Who could possibly defend the practice of Female Genital Mutilation? A feminist sociology professor in California, of course!
While I’m most well-known for my work on hook up culture, I’ve written extensively on a different topic altogether: how Americans talk about female genital cutting practices (FGCs), better known as female genital “mutilation.” While FGCs are passionately opposed by essentially all Americans who learn about them, our understanding of the practices is, in fact, skewed by misinformation, ethnocentrism, and a history of portraying Africa as naively “backwards” or cruelly “barbaric.”
And so on. Yes, we need to adopt a more "balanced" view. We need to balance the holding down of a young girl so that her clitoris can be excised with a rusty razor blade, against the much more significant need for us to demonstrate, loudly and clearly, how much we oppose ethnocentrism.
Ophelia B at Butterflies and Wheels (via whom) takes this nonsense apart here, here, and here. See also Urooj Zia's comment to the original piece:
Hello from Pakistan. This article has offended me and made me furious enough to leave a rant in response. Here goes:
//but people in communities where cutting occurs largely find the term confusing or offensive//
What the WHAT?! So in one clean sweep, feminist voices from these communities get discounted, while barbarism gets amplified by a feminist? How does that make sense? And this 'them non-Western women don't deserve any better' is racist! ...
I don't get it, why did you write this article? Why would anyone do this, why?! What makes you think that you sitting in your ivory tower deserve better than us? What are we, lesser beings? What makes you think we deserve to have our bodies mutilated? What is WRONG with you?! Feminists here have a hard enough time anyway; stop making our lives more difficult. If you can't support our voices, don't cut us down and don't you dare tell us that we don't deserve better. We bloody well do.
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