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Muslim Genital Mutiliation is a Good Thing
by Robert FulfordIt was a surprise to Janice Boddy when she realized that the altering of female genitals through surgery, professional or amateur, looms large whenever the Sudan is mentioned. In 1976, when she went there for the first time, she was interested in studying religious beliefs of rural Muslim women. But her fellow graduate students in Canada made it clear that when they thought of the Sudan they thought first of female circumcision. This is yet another variant of Edward Said's anti-orientalism BS about ideological "creation of the other" for colonialist ends. According to the dogma, only 3rd worlders like Kim Jong Il and bin-Laden can "represent" their authentic world view. Westerners have no moral right to pass judgement; we have a moral obligation to bend to the anti-colonial will. Bite me! Moreover, the women in the village she chose for her anthropological research insisted that she should learn about this practice and see it performed if she hoped to understand them. She followed this advice and eventually concluded that circumcision validates the village women's lives, safeguards their fertility and establishes "the meaningful parameters of their selfhood."
Her readers discover, almost at the beginning, that she has a limited idea of academic detachment and fairness. A chronology of events at the front of her book twice uses the politics-laden term "propaganda" to describe Britain's efforts in the 1940s to publicize the harm done by genital cutting. But then she quickly buckles down to her own propaganda project, a storm of disapproval directed at those who argue against the ritual cutting of female genitals. In her first four pages she says this worldwide campaign has been sustained by imperialistic logic and spurious empathy. Much of its literature, she claims, is "moralizing and polemical" as well as self-righteous. Its supporters, including the 1995 World Conference of Women in Beijing, have "leaped to condemn what they've only presumed to understand." The word for Boddy's approach is "tendentious"-- obviously, it's calculated to promote a particular view... Posted by: McZoid 2007-09-03 |
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