14 Rites and Wrongs: An Insider/ Outsider Reflects on Power and Excision

Genital Cutting as Gender Oppression: Time to Revisit the WHO Paradigm

“…Numerous scholars have argued that this selective focus reflects moral double standards rooted in racism and cultural imperialism (Gunning, 1991;Obiora, 1996;Tangwa, 1999;Ahmadu, 2000Ahmadu, , 2007Ahmadu, , 2016bMason, 2001;Shweder, 2002Shweder, , 2013Njambi, 2004;Ehrenreich and Barr, 2005;Oba, 2008;Dustin, 2010;Smith, 2011;Kelly and Foster, 2012;Boddy, 2016Boddy, , 2020Onsongo, 2017;Shahvisi, 2017Shahvisi, , 2021Shahvisi and Earp, 2019). Some have therefore called on the WHO to revise its policy: either by including Western-associated 5 so-called "cosmetic" female genital surgeries in the campaign against "FGM" (Esho, 2022), or by establishing an age limit or consent criterion for FGC to be applied without discrimination or favor (Dustin,3 For the purposes of this paper, an intervention to alter a bodily state is medically necessary "when (1) the bodily state poses a serious, time-sensitive threat to the person's well-being, typically due to a functional impairment in an associated somatic process, and (2) the intervention, as performed without delay, is the least harmful feasible means of changing the bodily state to one that alleviates the threat" (BCBI, 2019) (p. 18).…”

“…The fact that, in FGC-practicing societies, the rite of genital cutting does not exclude females is therefore significant. Instead of assigning them to a lower status on account of their sex, it rather places them in a complementary relationship to males-i.e., "different but equal" -which may reflect a relatively non-hierarchical gender structure within the "cultural DNA" of at least some such societies (Ahmadu, 2000;Ahmadu and Kamau, 2022). 22 Due in part to Western intervention and criminalization, the ability of the rituals in question to serve their social function as sites of bonding is increasingly disrupted, with the practices being driven underground and stripped of their symbolic significance.…”

Do No Harm? Discrepancies across Canadian Healthcare Policy and Obstetrics and Gynaecology Training for Treating Women affected by Female Genital Cutting

“…As a prominent scholar in the field of FGC, Ahmadu (2007) discusses her own experiences of undergoing FGC and her affective response of being within this area of academia that is vehemently condemned. Ahmadu (2007) urges that the tension between perspectives of cultural insiders versus outsiders enforces a binary within knowledge production.…”

“…As a prominent scholar in the field of FGC, Ahmadu (2007) discusses her own experiences of undergoing FGC and her affective response of being within this area of academia that is vehemently condemned. Ahmadu (2007) urges that the tension between perspectives of cultural insiders versus outsiders enforces a binary within knowledge production. Further, as editors of the anthology Transcultural Bodies: Female Genital Cutting in Global Context, Hernlund and Shell-Duncan ( 2007) have produced a seminal text that represents diverse perspectives and angles to approach FGC research, particularly from an over-arching anthropological perspective that does not aim to condemn nor support the practice, rather to build and disseminate knowledge on a variety of subsections of FGC-based scholarship.…”

“…While this information is not inaccurate, it is not always the case that this is how FGC is performed but framing it as such without elaborating on the other methods and locations of the ritual adds to the narrative of FGC as solely being barbaric, dirty, and coerced (Ahmadu, 2007). As discussed in my literature review in Chapter 1, while many women who have experienced FGC may condemn the practice, there are also many who do support it considering that it is primarily elder women in communities who uphold the tradition (Ahmadu, 2007;Shell-Duncan et al, 2018). Much of the discourse surrounding FGC tends to frame the practice in a universal way as the determined four types of FGC that happen globally and mainly throughout Africa.…”