SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This thesis traces the historical origins of arguments and advocacy against what many activists now call ‘female genital mutilation/cutting’ (FGM/C). It provides an ethnographic analysis of the means by which these arguments against ‘FGM/C’ were spread, received, experienced and reworked by actors located at unique conjunctures of social hierarchies, political situations, and cultural histories. Building on postcolonial feminist critiques of the double standards and colonial legacies in the contemporary anti-FGM/C campaign, my thesis examines the politics of knowledge production within what I call the global anti-FGM domain. Drawing on ‘traveling theory’ (Said 1983), I go beyond questions of what has been omitted and with what consequences, to explore how it has been omitted and what can be learned from including it (Bhambra 2020). My fieldwork took the form of a ‘nodal ethnography’ (Hodgson 2011a, 18) of the transnational anti-FGM/C domain and involved archival research and participant observation among NGOs, at conferences and workshops, and among a Maasai community in rural Kenya. I took Kenya as my starting point because the country has historically been and remains today the stage for anti-FGM efforts and contestations over such efforts. My findings complicate the notion that the anti-FGM campaign embodies the imposition of ‘Western’ values onto African communities. Beyond continuities between colonial and contemporary efforts to end female genital surgeries, my findings show the transformations in the anti-FGM campaign throughout the last century, and in particular how historically-specific social hierarchies and prevailing political and epistemological contexts shaped different expressions of the anti-FGM discourse. The latest discursive change in the anti-FGM campaign emphasises the need for ‘cultural sensitivity’ and ‘community-led’ change and, in doing so, hides ongoing power hierarchies in who gets to define ‘FGM/C’. I argue that it is the dynamic adaptability of the anti-FGM campaign that allows for continuity despite resistance and critiques.