Michelle Goldberg on relativism and FGM
‘On Feb. 6, 2007, two women, both of whom had been circumcised in Africa , met in the conference room of a small foundation on Fifth Avenue in New York City for a highly unusual debate. It was the fourth annual International Day of Zero Tolerance of Female Genital Mutilation, an occasion for events across the globe dedicated to abolishing the practice.’ One was Fuambai Ahmadu, the American-born daughter of a Sierra Leonean family, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago with a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics; the other was Grace Mose, who grew up in an Abagusii village in southwestern Kenya. Mose was there as an active opponent of FGM, and Ahmadu was there as a defender. Michelle Goldberg continues:
“My sitting here is a perfect example that female initiation can have a place in a global society,” [Ahmadu] insisted. “I don’t see that initiation is somehow an impediment to girls’ development.”…As she spoke, Mose, a fervent campaigner against the practice, glared at her. Unruffled, Ahmadu continued, arguing that in Sierra Leone, “female circumcision is empowering.” Toward the end of the debate, a Senegalese woman, incensed by Ahmadu, stood up and said, “I really feel very frustrated seeing an African sister defending female genital mutilation.” A few people applauded.
The Senegalese woman protested the term ‘circumcision’ and said the word should be mutilation. Then Ahmadu got angry.
“In Senegal, in Gambia, in my country, Sierra Leone, there are words that we can use, as circumcised women, against uncircumcised women that are very insulting and very nasty and very offensive.”
In Somalia, too. Ayaan Hirsi Ali tells us that.
The kids at madrassah were tough. They fought. One girl, who was about eight years old, they called kintirleey, ‘she with the clitoris.’ I had no idea what a clitoris was, but the kids didn’t even want to be seen with this girl. They spat on her and pinched her; they rubbed sand in her eyes, and once they caught her and tried to bury her in the sand behind the school.
Later, after a fight, another girl shouts at Ayaan, ‘Kintirleey!’
Sanyar winced. I looked at her, horror dawning on me. I was like that other girl? I, too, had that filthy thing, a kintir?
Ahmadu continues her objection:
Comparing these slurs to the word “mutilation,” she continued, “I may be different from you and I am excised, but I am not mutilated. Just like I will not accept anybody calling me by the n-word to define my racial identity, I will not have anybody call me by the m-word to define my social identity, my gender identity.”
The trouble with that is that it’s not just about her. She can say she is not mutilated, but that doesn’t mean she can say other women are not mutilated – especially since, as Goldberg points out, she was mutilated or ‘circumcised’ at the age of 22, with her own consent. There’s something quite self-regarding about the way she personalizes the issue.
Ahmadu sees herself as speaking for African women who value female genital cutting but are shut out of the rarified realms of international civil society. “The anti-FGM activists have access to the media, and they have enormous resources, so they’re able to influence the media in such a way that most of the women who support the practice cannot,” she told me later that evening.
But most of the very young girls who get mutilated also cannot influence the media, to put it mildly, so to pretend that anti-FGM activists are the big powerful bullies while the fans of cutting are the victims is…partial, at best.
Ahmadu’s argument, that to decry circumcision is to decry her very culture, is a persuasive one. Liberals have many reasons to sympathize with people struggling to hold on to their ways of life in the face of the hegemonic steamroller of globalization. But they have even more reason to sympathize with people like [Agnes] Pareyio who are fighting for individual rights in societies that demand subsuming such rights to tradition and myths about sexual purity. After all, even if relativists like Shweder truss them up in fashionable thirdworldism, such demands are the very essence of reactionary conservatism…To support people like Pareyio – as well as those fighting to implement the Maputo Protocol or working against draconian abortion bans or the terrible iniquities of Sharia law – is to reject relativism. It is to believe that other cultures, like our own, can change in necessary ways without being destroyed.
Quite.
Exactly–it’s not just HER identity, and the people who oppose FGM are the ones who had it done against their will. She had absolutely no right to speak for them. She was born and raised in America. What gives her the right to say what’s ’empowering’ in Sierra Leon? I find it significant that a Senegalese woman and a woman who grew up in a Kenyan village were her most vocal opponents.
And yes, she is mutilated. If she doesn’t want to think of herself that way, well, that’s her business, but she can’t dictate how the world thinks of her. I can call myself a tomato if I want to, but if you point out I’m a human being, well, that’s not oppressive to me.
And for heaven’s sake her existence doesn’t ‘prove’ anything. It doesn’t say anything about whether girls raised in Africa who actually have to live under the ideology that supports FGM can have her educational and economic opportunities. It also doesn’t address the most direct effects of FGM, namely, what is her sex life like? Can she enjoy sexual pleasure? Can she orgasm? Is her sexuality regarded as dirty and whorish by her people? Would it be if she were not circumcised? Are these attitudes compatible with ‘girls’ development’? How can there be ‘development’ for girls if their sexual pleasure centers are considered dirty? Etc.
A tangential point, so feel free to ignore: now that she has indicated how offended she is at being described as “mutilated”, or even hearing the term FGM, would you be allowed to do that anyway, in her presence? How about referring to others who have been through FGM, while she was listening?
It is so frustrating to see this conversation is still going on – this perverse “dialogue” between those who stand up for the rights of individual women not to be mutilated, and the self-styled Protectors of Girls’ Right to Be Subjected to Important Cultural Rites. I cannot believe we’re still watching African women defend FGM as an indispensible rite of cultural passage, without which African women won’t ascend to positions of influence in society.For Christ’s sake, I was able to think my way out of that box as a freshman in college.
I went to Sarah Lawrence College from 1995 to 1999. This was during the peak, and into the decline, of the post-modern relativist hegemony (yeah, I’m using that ironically) in academia. It was a struggle to work my way through the epistemological nihilism of the idea that nothing “really” meant anything, that all truths were “constructed.”. One of the most important and useful issues I had to grapple with, and that helped me work my way out of that intellectual black hole, was FGM.
I was in a class taught by my advisor, an anthropologist specializing in the title of the course, gender and sexuality in sub-Sarahan Africa. A fascinating class, and an effective as means of cutting my teeth on complicated political and cultural issues (imperialism/native “authenticity”/ yada yada). We did a unit on FGM, and our instructor, Mary, encouraged us to debate: Is infibulation merely “icky” because it’s “foreign?” Is it inherently destructive and degrading? Does your opinion of the practice change after reading that women having undergone the procedure defend it as a necessary rite of passage to assume political power?
As you can imagine, the classroom conversation was heated and emotional – often to the point of yelling. My gut (remember, I was a kid still learning how to think) told me everything about infibulation, and even some of the lesser versions, was wrong, wrong, wrong. How utterly stupid, how dehumanizing, to say that women’s labia needed to be lopped off, and their vaginas sewn together and kept apart with bits of stick so they could (maybe) pee, until their husbands did them the great honor of ripping open the wound on the wedding night. I shudder to think about it now.
I read African women defending the practice (on the basis of purity, conformity, the inability to wield female political power if the procedure wasn’t done) with amazement. But then I thought to myself, “who am I to tell these women they’re wrong? Who am I to dictate how they organize themselves politically? Who am I to march my lily-white liberal Western ass in here and rescue the benighted natives?”
But that still wasn’t satisfying, though I couldn’t put my finger on the solution until I had to write a paper about it. It dawned on me that the entire conversation was predicated on a false dichotomy:
A. Women remain “uncircumcised”, but don’t get to be elders in society, don’t get to wield political power, and are shunned by men and women alike.
OR
B. Women get cut, then become Powerful Matriarchs with all the perquisites pertaining thereto. They become actors on the political scene, determining the direction of their societies just as surely as the men folk, and we want that, don’t we?
Bullshit. My paper ended up stating (in more academic language):
“If getting your labia cut off, your clitoris removed, and having your vagina subject to constant pain and infection is the only way to get recognized as a full female citizen, then the system is fucked. It’s a false choice, and the only reason women perpetuate it is because they haven’t been given the chance to see any way out. And there’s a fair bit of the nasty, universal human impulse, “well, I had to go through it,” at work there, too. It’s no more reasonable than the proposition that the only way American black people can exercise their rights at the voting booth is to submit to poll taxes, or any other unfair, trumped up, degrading restriction.
So, yeah, I want those big bad Western Feminists to come in there and educate these poor women. I want them to criticize this and call it what it is – barbaric and unnecessary. Understandable from a historical perspective, yes, but not good because it’s ‘authentic.’ Outdated and best left in the shameful rubbish bin of history.”
Don’t tell me women or “societies” (he says with great reservation) can’t find ways to enfranchise everyone without depriving half the population of sexual pleasure and normal reproductive health. Don’t tell me they can’t find something, anything – a new color of headdress, an ear-piercing, oh, gee, maybe just a recognition of reaching the age of majority – to mark a woman’s ascenscion to political enfranchisement that doesn’t involve an “operation” worse than we’d allow to be inflicted on our house pets. Fuck that.
Interestingly, it’s only been recently – the past few years that I’ve read the articles linked to, and written on, B&W – that I’ve connected this experience to an important realization. To paraphrase Margaret Thatcher (and not in the way she meant), there is no such thing as society, there are only individuals. Individuals have rights. “Societies” is merely a discursive cover-word for the prerogative of those in power, usually men, to enforce their privileged status at the expense of women, gays, or other heretics, and call it authentic culture. It’s a stance that pretends the “societal system” serves everyone, not just them, and that to criticize it is to deprive indigenous people of their autonomy.
It disgusts me that so many otherwise clear thinkers from the West fall for this bald-faced con, and allow the powerless to languish in stone age conditions. It’s revolting. The Western concept that individual rights trump the right of societies (read: men, mullahs, and the like) to oppress individuals is simply morally superior. Sorry to go on so long, but I had to get that out of my system.
Good for you, JoshS. And don’t get it out of your system: Keep it right there!
:-)
Yeah – hear hear, Josh!
Bravo, Josh S!
Well, I’m glad I didn’t wear out my welcome with that diatribe, and I stick by it. But, it was colored by the unique bile that only 9:30 a.m. and two meager sips of coffee can generate. So, at the risk of reopening a can of worms recently put to bed at N&C, here’s a little levity, courtesy that same anthro class I wrote about above.
To get the full effect, you have to imagine a 21-year-old me. Promising young man from a marginally white trash background, plonked down by dint of scholarship and loans at one of the most expensive and urbane liberal arts colleges. Utterly convinced of my fabulousness; way too big for my britches, and very. .um. . .loudly. . .gay. I showed up for class once in full drag, just because it was so damned fun to be able to do it on campus with no repercussions except having to fend off real girls begging to try on my lipstick.
SLC classes are small, seminar-style affairs, with no more than 12 students. The discussion among students and instructors is uninhibited and intimate – intimate in the sense in which you imagine intellectual salons among good friends to be. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
Mary, my advisor and the class instructor, is a British anthropologist specializing in African gender identity. Brilliant woman, and a dear friend to this day. Back then, of course, I wanted so badly to be one of the adult intelligentsia, I needed a few firm corrections about when to remember I was a student, not quite yet a colleague.
So, we were reading a compilation of essays on gender-bending, transgressive sort of stuff in Mary’s class. There was a piece about cross-dressing prostitutes – boys who dressed up as girls, and plied their trade around the docks selling themselves to working class, “straight” men. The piece was in the ethnographic style; the author did field work and reported on what she observed and what she was told by her subjects. Apparently, we were to believe, the boys went to great lengths to achieve “realness” – they had to convince their clients they were getting a bona fide woman. To add authenticity, the author reported, the boys would add the finishing touch before a night out. By smearing oil from cans of tuna fish on their nether regions. No, I’m not kidding, that’s what the text said.
I don’t have to tell you I laughed so hard I had to leave class until I collected myself. I was convinced the ethnographer had been taken, Margaret Mead-style, by cheeky informants. When I came back, I blurted out, “Oh, come on! Everyone knows pussy doesn’t really smell like tuna!” Without missing a beat, Mary raised one eyebrow and deadpanned: “Oh. And everyone knows you’re such an expert on pussy, Josh.”
What? What’s pussy got to do with anything? Pussy has nothing to do with nether regions; pussy means kitty cat, don’t you remember? Just ask Adam Tjaavk!
Furthermore, I never ever put cans of worms to bed. I have enough to do without washing wormy sheets every day. Gross.
[…] convention to protect the rights of its peoples in this respect. For a discussion on FGM see Michelle Goldberg on relativism and FGM on the excellent http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/ […]