Shades of Othering: Reflections on Female Circumcision/Genital Mutilation

James, Stanlie M.

doi:10.1086/495300

Cited by 29 publications

(18 citation statements)

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“…The last two concepts are pertinent to a particular concept of social justice that we find especially relevant to this paper: 'Othering.' Othering describes a process of marking others as inferior so as to establish dominance (Chow 1989;Weis 1995;Donovan 2000;Fisher 2015;Merriam-Webster 2018), the process of marginalizing (James 1998), or the absence of functional empathy (Canales 2000). Othering is key to the discursive development of the subservient (Weis, 1995).…”

Section: Ways Of Knowingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Paired Measures of Competence and Confidence Illuminate Impacts of Privilege on College Students

Watson¹,

Nuhfer²,

Moon³

et al. 2019

Numeracy

117

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We seek to understand how the experiences of groups that differ in gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation produce college-level educational performances that differ from the experiences of the dominant majority group. We employ two datasets: a National Database of 24,701 participants and a Paired-Measures Database with 3,323 participants. Both datasets provide demographic information, socioeconomic conditions of status as first-generation student, English as a first language, and interest in majoring in science, and competency scores on understanding science as a way of knowing obtained from the Science Literacy Concept Inventory. The Paired-Measures Database includes additional selfassessed competence ratings that enabled quantifying affective confidence. We meld the ways of knowing of ethics, numeracy, and social justice, especially the social justice concept of Othering, to interpret our data. Two of three competing hypotheses about self-assessment encourage Othering. Our data strongly support the third-that all groups are good at self-assessment and merit equal respect. Women and men are equally competent in science literacy. Women, on average, are more accurate in their self-assessments whereas men, on average, are overconfident. Those with minority sexual orientations register higher competence than the binary-sexual majority but are less confident of their competency. Minority ethnicities, on average, produce significantly lower science literacy scores. With one exception (Middle Eastern), groups produce mean self-assessed competence ratings that are remarkably accurate predictors of their mean competence scores. The three socioeconomic conditions exert significant and unequal impacts across ethnic groups, with Hispanic, Middle Eastern and Pacific Islander data providing some unique results.

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Section: Ways Of Knowingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Paired Measures of Competence and Confidence Illuminate Impacts of Privilege on College Students

Watson¹,

Nuhfer²,

Moon³

et al. 2019

Numeracy

117

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…If we have learnt anything from the history of colonial and post-colonial efforts to eradicate female genital surgery, it is that interventions enacted in the name of health cannot always be disentangled from underlying assumptions about the nature of African Others; moreover, locals are generally well aware that more is at stake than 'health' -especially when those interventions relate to a procedure so intimately tied with gender, sexuality and identity (Boddy, 2007;Hernlund & Shell-Duncan, 2007;James, 1998; Public Policy Advisory Network on Female Genital Surgeries in Africa, 2012; Shell Duncan & Hernlund, 2000;Shweder, 2000). Why should we assume that this would be any less true of male circumcision?…”

Section: Male Circumcision and 'African Sexuality'mentioning

confidence: 99%

HIV prevention: Making male circumcision the ‘right’ tool for the job

Bell

2014

Global Public Health

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In recent years, HIV/AIDS programming has been transformed by an ostensibly 'new' procedure: male circumcision. This article examines the rise of male circumcision as the 'right' HIV prevention tool. Treating this controversial topic as a 'matter of concern' rather than a 'matter of fact', I examine the reasons why male circumcision came to be seen as a partial solution to the problem of HIV transmission in the twenty-first century and to what effect. Grounded in a close reading of the primary literature, I suggest that the embrace of male circumcision in HIV prevention must be understood in relation to three factors: (1) the rise of evidence-based medicine as the dominant paradigm for conceptualising medical knowledge, (2) the fraught politics of HIV/AIDS research and funding, which made the possibility of a biomedical intervention attractive and (3) underlying assumptions about the nature of African 'culture' and 'sexuality'. I conclude by stressing the need to expand the parameters of the debate beyond the current polarised landscape, which presents us with a problematic either/or scenario regarding the efficacy of male circumcision.

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“…Today, most Western feminist academics who write about FGCs argue in favor of careful, contemplative alliance with women from relevant communities. Third, conflating 'Western feminism', 'imperialism', and opposition to FGCs erases both grassroots abandonment efforts and genuine attempts at cross-cultural understanding and transnational alliance on the part of Westerners (Abusharaf, 2001a(Abusharaf, , 2001b(Abusharaf, [2000; Davis, 2004;Gruenbaum, 2001;James, 1998). In addition to creating acrimony among academics, then, this approach undermines practical attempts at harm reduction and abandonment of FGCs.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Because Hosken is widely considered to be responsible for initiating contemporary feminist engagement with FGCs (Boyle, 2002;Gruenbaum, 2001;James, 1998), my analysis begins in 1976, the year of Hosken's first publication about FGCs, and ends 30 years later, in 2005. Because scholars in the social science and humanities engage with critical social theories such as feminism and postcolonialism (Collins, 1998: xiv), I restricted my analysis to this literature.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This argument was popularized by Fran Hosken (1976a,b; and is made primarily by American and European scholars, but was also articulated by African scholars (such as Awa Thiam and Olayinka Koso-Thomas, who were born in Senegal and Nigeria, respectively). Hosken, Daly, and Lightfoot-Klein have been criticized widely for their use of the cultural inferiority frame (Abusharaf, 2001b(Abusharaf, [2000; Gunning, 1992;James, 1998;Kirby, 1987;Robertson, 2002). I will focus on other examples to show that this approach extended beyond the most familiar cases.…”

Section: Framing Fgcs As Inferioritymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Learning from “Female Genital Mutilation”: Lessons from 30 Years of Academic Discourse

Wade

2011

Ethnicities

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At the intersection of feminism and postcolonial theory is an acrimonious debate over female genital cutting (FGC). I subject this debate to an analysis in order to separate productive from destructive discursive strategies. I find that both FGC and the literature about the practice are frequently mischaracterized in consequential ways. Especially prior to the mid-1990s, scholars frame FGC as an example of either cultural inferiority or cultural difference. In the 1990s, postcolonial scholars contest the framing of FGC as a measure of cultural inferiority. However, they often argue that Western feminist engagement with FGCs, writ large, is 'imperialist'. I contend that both accusations of African 'barbarism' and of Western feminist 'imperialism' are empirically false and inflammatory. Furthermore, reifying 'African' and 'Western' perspectives erases African opposition to FGC and Western feminist acknowledgement of transnational power asymmetry. I conclude with a discussion of the role of outrage in academic scholarship.

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Shades of Othering: Reflections on Female Circumcision/Genital Mutilation

Cited by 29 publications

References 0 publications

Paired Measures of Competence and Confidence Illuminate Impacts of Privilege on College Students

Paired Measures of Competence and Confidence Illuminate Impacts of Privilege on College Students

HIV prevention: Making male circumcision the ‘right’ tool for the job

Learning from “Female Genital Mutilation”: Lessons from 30 Years of Academic Discourse

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