A Companion to Global Gender History. Группа авторов
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I have not taken up the arguments for or against ritual circumcision. The rites and myths chosen for analysis in this chapter are derived from the Mende folk of Sierra Leone who continue to practice circumcision as a rite of passage for youth into adulthood. The ritual of circumcision is explicit in its effort to construct a new identity, making it an excellent rite by which to think about gender. The rite of circumcision is an ancient rite and among some of the earliest organized rituals. In my work in ritual, myth, and semiotics, I draw on the systems of belief and practice of indigenous folks in Africa, Cuba, and North and South America (along with ancient near Eastern and Mediterranean myths, rituals, and symbols) as their worlds and world constructions are too often absent in the study of religion, not fitting the normative model of “religion” represented by the so‐called world religions of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Confucianism (Paden, 1994). Examining indigenous systems to think about ritual, myth, and symbol gives credence to their world constructions.
The Terrain and What is at Stake
Ritual and myth are central to the construction of identity, in particular gendered identity, in most if not all social and historical contexts. Although often cloaked as traditional, unchanging and unchanged, this is decidedly not the case, as ritual and myth are subject to the same vicissitudes of time and place as the system of belief and practice with which they are associated or in which they occur (Bell, 1992: 118–24). Instead, we might better engage ritual and myth as media that invent, shore‐up, and/or challenge the why, who, how, and what of being human in the world. As discursive practices, ritual and myth relate and reaffirm gender ideologies and their performances as “dense transfer point[s] for relations of power” (Foucault, 1978). Different kinds of myth circulate through social bodies, including cosmogonic myths that center on the creation of a world, demogonic myths that center on the creation of social bodies, and anthropogonic myths that center on the creation of human animals. All these kinds of myths are central to the formation and structuring of human social systems.
Gender is an aspect of identity that is represented, under the sway of Euro‐Western gender ideological systems, as all encompassing. The bodily locating and locking of gender is enacted through the making, and then the marking, of genitals. Once created, the genitals are that by which we know ourselves and that by which we are dominated (Fausto‐Sterling, 2012). In the scientific narrative of gender ideology, this domination is achieved through chemical and cognitive processes, the latter of which are said to appear properly at the time of human pubescence (Schiebinger, 2004; Tuana, 2004; Martin, 1992). The fleshy bits named genitals, both the origin and target site of these processes, are seen to be of two kinds only, and these two kinds are taken to be opposites in all ways: that is bodily, socially, and cognitively (Laqueur, 1992). Opposite is taken to mean that something is completely and utterly different from another thing; as night is to day, the earth to the sky, yin to yang, and the moon to the sun. Opposition is a construct, and not a natural fact coming to meaning within a context. There are other sources besides science for this kind of thinking, such as the ancient Greeks, whose oppositional thinking directly influenced Christianity, Judaism, and Islam through the texts attributed to such philosophers as Plato and Aristotle and the physicians Hippocrates and Galen, among others.
Operating in an oppositional framework means that the notion of opposition dominates how any subject is thought. Also, an oppositional framework insists that two opposites cannot and do not share of each other. And finally, the framework imbues one of the opposites with positive value and the other with negative value. For example, in many masculine hegemonies, the female, girls/women, and the feminine carry negative value (–) and male, boys/men, and the masculine carry positive value (+). Equally, gender ideologies framed within and by opposition, construct and enforce their own versions of heteronormativity (Butler, 2004: 79–80). As the majority of gender ideologies around the globe have been impinged upon by Euro‐Western colonialism, they evince in lesser or greater degrees the framework of opposition.
For example, as a concept, reproduction is equally shaped by oppositional thinking so only two are imagined as part of the process of reproduction rather than one or more than two. We know, however, that reproduction takes multiple forms and can involve only one actor or multiple actors and yet we persist with imagining only dyads.1
The naturalization and mystification of gendering is called gender ideology. Drawing on the Althusserian‐Marxian understanding of ideology, ideology is the outcome and process of mystifying social relations so that these relations appear as if they are naturally–biologically and/or psychically–metaphysically determined. When gendering is mystified, its creation is turned over to nature and/or deity so that nature (often called Mother Nature and then paired with a masculine deity) and/or deity(ies) are given credit for “making gender,” while deity is further represented as requiring the surveillance of proper gender, sexuality, and reproduction. The turning over of gender to nature and/or deity(ies) obfuscates the power relations that infuse and demarcate our social relations.
Inscribing Gender in the Flesh: Making the “Female” and “Male” in the Ancient World
As the imagined and material, genitalia are the site where gender is produced. As the site of the production of gender, genitalia often come under censure. The word genitalia comes from both Latin and French and means “bodily organs of reproduction.” From the outset, then, reproduction inflects the meaning of the anglo word genitalia. The same fleshy bits are named the kpota (vulva) in Mende, and mbulo (penis) in Mende (Schon, 1884: 64, 88 respectively). We can see by the different terms that there is nothing in particular about the words kpota or vulva and mbulo or penis that speak to any kind of essences or truth.
In a number of social locations past and present, these fleshy bits are reshaped through the rite of circumcision, which across the centuries has been used to mark the bodies of males and females. The English term circumcision (Hei‐biliya in Mende) comes from Middle English and is derived from the Latin circumcis, which means to cut around. In the cutting of genitalia, flesh is removed; the hood of, and/or the clitoris is (are) excised, while the foreskin is cut around the circumference of the head of penis. There is contention around calling the cutting of female genitals circumcision and likening it to male circumcision (Shear, Hart, and Diekema, 2012). That said, it seems to me that arguing that female circumcision is worse than male circumcision does not lead to the conclusion that female genital cutting cannot be termed circumcision, as many languages, such as Greek, both draw on the same root word, meaning “cut.”
The cutting of the genitalia as a rite of passage to gendered adulthood has deep roots and was most likely practiced in the prehistorical period (Wyatt, 2009). The earliest recorded cutting of the head of the penis dates from the Old Kingdom period of Egypt (2575–2150 BCE) where reference is made to the practice of cutting skin from the head of the penis. Whether this was for a specific group such as priests or for young men in general it is difficult to say, but the practice is visually represented on a tomb dated to c. 2400 BCE, while reference to the ritual is also made on a tomb stela dated to 2300 BCE. Written on the stela was the claim by the deceased to have been circumcised along with 120 males during which he did not “scratch or hit” someone and nor was he scratched or hit (Gollaher, 2000; Sparks, 2005; Theisen, 2011). It is difficult to say with certainty how the practice was used, but in the instance of priests, the tendency has been to see the practice as a rite of purification (Zucconi, 2007: 28), while in the instances of the 121 males circumcised, the sense is to understand it as a rite of passage and likely linked to the cult of the Egyptian deity Hathor (Roth, 1991: 70).
The cutting of the vagina is not explicitly referenced in Egypt until the Roman geographer Strabo of the first century CE who wrote: “They [Egyptians] circumcise the males, and [excise]2 the females, as is the custom also among the Jews, who are of Egyptian origin, as I said when I was treating of them” (Jones, Jones, and Sterrett 1917–1933: 17.2.5). Peritemnō (περιτέμνω) is the Greek for “cut around” and was used by Strabo