SS+FGC+neg+-+Feminism+FL

Outside Sudan and the other countries where it is practiced, female genital cutting has drawn the attention of women across the globe, many of whom have joined movements to abolish it. Aside from moral debate__,__ __a controversy surrounds whose role it is to speak out against FGC: is it a question for African women? For all Africans? All women? All people__? Most international assistance agencies have developed policies or programs to combat female genital cutting, and according to the WHO there is a "Western feminist tendency to see Female Genital Mutilation...as the gender oppression to end all oppressions." In a 1998 World Health Report, the WHO argued for complete eradication. Its resolution stated that "FGM is a deeply rooted, traditional practice. However, it is a form of violence against girls and women that has serious physical and psychological consequences which adversely affect health. Furthermore, it is a reflection of discrimination against women and girls." The WHO explains its intervention through its belief in universal human rights and its disapproval of the notion that cultural relativism justifies acts of sex-based violence. However, others have challenged the WHO's view. According to anthropologist Ellen Gruenbaum: "__If these values are based on deeply held cultural values and traditions, can outsiders effectively challenge them without challenging the cultural integrity of the people who practice them?" Many__ Sudanese __women find the way in which Western women contribute to the anti-FGC movement to be offensive and counter-productive to their own efforts to eradicate the practice. They accuse Western women of failing to acknowledge the agency of African women by implying that they cannot speak for themselves. Also, Africans accuse Western women of sensationalizing FGC and in so doing creating a defensive reaction among practitioners who might otherwise be allies in the process of eradication. Also, some African women feel betrayed by the single-minded focus on FGC exhibited by Western women as well as by some African scholars. While genital cutting has received significant attention around the world, other issues that significantly affect women's lives are ignored.__ Henry Louis Gates, the seminal scholar of African-American studies, wonders: "__Is it, after all, unreasonable to be suspicious of Westerners who are exercised over female circumcision, but whose eyes glaze over when the same women are merely facing starvation?"__ Critics like Gates point out that action may seem misguided when it is based on sensationalism and ignores those needs which are greatest. As Ellen Gruenbaum articulates, "__Instead of concern for the basic needs for Third World Women, like water supply, economic development, and peace, Western feminists are more concerned about veils, clitorises, and so on. What good is all this without our lives?" Others resent what they see as Western cultural hypocrisy__. Nahid Toubia, __an Egyptian feminist, argues that "the thinking of an African woman who believes FGM is the fashionable thing to do to become a real woman is not so different from that of an American woman who has breast implants to feel more feminine." Women all over the world alter their physical appearances in a variety of ways, and yet FGC is uniquely characterized as barbaric and inhumane__.
 * 1) African women believe that Western involvement only hurts their own efforts towards obtaining more rights**
 * __Yale Journal of Public Health__**, Vol. 1, No. 2, 20**__04__**, “Cut Off.” http://www.yaleph.com/archive/vol1no2/story7.html

Rosemarie **__Skaing__,** 20**__05__**, MA Sociology from University of Ioaw, “Female Genital Mutilation,” p. 98-99.
 * __Feminism Frontline__**
 * 2)** **US** **assumptions of FGC are demeaning to the women who undergo the practice**


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Sunera **__Thobani__** (Assistant Professor at the Centre for Research in Women's Studies and Gender Relations at the University of British Columbia. Her research focuses on globalization, nation-building, citizenship, migration, race, and gender relations. Dr. Thobani is also past president of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women (NAC), Canada's largest feminist organization. The first woman of color to serve in this position, Dr. Thobani's tenure was committed to making the politics of anti-racism central to the women's movement.” Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity” http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/hypatia/v020/20.3thobani.html) 20**__05__**. The publication of Chandra Talpade Mohanty's germinal essay, "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses," made her a much admired and respected scholar, deeply influencing the thinking of many feminists, including myself. The essay, which quickly became part of the Women's Studies canon, is reprinted in Mohanty's latest book, //Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity//.In this book, __Mohanty identifies__ three "__problematic directions within U.S.-based feminisms__." __The first is the growing, largely class-based rift between activist feminism and university-based feminist theorizing__, the latter being susceptible to careerism and a narrow professionalism. __The second is the deepening of consumerist and corporatist values, fuelling a rise of "neo-liberal"__ and "free market" __feminism, concerned only with "women's advancement up the corporate and nation-state ladder.__" Last is the "narrowing of feminist politics and theory," which she defines to be a result of the "critique of essentialist identity politics and the hegemony of postmodern skepticism about identity" (6). Mohanty argues the case for a materialist analysis that addresses issues of identity, agency, community, home, and nation within the context of the institutions of the global political economy. Divided into three sections, the book addresses the major themes that have consistently occupied Mohanty's writings: decolonizing feminism; demystifying capitalism; and reorienting feminism. **[End Page 221]** The first section of the book, "Decolonizing Feminism," is vintage Mohanty. Her critique of the textual strategies deployed by Western feminists in cross-cultural studies to construct a __[the]monolithic image of third world women as always and everywhere victimized, unrelentingly oppressed by "their" patriarchal cultures, remains as pertinent today__ as when she first wrote her classic essay. The textual strategies she identified at that time included the assumption that the category of 'woman' is a discrete, unitary formation, constituted prior to women's entry into social relations and institutions, such as the family; and __the uncritical use of descriptive generalizations and disjointed examples as "proof" of the universality of the oppression of women in all Third World societies__. The __result__ of such __[in] flawed analytic and methodological approaches__ distort the understanding of the various types of agency of Third World women, particularly the forms of resistance they develop, __and thwarts the potential for cross-cultural feminist alliances__. Simultaneously, Western feminists constitute themselves as active agents of history—liberated, educated and free—//through// the object status they impose upon their downtrodden "sisters." Mohanty argues that __the power exercised through such constructs is not unlike that exercised by other Western colonialist discourses.__ Unfortunately, the book does not carry this analysis forward to examine the current situation of Muslim women (in Muslim and non-Muslim societies) in the midst of the aggressively militarist empire-building of the U.S. regime in its invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq. The ubiquity of the image of Muslim women as desperately in need of rescue by the "West" reveals how strong are the current forces that antiracist feminists have to contend with in the United States as elsewhere.
 * __Feminism Frontline__**
 * 3) Seeing a Monolithic image of third world women destroys the unity needed for a cross-cultural feminist movement**

Eryn **__Scott__**, 20**__02__**, Gender Studies Professor at Columbia, “Differences and Intesections Between Feminism.”
 * __Feminism Frontline__**
 * 4) Global feminism is an impossibility- the capitalist structure; social economic and racial stratifications prevent**

Mary **__Nvangweso__**. September 20**__02__**, master degree in theology, “Salvific message and the Nandi ritual of female circumcision.” Máire Ní **__Mhórdha__**, Master of Applied Anthropology and Participatory Development (MAAPD) Program, January 20**__07__**. “Female genital **cutting**: traditional practice or human rights violation? An exploration of interpretations of FGC and its implications for development in Africa.” http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:msVcbzcLhEkJ:rspas.anu.edu.au/maapd/papers/wp-07-01.pdf+mutilation+cutting+discourse&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=5&gl=us
 * 5) African women perceive western feminists and confrontational and empirically resist**
 * __Feminism Frontline__**
 * 6) The reason African women are subjugated, or viewed in a lowly matter, is because of Western policies like the plan.**

This incident is a telling one, highlighting the maternalistic nature of the relationship between colonizer and colonized. The history of British colonial rule in northern Sudan is marked by conflicts over the practice: “policing women directly and indirectly through kinsmen, chiefs and clerics…occupied centre stage in colonial legislative agendas” (ibid.). Anne McClintock (1995) argues that women and men did not experience imperialism in the same way, and that gender distinctions mattered in the confrontation with colonialism. __Within pre-colonial power hierarchies, women enjoyed significant__ __leverage over ritual and the fact that women rather than men determined whether a girl__ __was circumcised was very threatening to the British sense of gender order (Abusharaf,__ __2006). The British insertion of colonial authority figures within family and community__ __networks thus served to remove power and control from women and actually reinforce__ __male dominance in Sudanese society. Far from being a ‘civilizing’ or ‘liberating’__ __influence on women’s lives, these policies were enacted with the view of regulating their__ __behaviour and restricting their freedoms:__ In areas where women’s subordination was clear, the British did not interfere to improve them, while in other situations where women shared equal status with men, they lost this status under the pretext of civilisation. In this the colonial male bourgeois mentality played an important role. Abusharaf (2000:157) Veena Das (1997) asserts that __by appropriating the bodies of women as objects on which__ __the desires of nationalism can be inscribed, women become a microcosm of the nation__. From a colonialist standpoint, women’s power needed to be circumscribed and their bodies governed, in order to inscribe colonial rule. Thus it can be argued that __current debates surrounding FGC in__ __Africa__ __must be viewed__ __within recent historical perspectives of colonizers and colonized__. Lane and Rubinstine (1996:37) argue that “__where the residue…of colonial privilege may contribute to a__ __Western intervenor’s expectation that her actions will be viewed as appropriate and__ __authoritative, former colonial subjects may take precisely the opposite view”. It is clear__ __that the necessity exists to take account of contemporary and historical relationships of__ __power and privilege as essential first steps toward arriving at a sensitive and nuanced__ __approach to the issue.__

Rosmarie **__Skaine__**, Sociologist, MA from UNIowa, 20**__05__**, __Female Genital Mutilation: Legal, Cultural & Medical Issues,__ page 96.
 * __Feminism Frontline__**
 * 7) Feminist framing of FGC excuses economic exploitation and detracts focus from other key issues**


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Máire Ní **__Mhórdha__**, Master of Applied Anthropology and Participatory Development (MAAPD) Program, January 20**__07__**. “Female genital **cutting**: traditional practice or human rights violation? An exploration of interpretations of FGC and its implications for development in Africa.” http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:msVcbzcLhEkJ:rspas.anu.edu.au/maapd/papers/wp-07-01.pdf+mutilation+cutting+discourse&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=5&gl=us
 * __Feminism Frontline__**
 * 8) Women gain more power after going through FGC- the plan puts a stop to this**

Boddy notes that in the Sudanese context of complete polarization of the sexes, the procedure of FGC renders a girl marriageable, and that undergoing it is a “necessary condition of becoming a woman”, arguing that women are not so much preventing their own sexual pleasure, as “enhancing their femininity” (ibid.). ‘__Circumcision’ is believed__ __to endow women with a remarkable ability to exercise self-control and power, to display__ __restraint over their sexuality. Self-mastery is seen as a virtue and controlled sexuality__ __allows women to “drive hard bargains and have a say in household politics and decision-__ __making processes__” (Abusharaf, 2001:129). __The act of ‘circumcision’ allows women to__ __exercise power not only over their sexuality, but also over their spouses__ (ibid.). __However__ __controversial they may be in the West, it is nonetheless critical that notions of women__ __using ‘circumcision’ as a form of gender identification, cultural transmission and power__ __be considered in any analysis of the practice, in order to challenge the image of the__ __circumcised woman as a subjugated victim of male dominance.__

Spike V. **__Peteeson__**, 19**__92__**, Professor of Political Science at the University of Arizona, “Gendered States: Feminist Visions of International Relations Theory, p. 46. [Bhattacharjee.
 * __Feminism Frontline__**
 * 9) The state’s construal of violence and selective intervention entrench the ideology of a woman’s “need for protection”**


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Spike V. **__Peteeson__**, 19**__92__**, Professor of Political Science at the University of Arizona, “Gendered States: Feminist Visions of International Relations Theory, p. 45.
 * __Feminism Frontline__**
 * 10) The state is the largest organizer of patriarchy-eradication of FGC can’t solve**


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Karen **__Musalo__**, prof at Univ of Cali and Director of Center for Gender and Refugee Studies, Winter 20**__07__**, lexis. [Bhattacharjee]
 * __Feminism Frontline__**
 * 11) Feminist discourse surrounding FGC is victimizing and oppressive**


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Máire Ní **__Mhórdha__**, Master of Applied Anthropology and Participatory Development (MAAPD) Program, January 20**__07__**. “Female genital **cutting**: traditional practice or human rights violation? An exploration of interpretations of FGC and its implications for development in Africa.” http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:msVcbzcLhEkJ:rspas.anu.edu.au/maapd/papers/wp-07-01.pdf+mutilation+cutting+discourse&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=5&gl=us
 * __Feminism Frontline__**
 * 12) Western nations enact policies like the plan with colonialist undertones, and fail to realize that FGC empowers women**

__Perspectives such as that of Hosken maintain that circumcised women can feel no__ __pleasure – a view which may be due to notions of the clitoris as the ‘seat’ of sexual__ __pleasure in a woman. This view fails to take into account the numerous testimonies from__ __circumcised women that they__ achieve orgasm and __have a fulfilling sex life__ (see (Abusharaf, 2001). Melissa Parker (1995) argues that __emotional Western responses to the__ __perceived ‘death’ of a female’s sex life are grounded in modern Western notions of__ __sexuality as intrinsic to self, and the requirement for particular kinds of sexual__ __gratification for well-being, which are not universal. Such notions may seem “immoral,__ __amoral or bizarre” to people in some non-Western societies__ (Parker, 1995: 520), and __heated debates among Western feminists and researchers are often influenced by Euro-__ __American discourses which have little or nothing to do with the study populations__ (ibid.). __This “inbuilt colonialism of__ __First World__ __feminism towards the Third”__ (Spivak, 1981:184) __makes little attempt to understand that what may be seen as oppressive in one culture, is__ __not oppressive in another. Sudanese feminist Rogaia Abusharaf, analysing the work of__ __Hosken and others finds that:__ __African women are repeatedly painted as downtrodden, forlorn, helpless casualties of__ __male dominance. Their confinement in antiquated customs and cultural practices is__ __viewed as puissant testimony to their eternal vassalage to patriarchy and,__ __consequently, of their subjugation within both the so-called “public” and “private”__ __spheres.__ (Abusharaf, 2001:112) __These representations stress a notion of patriarchy in which the African woman is seen as__ __‘Other’ to Western women, wholly subservient, passive and ‘voiceless’: someone whose__ __sexual and reproductive potential is controlled by men and whose genitals are mutilated__ __in silence and without protest__ (ibid.). Yet, __in many parts of northern__ __Sudan____, the ritual is__ __considered a joyous occasion in a young girl’s life, and is accompanied by ceremonies__ __and festivities celebrating the girl’s rite of passage into womanhood__ (Abusharaf, 2000). __FGC is often mentioned in conjunction with other forms of ‘gender based__ __violence’, which bear no relation to the cultures in which FGC is practiced__. Examples include: sati (widow-burning); dowry deaths; prenatal sex selection and female infanticide, with the latter two practices grouped alongside FGC by the United Nations Population Fund as “extreme manifestations of the low social value placed on girls” (UNFPA, 2005). __These classifications of FGC as “violence against women__” (ibid.) __exemplify the over-simplifying nature of many rights-based arguments, which pay little__ __or no attention to the cultural context in which it takes place – including the fact that the__ __practice is usually performed and maintained by women__. Abusharaf (2001) concludes, after two periods of fieldwork in the Douroshab community in northern Sudan, that __women have considerable influence in their community, evident from the roles they play__ __in family and community life, and that in the context of FGC, they wield a particular__ __power, for they alone perform the operations. She contends that their authority should not__ __be attributed to ‘false consciousness’, in which women perpetuate their own subjugation.__ __On the contrary, in this context, circumcision is seen as “the machinery which liberates__ __the female body from its masculine properties” and for the women she interviewed, it is a__ __source of empowerment and strength (Abusharaf, 2001:123).__
 * __Feminism Frontline__**

Spike V. **__Peterson__**, 19**__92__**, Professor of Political Science at the University of Arizona, “Gendered States,” p 45-46. [Bhattacharjee]
 * 13) The state is the centralized agent of social control and defines masculinity as the condition to enter the public sphere**


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Elizabeth **__Boyle__**, Professor of Sociology, Univ. of Minnesota, 20**__02__**, Female Genital Cutting.
 * __Feminism Frontline__**
 * 14) Patriarchy describes any power relations- not just male/female**


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Ellen **__Gruenbaum__**, Professor of anthropology at the University of California, 20**__01__**, __the Female Circumcision Controversy__.
 * 15) FGC is only one manifestation of patriarchy-it’s not a cause-patriarchy will still exist in non-FGC communities**

Máire Ní **__Mhórdha__**, Master of Applied Anthropology and Participatory Development (MAAPD) Program, January 20**__07__**. “Female genital **cutting**: traditional practice or human rights violation? An exploration of interpretations of FGC and its implications for development in Africa.” http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:msVcbzcLhEkJ:rspas.anu.edu.au/maapd/papers/wp-07-01.pdf+mutilation+cutting+discourse&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=5&gl=us
 * __Feminism Frontline__**
 * 16) FGC is the only way African women can feel empowered and unique**

//Women constructing other women// Janice Boddy (1989), from her research among the Hofriyati of northern Sudan, presents the main motivation for FGC as a way to create ‘gendered’ entities in the community. __Children are raised genderless and it is not until boys and girls are circumcised that they__ __can take on the societal understandings and responsibilities of their gender__. Thus: Among Hofriyati, __women actively and ongoingly construct other women… from__ __the body of man. By eliminating any vestiges of maleness, they constitute women__ __as separate entities and distinct social people.__ (Boddy, 1989:58)