The Female Circumcision Controversy. Ellen Gruenbaum
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the arguments, policies, and change efforts must grow.
Exploring the female circumcision controversy requires an investigation of ethnic, moral, religious, and gender role issues to promote greater understanding of the people who continue these practices and to consider how change is taking place.
Cultural Debates
Mohammed (in my earlier example) was not unique in his desire to foster improvements in the situation of women in Sudan. Indeed, a strong women’s organization, the Sudanese Women’s Union, has been politically active since the 1940s and includes many feminist, as well as nationalist, goals in its agenda (Hale 1996).
Yet in the 1990s, accusations that women’s rights advocates have adopted “Western values” are not uncommon. Nationalism in Africa often has included rejection of some elements of European culture and social structure, but this has intensified in certain contexts under the Islamist movement. Often referred to as “Islamic fundamentalism,” a term disliked by most Muslims, this Islamist movement is characterized by a desire to adopt what is thought to be a more authentic adherence to Islamic practice, including using Islamic law as the law of the state, and in some situations imposing Islamist understanding of proper dress and social rules on all members of society, or all Muslims at least. “Western” can then become an ideological stigma, symbolic for the Islamists of a rejection of the Islamic faith. In countries like Sudan, where an Islamist-oriented government came to power in 1989 and imposed many such policies and promulgated teaching and media efforts to gain popular acceptance, those who prefer to wear less restrictive clothing or otherwise challenge the legal initiatives of those in power have found themselves labeled “Westernized.” This label implies their views or practices are illegitimate for a Muslim or for any Sudanese and sets them up for discrimination and worse. In some countries where the Islamist movement has taken hold more as a social movement, there may be more tolerance for diversity of personal practice and opinions, as seems to be the case in Egypt. Many of the extreme elements of the movement do not accept this diversity as a final state of society, however, and are working toward the goal of an Islamist state.
Although European and North American feminists have strongly advocated equality for women, including social changes to allow them greater dignity and autonomy and the elimination of sharp social constraints on roles and behaviors, the labeling of these desires as “Western” is misplaced. Throughout the world, women’s equality has been a goal for reformers for decades, often predating the European and American movements. Indeed, Muslims frequently claim that the revelation of the Qur’an to Mohammed in the seventh century was a major boost to the status of women. In the past century, many Arab women (Muslim and otherwise) have written works that are clearly feminist in intent (Badran and Cooke 1990), and one of the first feminist “role reversal” novels was written in 1905 by Rogaia Sakhawat Hossain, a Muslim woman in what is now Bangladesh: Sultana’s Dream (Hossain 1988). And although there were contentious debates at the Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing in 1995 about whether equality for women should be a goal in the Platform for Action document, most Muslims who opposed the term “equality” could accept the compromise term “equity.” They argued that equity—with its implications of appropriateness to the context, allowing for a special role for each sex and different rules for men and women—rather than formal equivalency was preferable. According to their position, men should not have superiority, but men and women could have differing roles without preventing fair and equitable treatment of women. “Equality” to them implied that they would need to violate religious values such as male responsibility for support of family, the latter constituting the justification for such practices as giving women a smaller share of inheritance. The compromise on wording enabled people from all the participating countries to agree to promote women’s welfare without agreeing on the particular legal, religious, or cultural approach.
The drive for change in women’s roles and improvement in women’s status is not simply the result of external “Western” influences but is a consequence of the dynamic of the inherent cultural contradictions in each culture. Culture is always contested (Sanday and Goodenough 1990), rife with debates, and crosscut by the viewpoints of different classes, age groups, genders, and other social divisions. Individuals’ lack of behavioral conformity to cultural ideals offers evidence of this, as do the disagreements over ideas and the debates about how to interpret myths, traditions, rules, and religious teachings.
In posing a model of contested culture on these questions, I offer an alternative to the oversimplified “traditional/modern” or worse, “Western/non-Western,” dichotomies that have plagued the analysis of cultural differences. The ways in which dialogues take place across our imaginary “cultural boundaries” are structured by the contested nature of culture—which ideas are listened to, discussed, adopted, or rejected is influenced by the problems faced by individuals and groups and whether the ideas offer satisfying resolutions to existing social conflicts. The women and men of the societies in which circumcision is now practiced are arguing this issue out for themselves (see Gruenbaum 1996), and their ideas are as diverse and varied as the political discourse on women’s issues is anywhere. They are not dependent on the “West” for feminist ideas, nor can “traditional” and “modern” ideas be posed as monolithic alternatives. This book offers my understanding of the relationship between female circumcision and the status of women, from both a global perspective and more specifically as I have come to understand it in Sudan.
Why Do People Do It?
There is no simple answer to this question. People have different and multiple reasons. Female circumcision is practiced by people of many ethnicities and various religious backgrounds, including Muslims, Christians,3 and Jews,4 as well as followers of traditional African religions. For some it is a rite of passage. For others it is not. Some consider it aesthetically pleasing. For others, it is mostly related to morality or sexuality.
Understanding the diversity of reasons is the central issue if there is to be any hope for cross-cultural understanding, fruitful dialogue, or effective change efforts. Thus the central chapters focus on these questions.
Chapter 2 examines the cultural meanings associated with the practices, including beliefs about them and ritual aspects. Comparison with other forms of body alteration, especially male circumcision and subincision practices, is included. The main examples are drawn from my field research in one rural Sudanese community. Religion is often used as a justification for continuing or discontinuing a cultural practice, and circumcision is no exception. Because female circumcision is practiced by people of several religions, the issue requires an exploration of the relevant religious teachings and controversial interpretations.
In Chapter 3, I address morality and marriage expectations, including the significance of virginity expectations, the contribution of female circumcision to the preservation of virginity, and its role in the promotion of marital fidelity. The key question is whether circumcision status affects marriageability in the cultures where it is practiced.
If culture is so important in the perpetuation of female circumcision from one generation to the next, the cultural differences among ethnic groups might be expected to coincide with differences in practices, meanings, and ability to change. But insofar as ethnic identity might then be partially defined by the practices, we can also expect that tenacity to female circumcision practices based on ethnic identity might rival gender identity as an important obstacle to change efforts. Also, as people shift their ethnic identities through social class realignments, intermarriage, and migration, what happens to their circumcision practices? These are the issues pursued in Chapter 4.
One of the most salient issues about female circumcision in the writings of Western feminist authors is sexuality, which is the subject of Chapter 5. What are the effects of different forms of the surgeries on male and female sexual responses? Is the preoccupation with sexuality an indication of Western ethnocentrism?