Okay, finally back at my computer so adding these refs now - someone asked whether there are post-colonial critiques of tendency to think of African child genital cutting as 'barbaric' while white Western/US child genital cutting is 'civilized/respectable' - yes. Some highlights:
Among many other excellent discussions of this issue, I recommend "Dualisms and female bodies in representations of African female circumcision: a feminist critique" by Wairimũ Ngaruiya Njambi journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14… 1/
"Bridges and Barricades: Rethinking Polemics and Intransigence in the Campaign against Female Circumcision" by L. Amede Obiora core.ac.uk/download/pdf/2… 3/
"Female Circumcision as Female Genital Mutilation: Human Rights or Cultural Imperialism?" by Abdulmumini A. Oba degruyter.com/document/doi/1… 4/
"Equality, not special protection: multiculturalism, feminism, and female circumcision in Western liberal democracies" by Fuambai S. Ahmadu books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr… 5/
"Genital surgeries on children below an age of consent" by Hanny Lightfoot-Klein et al. wiley.com/en-us/Psycholo… 8/
Also relevant are such texts as: "Intersex surgery, female genital cutting, and the selective condemnation of cultural practices" by Nancy Ehrenreich and Mark Barr catedra-laicidad.unam.mx/sites/default/… 9/
And: "A rose by any other name? Rethinking the similarities and differences between male and female genital cutting" by Robert Darby and J. Steven Svoboda anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.152… 10/
And: "Framing Male Circumcision as a Human Rights Issue? Contributions to the Debate Over the Universality of Human Rights" by Debra De Laet tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10… 12/
"SHAPING GENITALS, SHAPING PERCEPTIONS: A Frame Analysis of Male and Female Circumcision" by Marjolein van den Brink and Jet Tigchelaar heinonline.org/hol-cgi-bin/ge… 13/
"Local rites and body politics: Tensions between cultural diversity and human rights" by Lenore Manderson tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10… 14/
"Genitals and ethnicity: the politics of genital modification" by Sara Johnsdotter and Birgitte Essén sciencedirect.com/science/articl… 16/
"What about 'FGM'? And why understanding culture matters in the first place" by Richard Shweder: jstor.org/stable/2002767… 17/
"Ban without prosecution, conviction without punishment, and circumcision without cutting: a critical appraisal of anti-FGM laws in Europe" by Maria Caterina La Barbera researchgate.net/publication/31… 18/
"Hegemonic human rights: the case of female circumcision. A call for taking multiculturalism seriously" by Elisabetta Grande academia.edu/14381184/Hegem… 20/
"Genital cutting and Western discourses on sexuality" by Kirsten Bell cirp.org/library/anthro… 21/
"Critiquing circumcision: in search of a new paradigm for conceptualizing genital modification" by Zachary Androus tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.108… 22/
Okay, realizing I should stop here as this is an ENORMOUS literature, and anyone who wants to get a handle on the basics can start with these
Well, also: here is a really nice recent one that adopts an explicitly post-colonial lens: "Interrogating the politicization of FGC within conditions of asymmetrical cultural convergence" by MacNamara et al. sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
And I can't help myself ... there are just too many really good critiques. See: "Femonationalism and populist politics: the case of the Swiss ban on female genital mutilation" by Bader and Mottier onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.11…
There is a lot of work on this; much of it is cited in this review article by Sara Johnsdotter and myself nature.com/articles/s4144… … I’ll add refs to individual papers by (eg) post colonial and African studies scholars below
Take this chapter by Birgitte Essén, perhaps the most senior gynecologist & medical expert who has extensive clinical experience working directly w. women affected by FGC. She notes that for over 50 years, the @WHO has published guidelines on FGC re: health consequences ... 6/
& other empirical claims concerning different types of FGC, but "without the usual concern" for high quality evidence, based on "uncritical" thinking re: causes & consequences, "skewed or insufficient data" & "misleading conclusions." This has v. bad real-world implications 7/
Focusing on a Danish case for which she served as an expert witness, Essén notes that trial doctors -- whose testimony led to conviction & more than a year of imprisonment of 2 parents of Somali origin, separating them from their children -- had *NO EXPERTISE* in FGC 8/
Heartbreaking: up to 40% of Filipino boys experience infection (drdf.org.ph/sites/default/…), and up to 70%, PTSD (sciencedirect.com/science/articl…), from their public circumcision rites each year. I wonder why @WHO doesn't view this as a human rights violation? One possibility is that ...
routine & religious male circumcision—common in U.S. & Jewish/Muslim families, respectively—is a tradition among many of the most influential “gatekeepers” of the global human rights agenda: “the practice is prevalent in their own social networks”(amazon.com/Lost-Causes-Ve…) ...
Per Carpenter: “Unlike other practices human rights professionals condemn but don't participate in, circ was widespread” among them. "Confronting it evoked defensiveness from those who had circumcised their own boys, loath to think of themselves as human rights abusers” ...
New paper: "Zero Tolerance for Genital Mutilation: Review of Moral Justifications" (in press with Current Sexual Health Reports). Analyzes culturally biased, unscientific, ethically incoherent position of @WHO on child genital cutting practices. Thread 1/ researchgate.net/publication/34…
Paper analyzes 2 main positions that have emerged in bioethics literature: equal opportunity defenders of parental/religious rights to cut children's genitals irrespective of sex/gender, & equal opportunity defenders of children's rights to be protected from genital cutting. 2/
But there is 3rd, incoherent, discriminatory & biased position held by @WHO: "selective zero tolerance" 4 medically unnecessary genital cutting -regardless of severity/motivation- of non-Western ppl w/ female-typical genitals only, yet tolerating comparable Western practices. 3/
Very disturbing to see this lack of scientific nuance from one of the main people responsible for driving US policy & funding toward a mass surgical campaign affecting the genitals of millions of Africans. There are multiple things wrong with this statement ... [THREAD]
First, it is false there is "no debate in science community" re original RCTs. Rather, those with critiques were ignored or shut out by those driving agenda, a small network of circumcision advocates active in all stages of the science-to-policy pipeline ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25646671
Second, even if one accepts RCT findings at face value, despite critiques (e.g., re: confounds & obvious lack of placebo control), they pertain to adult, voluntary circ under "ideal" clinical conditions as part of trials led by long-time circ proponents; (cont'd)