Hooray hooray hooray for FGM
Fuambai Ahmadu is really quite creepy.
I am not surprised that the women of Kailahun have taken to the streets to protest what is now becoming a brazen attack by anti-FGM activists against female initiation and excision in Sierra Leone…I have witnessed first-hand the proliferation (and invidiousness) of this alarming multi-million dollar “development” industry, financed largely by western countries and international agencies such as UNICEF, WHO, UNFPA and so on. Faced with a global media onslaught depicting the most insidious and racist types of representations of African men and women witnessed since colonial times and the downright force of anti-FGM campaigns to shame, more and more circumcised African women have come to see and define themselves through these media lenses as “mutilated”.
Lots of emotive language there, along with a fair amount of trendy code. Anti-FGM activists are ‘brazen’ – as if there is something shameful about opposing the mutilation of girls. And then there’s all the sly nonsense about money and scare-quoted ‘development’ and industry and financed and western and international – as if it were Walmart and McDonald’s and Coke teaming up to make a profit from saying girls shouldn’t be mutilated. The disdain for UNICEF, WHO, and UNFPA is odd too. But no problem, just pretend it’s all racist and colonialist and there’s no further need to explain. So her position is that international agencies are, by definition, invidious and racist/colonialist and anti-FGM campaigns are brazen and corrupt (being financed by all those invidious international agencies), while people who mutilate girls are all that is good.
[T]here ought to be some respect and sensitivity to Sierra Leonean women and our culture. The term FGM is offensive, divisive, demeaning, inflammatory and absolutely unnecessary!! As black Africans most of us would never permit anyone to call us by the term “nigger” or “kaffir” in reference to our second-class racial status or in attempts to redress racial inequalities, so initiated Sierra Leonean women (and all circumcised women for that matter) must reject the use of the term “mutilation” to define us and demean our bodies…For those of us who take pride in our culture, our ethnicity, and our female ancestors, which Bondo represents, we must continue to stand up for ourselves and defy any attempt by others, however powerful they may be, to rewrite their own histories onto our bodies, to negate our particularities as they universalize their own.
That ‘as…so’ is completely bogus, obviously, because ‘nigger’ does not work the same way as ‘mutilation’ does. Ahmadu calls herself a scholar but her way of ‘arguing’ is not very scholarly.
“[T]here ought to be some respect and sensitivity to Sierra Leonean women”
Except when you want to hack off their genitals.
Lecture 19 Mar 2009 Anthropologist Fuambai Ahmadu provides an empirically grounded perspective on female circumcision, starting with a brief documentary, etc.
http://www.arts.uregina.ca/anthropology/fuambai-ahmadu-lecture.
“Except when you want to hack off their genitals.” I know that’s right, NB! People like Ahmadu really chafe me – nay, they make me want to slap the shit out of them. As I said in a post on another thread, I cannot believe I woke up this morning to step out of the Wayback in Time Machine to wake up in postmodern 1996. We’re still debating whether clitoridectomy and infibulation are mutilation? Really?
So. . . the opposite of mutilated is initiated?
Her argument is odd and twisted, in addition to being less than scholarly. I think she is exploiting the straw-person of “western” “development” “brazen” ethnocentric disregard for the culture she identifies with in Sierra Leone to remind readers that she is a member of the elite highly educated and contrarian initiated. Also, conveniently for her, she survived her procedure and lived to be thankful for it. But no matter how much research she musters she cannot erase the sickness and death caused by the procedure itself to the girls who are kindly held down by those they trusted, and cut.
Sorry, ma’am. It does not work.
As I’m sure was pointed out elsewhere, this is a bit rich coming from Ahmadu – product of an American education who was able to choose to have her genitals hacked off at age 22. I wonder why she didn’t reject imperialist indoctrination and refuse to attend college?
And yes, I’m sure Sierra Leone would be much better off with FGM and without clean water, electricity, and all the other accoutrements of eeeevil development.
Ultimately this woman is just a right-wing ethno-nationalist, but since she’s from a country traditionally looted by outside powers she gets special street cred for some reason.
Is anyone advocating that women who choose to mutilate themselves at 22 be expressly forbidden to do so?
(I might advocate that, actually, just for the sake of medical ethics. But I haven’t heard of anyone ELSE doing so.)
What a fool. She has no argument–just “offense.” She never explains WHY this isn’t mutilation, any less than lopping off a hand or a nose or an ear would be.
I might advocate that, actually, just for the sake of medical ethics. But I haven’t heard of anyone ELSE doing so.
But even that wouldn’t be expressly forbidding 22-year old women from mutilating themselves – it would just be forbidding anyone with a medical degree from performing genital mutilations. Now it would have the effect of practically banning FGM, but people who perform male genital mutilation in religious settings aren’t exactly medical professionals.
What a fool. She has no argument–just “offense.” She never explains WHY this isn’t mutilation, any less than lopping off a hand or a nose or an ear would be.
Well put, and succinctly too!.
Damn. Looks like I’ve been completely wrong about something for a couple of decades. Again.
I’m an insidious, racist, colonialist.
Who’da thunk it?
If anyone has the morbid curiosity and the stomach for it, I’d suggest googling “body disphoria disorder” sometime. The basic breakdown of the disorder is that some rare individuals have the unshakable conviction that a part of their own body – a hand, an arm, a leg – does not belong to them, and the patient also presents an obsessive desire to have the offending body part removed. The reason I bring up such an oddity in this context is that some medical ethicists – not very good ones, and not many of them – but some argue that allowing those afflicted with BDD to mutilate themselves with the help of a physician is morally permissible – because that’s what the patient wants; it’s his or her choice. Really? And is it the patient’s choice to have the uncontrolled, unalterable, obsessive conviction that his right hand is not really his own and it ought to be cut off in the first place?
There seems to be a view of free will and agency here that is deeply at odds with reality, which is where the parallel with FGM comes in. Most women who undergo FGM do not undergo the mutilation voluntarily; indeed, most are not women at all, but girls. And the circumstances under which the choice is made (for those who can even be said to choose) are anything but free. And the cultural context in which the tradition is practiced is anything but empowering for women. One even begins to wonder about the substantial freedom that Fuambai Ahmadu appears to have had in her choice – because ideological commitments of such extremity are generally not born in circumstances of rich and genuine individual liberty. I suspect that it was always made very clear to her what the price of her privilege was, and her ongoing defense of FGM is as much a part of that price as was the mutilation itself.
It is simply not morally permissible to amputate an integrated, functional body part from a living human for anything but health-promoting reasons (medically necessary amputations, disease prevention, kidney donation, etc.), even if the prospective amputee expressed a firm and strong desire for it to be done – and even if the body part is very small, such as the clitoris. The desire itself is the sickness in need of treatment – whether that sickness is the individual psychopathology of BDD (probably rooted in some neuropsychological cause, a kind of photo-negative of phantom limb syndrome) or the cultural pathology of a controlling, abusive, patriarchal tradition like FGM.
To claim that the expressed desire for mutilation is sufficient to justify the mutilation in either case (BDD or FSM) commits several obvious errors: It takes expressed desires as “freely chosen” in a radical sense that is completely at odds with all evidence about how human beings come to (1) have desires (which is complex and not in any obvious way “free,” or even slightly under one’s own control), (2) express desires (which is subject to all sorts of coercive influence), and (3) make choices (which are frequently curtailed by all sorts of internal and external factors). And worst of all, it ignores the obvious fact that a person’s well-being is being subject to clear, concrete harm with no commensurate benefit other than fulfillment of this highly problematic desire/choice — except for the “benefits” of FGM which are themselves coercive, such as not being shunned or killed for failing to go along with tradition.
[Incidentally, if it occurs to anyone that one practical justification for fulfilling some BDD patients’ desire for amputation so they don’t die from attempting to carry out their obsessive desire for themselves… In one documented case, a BDD sufferer who managed to successfully have the offending limb removed – I forget which limb, and I forget whether the person survived self-mutilation or actually found a doctor stupid enough to assist – soon began to focus the obsession on another limb…]
Thanks to Marie-Therese for the link to the University of Regina web site describing the anthropologist Fuambai Ahmadu’s lecture to show that FGM does not degrade sexual function in women (and therefore, presumably, cannot be considered mutilation). But it’s the description of the lecture that gets me. It really is creepy. Here is an extract:
“Ahmadu contextualizes the film and the practices of male and female initiation and circumcision from Kono (or Mande) people’s perspectives. She examines Kono attitudes and behaviors with respect to women’s sexual prowess, contrasting female circumcision’s opponents’ ‘scientific’ but parochial assumptions about female sexuality, genital anatomy, and sexual pleasure with Kono people’s own cultural lexicon, where there is no ‘female sexual dysfunction’.”
Got that? “From the Kono (or Mande) people’s perspective.” Not that of WHO, UNESCO, and various other basically colonialist perspectives. And then comes this:
“Ahmadu’s liberal, empathetic, and thoroughly informed discussion of the issues in question constitute a strong challenge to the more radical, ethnocentric, Othering arguments in anti-FGM claims, and a surprisingly instructive message of caution about prejudiced Western (mis)understandings of sexuality to otherwise open-minded, tolerant people”
Liberal, note! And prejudiced liberal misunderstandings of open-minded, tolerant people! This is worse than Ahmadu’s stuff itself. She’s got cultural eggs to lay, but the people who wrote this stuff should have recognised that the eggs she is laying are cuckoo’s eggs. A good prophylactic is Sandal’s The Culture Cult.
“I’d suggest googling “body disphoria disorder” sometime.”
I wrote a piece about that for TPM a few years ago – because a couple of philosophers had written an article defending the ethics of amputating healthy limbs. I wrote it as neutrally as I could, because it was for the news section of the mag – but I certainly pointed out that there are reasons for caution, at the very least.
One evening a longish time later – months, a year or more, I don’t remember – I got a phone call from a stranger, who explained that he was one of those wannabe amputees. He wanted to thank me for the sympathy and understanding of my article. This made me acutely uncomfortable, but before I could explain that I hadn’t really intended to be all that sympathetic, at least not to the practice of amputation – he told me that he had just had a leg amputated.
Oh, goddddddddddddd.
Well above the knee, he’d had it taken off.
He murmured away for awhile about how he was adjusting, how it took some getting used to, etc etc etc
and in the end he simply admitted he wasn’t sure it hadn’t all been a mistake.
Fucking hell.
I’d love to think it was a hoax, but I never have been able to think that. The way he talked was too…halting, too wandering, too uncertain, too inarticulate. Too depressed. Too convincing.
“the more radical, ethnocentric, Othering arguments in anti-FGM claims”
That sounds like the looniest end of the spectrum in the discussion on the Women’s Studies list in January last year. I posted about it here of course – as well as about the AAA conference that Ahmadu mentions, and the Shweder article ditto, and the Tierney post ditto. It was a hot topic for awhile.
Snap, G – here’s something I said in a comment on one of those posts in January 2008 –
“People (meaning, women) who actually want FGM are in a category similar to people who want to have limbs amputated, and that is a very controversial subject. Some doctors are willing to do the amputations in certain circumstances, but not cheerily the moment they’re asked, and they don’t claim that it’s ‘fine,’ they cautiously say that it seems to provide relief for people with very intractable cases of body dysmorphic disorder.”
Check out the May 11 New Yorker profile on V. Ramachandran: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/11/090511fa_fact_colapinto
He figured out that body dysphoria disordered persons can sometimes get fixed with a mirror rather than a saw:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_box
Of course this will not repair Ahmadu’s thinking difficulties.
Great (or weird (or both)) minds think alike, I guess…
G: An interesting argument.
Would it be going too far to extend this argment to the current fashion for extreme body modification (tattoos, piercing, etc.), which to me is quite suspect????
I’m not saying a 23 year old hipster who inserts multiple studs in his….er…is the same thing as a 12 year old girl going through puberty, but..?
Oh yes, the mirror fix, I’d forgotten that. Well done V. Ramachandran.
Now we need an equivalent for FGM…
Actually, Brian, I don’t think the argument extends particularly well: Piercings, however viscerally some people may react to them, are non-debilitating and largely reversible. Amputations and the various specific practices encompassed by FGM are both debilitating and irreversible.
For another example, I wouldn’t attempt to extend this argument against rites of passage that involve excruciation of various sorts: I recently saw a documentary about a South American tribal initiation involving woven gloves stuffed with hundreds of bullet ants – insects so named for how much an individual ant’s sting hurts. However painful a rite of passage may be, even one that involves permanent scarring, such a rite is not the same as amputating or surgically modifying a functional body part to the detriment of the subject’s health and welfare.
The word “mutilation” is the correct word precisely because it captures both the real functional harm and the permanency of that harm. “Modification” is Orwellian newspeak.
G,
The argument you advanced in your comment on BDD would seem to set limits on those individuals’ autonomy over their own bodies on the basis that self-mutilating modifications cannot be called free choices if they are the result of psychological conditions that were not chosen. Surely, though, all free will is constrained by factors such as biology, social pressures, and psychology? Where can we/ should we draw the line? Or is it only that we should draw the line when it comes to saying what medical practitioners can and should do?
Despite your reply to Brian, I think your argument does need to be examined in the light of bodmod: even if the specific example of piercings is not comparable to amputation, there are there are many voluntarily undertaken body modifications that are (medically speaking) ‘to the detriment of the subject’s health and welfare’. I’m thinking tightlacing (non-surgical, but can cause permanent damage), penis splitting, nullification, and even more extreme operations (follow link at your own risk – safe for work, not for stomachs).
Such mods (mutilations – whatever) are undertaken voluntarily by autonomous adults in cultures (like ours) that do not place social pressure on people to have them done – so there are many ways in which they are qualitatively different from (incomparable with) FGM. They do seem to fall within the scope of your broader argument re. mutilation and autonomy, though. Certainly I would tend to assume that those who opt for extreme bodmods of these types are significantly pshychologically deviant from the norm, even if they have not been identified as suffering from a specific condition such as BDD.
None of this is relevant to almost all FGM. It’s relevant, though, to any suggestion that FGM as chosen by an autonomous, educated adult such as Ms Ahmadu is not an act of free will and thereby qualitatively different from (incomparable to) the overwhelming majority of FGM.
Sorry, OB, missed this the first time round. I just found the description of the lecture (on the U Regina web site) in some senses worse that the lecture itself might have been, for one spoke from within a culture, the other refused to make any judgements at al1.
I disagree G. Just because something is reversible, does not make it an acceptable cultural practice. As Sandall points out in The Culture Cult many initiations are so terrible in their effects, arousing such fear and submission to authority, that the person is scarred for life, whether irreversibly damaged by things done to the body or not. Initiations, including mutiliations and scarifications, are intended to subordinate people to the culture out of fear. Hell can do this as well as a knife.
Of course, young people who, for personal reasons, have studs in nose or bellybutton or more intimate places, are not being initiated. They’re playing ‘Simon says’, and this is an aspect of freedom, if a somewhat bizarre one. Being tortured or tormented or mutilated by adults as a necessary part of growing up is different altogether.
You have good points, outeast, but I think you’re also reading claims into my argument that I did not make. I also didn’t specifically rule them out, so let me clarify.
Choice and harm are BOTH at stake in moral analysis of these issues. Yes, I am dubious about free will and casual (or causal) references to it in general, and so I think talk about “choice” deserves careful critical analysis – which I made an attempt at by drawing out some implications of the BDD/FGM comparison. But however confused or possibly non-existent free will is in metaphysical or psychological terms, freedom from external coercion is still real and important – albeit not always clear-cut. I don’t think it’s easy to draw the lines to which you refer, which is why I resorted to examples rather than abstractions in the first place.
One thing I am sure about: A girl being brainwashed her entire life to accept horrible things being done to her as both necessary and right, and being subject to shunning or worse if she somehow manages to overcome or rebel against that life-long conditioning – that definitely counts as coercive and anything but free.
But in specific answer to Brian’s question about body modification, the choice element seemed less important than the harm element because I perceived a lack of permanent, irreversible and debilitating harm. And since permanency was an important aspect of the harm, I came up with another example suggesting that even in a highly coercive cultural rites environment (i.e. where choice is heavily curtailed), extreme but non-permanent harms wouldn’t necessarily be as objectionable as permanent harms are.
If you, outeast, instead want to focus on the more extreme body modifications where permanent debilitating harm IS at issue, then the focus of attention would have to be returned to choice – and the non-coercive, non-pathological (or at least not obviously pathological, as in BDD) nature of the body modifiers’ choices would seem to argue against limiting their freedoms. Similarly, Eric raised a concern about whether some of the more extreme rites of passage might in fact inflict permanent and debilitating harm – and in those cases, the highly coercive nature of cultural pressure would seem to put them in the same category as FGM; that is, immoral because it is both irreversibly harmful and highly coercive.
It is the incredible coercive pressure of culture that I think makes it reasonable to question exactly how autonomous Ms. Ahmadu actually was at age 22. I don’t know many details of her biography, but presumably she strongly identified with her culture and her nation – where her family has wealth and status (or she wouldn’t have been educated abroad) to which she intended to return. So how free was her choice? I don’t think she could have returned to Sierra Leone (and her family and wealth and status) without undergoing FGM – so her choice was hardly lacking in serious constraints and pressures.
On the other hand, she seems to have had many more and better options about lots of things – including FGM – than most Sierra Leonean women: I think that accounts for how committed she is to defending her choice – so committed that she willfully ignores the coercive and abusive nature of the custom that she chose to follow. In short, Ahmadu rationalizes FGM like her life – no scratch that – like her sense of identity and self-worth depends on it. And perhaps it does; more’s the pity.
This is a really tough one. I lived in Salone for a time and had the chance to discuss this issue. The truth is that many (possibly most) adult women will DEFEND FGM as a cultural artifact to be proud of. The anti-FGM forces are certainly painted as colonialist. It is almost as if, in SLs currently dire state and with memories of being the ‘Athens of the South’ not so long ago, they cling to this as one issue in which their views are as good as those of outsiders and the one on which they can insist on their identity. SL is a mendicant society, they know it, and they will stand up for something indigenous (whatever it is) as a means of asserting a non-mendicant pride. In almost all aspects of life they are little better than international beggars and the anti-FGM issue binds them together and allows them to assert an identity.
My 2 cents