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Next speaker: Cultural shock when women who had cutting as children migrate and learn that the cutting is not universal. Made to feel 'incomplete' as women compared to uncut women. Feelings of shame, afraid of being judged. Before migration they were ashamed of NOT being cut.
Power of cultural norms to shape what one perceives as "normal." Women in Quebec [interviewed by speaker] do not want to be considered "victims" and treated like (and even called) "barbarians," adding stigma on top of stigma. What the women need are three things:
(1) physicians who know what to do with FGM/C, who are well-trained, culturally knowledgable--they do not want physicians who are not knowledgable and who react with shock and mistreat the women; (2) support -- psychological and moral support; they just want to have a place to
talk with other women with FGM/C, to communicate about their experience; (3) clitoral reconstruction: increasingly, 'cut' women want to fit in with the dominant norms of new society. Barriers to sensitive/appropriate care: treating the women as victims/barbarians. Another is that
physicians in Western countries are not equipped to deliver adequate care: if a woman is delivering a baby, the doctor will call over the whole medical team to 'ogle' at the cutting, making her afraid that perhaps something was wrong with the baby, causing humiliation. Three
types of women: (1) those who are anxious about the future. They were told the cutting was good/normal, that all women have FGM/C; now they think of future sexual life and are afraid of pain, wonder if their genitals are 'normal' or will be stigmatized; infibulated women worry
about de-infibulation, worry about pain, lack of sexual pleasure; (2) resigned - women who accept what happened and try to just move on; (3) resilience - women who become activists and try to change the practices of their society. Powerful talk by F. Baldé from Canada. This theme
of growing up in a genital cutting-dominant culture and thinking what happened to one as a child was "normal" or "universal" and then finding out -- through travel, the Internet, research -- that other cultures do not cut their children & suddenly feeling despair, is common
in the literature across genital cutting practices: some examples and quotes from such 'perspective-flip' experiences for female, male, and intersex people are in this talk:
