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Female Genital Cutting (female + genital_cutting)
Selected AbstractsFeminism and Women's Autonomy: the Challenge of Female Genital CuttingMETAPHILOSOPHY, Issue 5 2000Diana Tietjens Meyers Feminist studies of female genital cutting (FGC) provide ample evidence that many women exercise effective agency with respect to this practice, both as accommodators and as resisters. The influence of culture on autonomy is ambiguous: women who resist cultural mandates for FGC do not necessarily enjoy greater autonomy than do those women who accommodate the practice, yet it is clear that some social contexts are more conducive to autonomy than others. In this paper, I explore the implications for autonomy theory of these understandings of the relation between culture, FGC, and women's agency. I review the range of worldwide FGC practices , including "corrective" surgery for "ambiguous genitalia" in Western cultures as well as the various initiation rites observed in some African and Asian cultures , and the diverse cultural rationales for different forms of FGC. I argue that neither latitudinarian, value-neutral accounts of autonomy nor restrictive, value-saturated accounts adequately explain women's agentic position with respect to FGC. I then analyze a number of educational programs that have enhanced women's autonomy, especially by strengthening their introspection, empathy, and imagination. Such programs, which engage women's autonomy skills without exposing them to autonomy-disabling cultural alienation, promote autonomy-within-culture. This understanding of autonomy as socially situated, however, entails neither endorsement of FGC nor resignation to its persistence. [source] Disputing the myth of the sexual dysfunction of circumcised women: An interview with Fuambai S. Ahmadu by Richard A. ShwederANTHROPOLOGY TODAY, Issue 6 2009Fuambai S. Ahmadu Fuambai S. Ahmadu is both a professional anthropologist and an initiated member of the Bondo society of Sierra Leone. This interview with Ahmadu by Richard A. Shweder on the subject of female genital cutting serves to contextualize a submission by Carlos D. Londoņo Sulkin, who describes the changes of perception he and other members of the audience experienced after a lecture by Fuambai Ahmadu on this subject at the University of Regina on 19 March 2009. The title of Ahmadu's talk was ,Disputing the myth of the sexual dysfunction of circumcised women'. In order to make sense of Londoņo Sulkin's reactions to her account, Fuambai Ahmadu was invited to set out her case, which she does in the form of a question-and-answer session with Richard Shweder. [source] Anthropology, liberalism and female genital cuttingANTHROPOLOGY TODAY, Issue 6 2009Carlos D. Londoņo Sulkin This essay is the reaction of a non-specialist on Africanist ethnography and female genital cutting to Sierra Leonese American Scholar Dr Fuambai Ahmadu's work on these matters. It argues that some anti-FGM perceptions and rhetoric are parochial and illiberal, and calls for anthropologists to take counsel both from our discipline's methodological requirement actually to pay attention to what the people we write about say and do over extended periods of time, and to its age-old demand that we be critical of our own premises, before adopting any purportedly liberal campaign to support or challenge this or that social practice. [source] | ||||||||||