dangerous territory where it is necessary to avoid reproducing in reverse the problems indicated in earlier parts of this discussion. However, the danger and discomfort that is engendered by such a journey proves the necessity of making the attempt, for there is no more telling argument that we are required to disrupt the constructed pedagogy of Female Circumcision than the problems we face when trying to place in the classroom cultural practices which take place in the west. In their articles, Michael Freeman and Jeremy Roche, like many other writers, touch upon some possible and, in some sense, obvious explorations of western practices, although neither seeks to address the implications of the possible parallels they have selected. Roche (1995: 295) refers to assaults on the body of the child ... sanctioned by western society: for example cosmetic surgery [and] corporal punishment while Freeman (1995a: 15) adverts to western breast implants and gender reassignments. It is important to consider a little more deeply the complexity of these western cultures of body alteration, whether permanent or temporary, which are popularly perceived as normal and/or necessary. For example, straightening teeth, pinning back ears, face-lifting, straightening, curling, removing hair, wearing stiletto heels - all these scar - or mutilate - the body in different ways, more or less permanently. There is a further range of practices which seek to normalize the body, such as the draining of fat, penile extensions and breast and buttock implants, drugs to encourage growth in height, botulism injections to prevent frown lines, facial surgery for people with Downs Syndrome as well as surgeries to repair the results of accidents.
not

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Some inscriptions are on public display, like earrings and nose-rings, whereas some act as secret resistances - genital tattoos and piercings. Some enable the inscripted body to pass as an insider; others, to rebel as an outsider, getting a bit of the Other. Again there are inscriptions in which the whole body is sculpted as a sacrifice in the cause of art - the classical dancer, the gymnast, the body-builder, who exhibit a pride in the sacrifice and pain. Indeed, for many forms of inscription, the pain is endured or suppressed for the sake of the gain, or even welcomed. Although these cultural phenomena are more or less embedded in different western societies and are both fluid and dynamic, differently sexed bodies are subject to both similar and different forces of inscription. Even in the most narcissistic of western cultures, the pressures to conform to an ideal impacts particularly upon women; the [beauty] myths true message is that a woman should live hungry, die young, and leave a beautiful corpse (Wolf, 1990: 64). As Alice Walker remarked, regarding the dangers of western misinterpretation of her work against female genital mutilation: ... in the enlightened West, it is as if genital mutilation has been spread over the entire body, as women (primarily) rush to change their breasts, their noses, their weight and shape... (Walker and Parmar, 1993: 9-10). Male circumcision may be included in this discussion of body interventions in the west, and indeed Roche (1995) does refer to it in his list of western practices. In the literature generally, where male circumcision is the subject of academic study, it is described as an interesting social ritual, not - as is the case with Female Circumcision - an irrevocable and barbaric act on vulnerable, innocent children. As a consequence, male circumcision tends to be presented as a quick, painless and sterile operation on a barely-sentient new-born, the sharp scalpel in the expert hands of a trained doctor, even justifiable on grounds of health. There are other stories of course; for example, in some communities male circumcision may take place as late as eight or nine years of age (Olson, 1983: 111-12). Similarly, the subjective experience of the circumcized man may vary widely. Dr John Warren, who was the founding member of NOHARMM UK, established in 1994 to educate the medical establishment and provide assistance to circumcized men, states:
About 70% of our members say they feel mutilated ... the lack of feeling in this area causes anger and embarassment.... Its like having a black and white television without ever seeing a colour one - when its all youve known you dont know what youre missing. (Barrie: 1996: 1)

Other men regard their circumcized body as normal and whole. A suggestion that their bodies have been mutilated is utterly rejected and the strong reported need of some parents to ensure by circumcision that the genitals of their child resemble their own supports this.12 In these ways, as in others, male circumcision is as complex as gender reassignment, Female Circumcision or breast implants. However, unlike Roche, Freeman states that to speak of male circumcision

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382
same breath as Female Circumcision is crass (Freeman, 1995b: 82), on the ground that in general the latter has only the remotest similarity with male circumcision in terms of its physical effects (Freeman, 1995a: 12) . We sense a deep concern in this statement with which we can identify, for, as the number of non-religious circumcisions rapidly declines in the west, all the ingredients are present for male circumcision to shift from the realm of the normal and the culture-free to being constituted as a fixed and barbaric practice of the wests local others. The danger lies in creating a new object of study: Religious Male Circumcision. This is particularly problematic given that, in Britain, male circumcision is now almost solely associated with communities and religious beliefs which are already marginalized. Care must be taken lest, in trying to destabilize one set of oppressions in legal pedagogy, another exotic Other is created by taking cultural practices found among oppressed groups as illustrations of unacceptable western body alterations. It is necessary to guard against the tendency for westerners to assume that genital mutilation is more foolish and &dquo;barbaric&dquo; than the stuff they do (Walker and Parmar, 1993:

in the

9-10).
It must be reiterated that we are not making a comparison between male and female body alterations, or trying to replace one exemplar in the cultural relativism/universalism debate with a new one, or adding another difference and stirring. The fact that we have to restate this illustrates one of the means by which Female Circumcision may be destabilized. We have to keep saying these things within our teaching practice: we dont need to keep recounting the stories, we dont have to focus just on those Other places, we must avoid the construction of other objects, such as Breast Enhancement or Male Cir-

cumcision.
In conclusion, it is not enough merely to acknowledge the histories and geographies of Female Circumcision without also interrogating western assumptions and traditions:

Much can also be learned from ... Western body modifications and their stated reasons for altering or decorating their bodies. In many instances they are remarkably similar to those given in relation to FC/FGM. (Bibbings, 1995:164)

However this goes beyond mere comparisons of practices. Western teachers who enter the cultural relativism/universalism debate as if there were no histories of empire and subjectionl3 necessarily reinforce the western myth in which the native woman, as Andrew Dewdney (1996: 92) argues:
is a trace of herself, dressed up, a cipher for women of colour worldwide who have struggled for identity in a racist and colonial environment. The woman is, metaphorically, the flora and fauna of Cooks terra nullius. On this view the spectator is brought face to face with the exotic of the male and colonial gaze and caught in an act of both cultural exchange and translation.
...

Preconstructed and

readily available,

Female Circumcision lies in wait

to

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recapture the classroom, either on its own terms or as a model for the construction of other equally dangerous and misleading exemplars. The easy way out, of course, is to attempt an exclusion of the subject altogether, but that would be a different denial of our responsibility as teachers. Our pedagogy must enter a conversation - with ourselves, the texts, the students, and the silenced voices - in which we ourselves are continually subverted. It may not be possible to avoid capture by Female Circumcision, or other preconstructed objects. Nevertheless, like the writing of this article, slipping, sliding and wobbling along the way, we must overtly seek the multilayered awareness which is necessary at least to recognize the limitations of our assumptions and habitual pedagogic practices. This process is not confined to human rights or child law. Once embarked upon it becomes obvious that there is a need to continuously recognize and reaffirm our assumptions and practices in the whole of legal education.

NOTES
1.

We have chosen to use the term Female Circumcision as an indication of the way in which female genital surgeries have become a singular discursive object
or

artefact. Elsewhere we deploy the term female genital surgeries, used by Gunning (1991-2) and Lewis, for, as Lewis indicates, it permits comparison, where appropriate between traditional types of FGS and "modern" forms of surgical modification of womens bodies that are not generally subject to human rights scrutiny (Lewis, 1995: 7). However, as Hope Lewis indicates, there is no one term that is appropriate in all contexts and many western and African human rights activists prefer the term female genital mutilation. However, we are not at any stage in this article attempting to describe female genital surg2.

3.

4.

eries for reasons which will become apparent in the course of our discussion. The debates at the Fourth United Nations World Conference on Women held in Beijing in September 1995 encapsulated the challenge to global feminisms tendency to privilege the experiences, standards and values of white, middle-class and heterosexual women. Even Alice Walkers intervention has been criticized. A recent Channel Four Programme (Cutting the Rose, Black Bag, 7 October 1997) showed arrangements for such operations to be carried out in Britain, and pointed to the fact that, although there had been no prosecutions under this legislation, the British Medical Association estimates that 3-4000 young girls are circumcized in Britain every year. Dorkenoo (1995: 5), for instance, adopts five classifications of the wide variations of mutilation ... performed in different countries: circumcision; excision, infibulation, intermediate infibulation, and unclassified (which includes scarring and humenectomy). Hicks (1993: 11, n. 14), also admits of the many variations but delineates roughly three categories: clitoridectomy, pharaonic circumcision (infibulation) and clitoridectomy and excision of labia minora. These scientific descriptions form part of the educational texts. The first extract in Steiner and Alstons (1996) case study is from the World Health Organization undertaken by the traditional midwife: Circumcision Proper, Excision and Infibulation. Freeman (1995a) uses a long quote from an article by Alison Slack (1988) detailing four basic forms that vary in degrees of severity: ritualistic circumcision, sunnar, excision or clitoridectomy,

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5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

intermediate pharaonic circumcision and recircumcision/refibulation. read a number of texts on female circumcision we were surprised to read a Consultant Gynaecological Surgeon practising genital reconstruction in a London hospital stating that contrary to the prevailing knowledge in academic texts the clitoris is not always removed but remains beneath the scar tissue of infibulation (Independent, Friday 30 May 1997: 19). Huda (1996: 55) also remarks that [t]hey urged me to write what I thought best and pleaded quite frankly their illiteracy. The Hoskens Report (1993: 11) makes a similar point, but betrays an imperial standpoint: ... rural Africans are very friendly and try to please; they will tell a researcher what they think he/she wants to hear in order to please. Writers thus constructed a racial and sexual hierarchy in this fantasy continent in which the black woman rested on the lowest branches of the evolutionary tree, at the very nadir of human degeneration just before the species left off its human form and turned bestial (McClintock, 1995: 55). He is referring to the Kikuyu matrons whose carrying out of the excision is described in surgical, skilled terms, which stand in marked contrast to the primitive nature of other described practices. He claims also that middle-class French women are seeking this operation in French hospitals - wishful thinking on his part maybe? As in all time travel, the past, present and future are conflated and the result is to construct an overarching experiential sameness in one place and also the fabricated "mystic orient" is thus often seen as a timeless place, built around notions of the eternal and the archetypal, but the timelessness is associated with the idea of the past as a tense, rather than as history as a process (ShurmerSmith and Hannam, 1994: 19). Although necessarily these two popular knowledges are interlinked, the first focuses on the plasticity of the human body while the second prioritizes its fixed and universal quality. Grosz (1995), in her exploration of Western theoretical literature on the body, identifies two dominant approaches which reflect these two popular understandings. The first of these theoretical approaches, which she terms the inscriptive sees the body [as] a surface on which social law, morality and values are inscribed (Grosz, 1995: 33). The second conceptualization of the body reflects the natural body as temple approach. It takes the body-schema or imaginary anatomy as its object(s), and Grosz terms this the lived body approach. The difference between Groszs inscriptive approach and the populist understanding of the bodys malleability is that in the former there is a recognition of the social forces involved, whereas in the latter it is assumed that these surgeries are a matter of choice. This quotation contains traces of the vagina dentata: see Easlea (1981: 40) for example, Sartre: "beyond any doubt her sex is a mouth and a voracious mouth which devours the penis". See Flusfeder (1996), who said he did not believe in God, but felt strongly the need to have his child circumcized, although the child in the eyes of Orthodox authorities was not Jewish. In one piece of American research, parents whose children were born or treated in a variety of hospitals in Salt Lake City, Utah, reported as their main reasons for having their sons circumcized, cleanliness and health, routine normal family tradition and physical appearance (Metcalfe

infibulation. Lightfoot-Klein (1989: 33), adopts a five-fold classification, mild sunna, modified sunna, clitoridectomy/excision and infibulation/pharaonic circumcision, introcision and then adds two more types from the Sudan,

Having

et

al.,

1983:

577).
was

13.

new

feminist socio-legal text by Bridgeman and Millns (1998)

published

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385

after this article was completed. A chapter entitled Body Image focuses upon harm inflicted on women by other individuals or as a consequence of cultural pressures operating in society ... in order to consider ways in which the law, when engaging with the female body, reinforces societal expectations of the nature of women and our appropriate gender role (Bridgeman and Millns, 1998: 545-6). This chapter consists in extracts and commentary on the treatment of anorexics, cosmetic surgery and female genital mutilation. The latter is selected as a further example of the alteration of bodies of women in accordance with the dictates of self-perpetuating cultural norms (Bridgeman and Millns, 1998: 588). In so placing Female Circumcision, the editors not only conceal the obvious differences between these three harms but also - like so many authors - seem unaware of the western-centred universalism which their choice, and positioning, of the subject are covertly reinforcing.

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