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Feminisms and Universalisms: “Universal Rights” and The Legal Debate Around the Practice of Female Excision in France
Françoise Lionnet
In the American academy, the experience of the last two decades of literary and cultural criticism seems to have created almost insurmountable differences between “Western” modes of analysis of the concrete status of women in various non-Western cultures on the one hand, and non-Western women’s subjective experience of their own position on the other hand.[1] Is it possible, in such a climate, for a critic based in the academy to “illuminate,” as Fatima Mernissi has put it, non- Western social contexts within which the “structural dissymmetry” of gender is embedded? (ix). To attempt to do so, I would like to take as case in point the issue of female genital excision which has again come to the attention of public opinion in France and other Western European countries where African immigrants are having it performed on their daughters.
To address such an issue, interdisciplinary work of the kind with which the past two decades of academic feminisms have made us familiar remains important. Feminisms (in the plural) have been a major intellectual tool for interrogating the production (and the reproduction) of knowledge across the academy. Feminist scholars in history, sociology, anthropology, psychology, psychoanalysis, philosophy, legal theory, and literary criticism have provided us with paradigms that have broadened our understanding of the politics of representation across time and place, and more specifically, the representation of women as the object of patriarchal knowledge– across disciplinary and cultural boundaries.
Because of the cross-fertilization among different disciplines that has occurred thanks in large part to this kind of inquiry, I believe that feminism has, in many ways, lived up to its early promise of interrogating the nineteenth-century model of the university organized around disciplines and periods. As Naomi Schor and Elizabeth Weed have recently put it in an issue of differences devoted to “Feminism and the Institution,” to question that traditional model of the university is “not only to critique and resist disciplinarization within the university, but to struggle against the split between inside and outside…. The challenge of academic feminism has always been to displace the very categories constituting the academy and its other [i.e., what is also called the “real world”] and it is that challenge that U.S. feminists of color, and Italian feminisms are, in different ways, reasserting today” (vi). It is of course true, as Elaine Marks affirms in the pages of the same journal, that one of the most surprising developments about women’s studies and feminist theory in general has been “the reproduction of familiar discourses and paradigms that existed–whether in the United States, or France, of England, or Italy–within other political, intellectual, and pedagogical fields, as if the “feminist” inquiry were imprisoned in national, sometimes chauvinist modes of thinking and writing.” And Marks goes on to add: “Feminist studies’ worst enemies have been those who have treated ‘feminism’ like a new religion with dogmas that can allow for only one possible interpretation” (72-73). I think that the only way out of that fundamentalist feminist impasse is, and will continue to be, through the awareness of the multicultural dimensions of women’s real lives in and out of the academy–and that’s where working between disciplines becomes imperative.
For my purposes in this paper, I’d like to focus on the legal debate that now exists in France on the issue of rights, bodily integrity and female excision. The fact that this practice exists in Europe began to surface at a time when the rights of all children were also being widely debated, fostering new legislation to protect them from various forms of physical and sexual abuse.
On February 2nd, 1981, a new law was introduced in the French penal code with the express purpose of repressing violence against minors. Article 312.2 of the code states the various types of legal sanctions that can be used to punish those found guilty of assault and battery or “coups et blessures volontaires è enfants de moins de 15 ans.” During the following decade, several interesting judicial cases that raised complex cultural questions would be tried on the basis of this law. They all involve African families whose daughters were subjected to this custom. Viewed as intolerable by Western critics since colonial times, excision consists primarily of clitoridectomy, but can also be accompanied by the excision of all or part of the labia and by infibulation (or the stitching together) of the two sides of the vulva. It can be fatal, and is increasingly considered–in the West–as a violation of basic human rights (Slack).
Transferred by immigrants from their own countries to their new homeland, this rite of passage is meant to mark entrance into adulthood, and is normally accompanied by extensive psychological preparation in the form of religious teachings and ritualized observances. When performed in France, however, much of the ritual apparatus is absent, such as that of Mantessa Baradji, a five- week-old baby girl who died of a slow but fatal hemorrhage on April 3, 1983, the day after she had been excised. This case, as well as two other non-fatal ones, involving Batou Doukara and Assa Traore, excised respectively at the ages of three months in 1980, and one week in 1984, were tried in criminal court, and suspended jail terms of one to three years were given to the parents. Several other cases are pending, and the justice system is becoming ever more severe in its attempt to suppress the practice. But at the same time, a serious legal controversy has emerged around these decisions.
The debate opposes two apparently conflicting versions of human rights, one based on the Enlightenment notion of the sovereign individual subject, and the other on a notion of collective identity grounded in cultural solidarity. Critics of the Enlightenment version of human rights have opposed to it the more culturally-specific concept of human dignity, stating that “concepts of human dignity do indeed vary. They are embedded in cultural views of the nature of human beings, which interm reflect the social organization of particular societies,” and adding that “in Africa, idealized versions of human dignity reflect idealized interpretations of pre-colonial structure” (Howard 17). When emphasis is on the group, protection of the individual qua sovereign individual subject can be at odds with her development as a fully-functioning member of her own society. By criminalizing the practice and sending to jail the parents of the excised girls, the French courts have judged individuals guilty of an act of violence which they had, in fact, no intention of committing, since their behavior was in accordance with deeply-held socio-cultural and religious beliefs about the nature of femininity and the function of sexuality in their respective collectivities. Anthropologists and social critics have argued that such sanctions will have little if any positive impact, since families may continue to have the excision performed either clandestinely in France (and with greater risk to the girls’ life and health) or back in Africa during school vacations.
Genevi*ve Guidicelli-Delage has pointed out that France is the only European country confronted with this issue that actually prosecutes “les auteurs et complices d’excision” (207). This, she says, presents serious judicial risks since “le prátoire pénal est le lieu où l’on juge exclusivement des comportements individuels et non un lieu où l’on débat de pratiques collectives” (208). Despite these warnings, the most recent jury trial at the Paris Courd’assises on March 6, 7, and 8, 1991, concluded with the harshest punishment ever: a five-year jail term for Aramata Keita, a resident of France and a member of the caste of women ironworkers who traditionally perform excision in Mali, and a five years’ suspended sentence with two years’ probation for the parents, Sory and Sémite Coulibaly, who had their six daughters excised by Keita in 1982 and 1983.
As Le Monde reported in its coverage of the trial, the presence of the three accused in the dock seemed but “a pretext, were it not for the fact that they were risking imprisonment” (Peyrot 16). Although three individuals were sent to jail, it seems as though the courts tried the practice rather than the persons involved: “The three accused listened to proceedings without understanding them. Their two interpreters did not translate the debate being conducted in court–which occasionally took the air of a symposium” (Peyrot 15-16). The woman public prosecutor dismissed experts’ arguments regarding the pressures of ethnic customs and the ways in which such a practice forms part of a whole social system. She stressed the fact that Keita received a financial reward for her services (ostensibly the symbolic and documented offering of a pagne and some soap, but presumably other unacknowledged monies totaling approximately one hundred francs) and because of this, the prosecutor demanded–and got–an exemplary decision from the jury, stating: “From today on, it must be made quite clear to every African family that excision has become a moneymaking activity which risks incurring a very heavy sentence” (Peyrot 16). Under the guise of protecting young girls from a “barbaric mutilation,” the French legal system has victimized three individuals who were not themselves treated as persons in their own right during the trial, since it was clear that intentions, motivations, and responsibility–which are the foundations of individual guilt before the law–could not be interpreted as criminal (Guidicalli-Delage 205). As the respected ethnopsychiatrist Michel Erlich has explained, the reasons for the continued performance of this practice are compelling psychosexual ones for those involved, since it is embedded in a cultural context that encodes it as a beautifying and enriching phenomenon without which girls do not become women, and will therefore never be able to marry, have some degree of economic security, and lead “”full” female lives.
However objectionable the practice, and many women and men in Africa and the Middle East have denounced it, putting complex “strategies for eradication” (Koso-Thomas) in place in countries like Senegal, Sierra Leone or Egypt, experts in the field agree that education remains the essential tool, whereas legal action cannot even be justified on judicial or juridical grounds, since there exists no law in France that specifically forbids excision, only the above-mentioned art. 312.3 which must be interpreted as relevant to these particular cases in order for it to apply. The social, economic, and psychological consequences of jail for the families of the condemned parties are ignored by the courts, which thus manifest a blatant disregard for collective, familial, and community values, and under the pretext of protecting the abstract rights of an individual child, penalize the child by arbitrarily sentencing her parents for the purposes of making an example of them.
It is to reflect upon the contradictions and difficulties that arise from these complex human rights issues that a working group or “Atelier Droits des Peuples et Droits de l’Homme” was created at the Centre Droit et Cultures of the University of Paris, Nanterre. The first series of essays pertaining to excision was recently published in the journal of the center, Droit et Cultures, and I would like to briefly survey the preliminary results of this workshop because of the importance that they will have in defining the discourse about identity and sexuality within immigrant communities in France, and because it re-opens the question of universal rights in an unprecedented way.
The increasing diversity and plurality of French society has given rise to cultural conflicts that continue to erupt around topics such as citizenship, habitation, schooling, dress, and the rhetoric of difference and equality, or integration and xenophobia, that has characterized political discourse in the 1980s. These are forcing a reexamination of the principles of universal democracy and natural rights that had theoretically been taken for granted since the Revolution of 1789. As Raymond Verdier explains, it has become necessary to rethink the familiar Western dialectic based on the oppositional paradigm of the individual versus society, and to conceptualize in its place “des droits dits de la solidarité.”
Cessant de prendre pour point de départ le sujet individuel mais envisageant l’homme comme membre d’und communauté humaine diversifiée, l’approche proposée entend échapper tant à un pur relativisme culturel qui mettrait en pièce l’unité du genre humain qu’à un pseudo-universalisme totalitaire et impérialiste qui méconnaitrait tout droit à la différence et conduirait à la négotiation de toute identité culturelle et religieuse, selon “la configuration moderne individualiste des valeurs.”
Difficile conciliation à promouvoir qui nécessite d’un cotee la connaissance profonde des traditions culturelles, de leur évolution et de leur transorfmation, de l’autre un regard critique sur la nation d’identité qui nous évite de tomber dans les pièges de l’ethnocentrisme. (149)
[The approach we propose would not take the individual subject as its point of departure, but would look at the human being as a member of a diversified community. This would avoid the recourse to either the pure cultural relativism that undermines the unity of the human race of the totalitarian pseudo-universalism that would refuse the right to difference and lead to the negation of all cultural and religious identity, in keeping with “the modern individualist configuration of values.”
This is a difficult conciliation, and it requires a deep understanding of cultural traditions, of their evolution and transformation on the one hand, and on the other, a critical look at the notion of identity as to avoid falling into the traps of ethnocentrism.]
The practice of female excision is a kind of ideal test-case, since it apparently illustrates absolute and total cultural conflict between the rights of the individual to bodily integrity on the one hand, and her need to be satisfactorily integrated into a community on the other. But, as Michel Erlich reminds us, this right to bodily integrity is by no means an absolute value in Western society, since male circumcision, tonsillectomy and appendectomy–which can be viewed as ritual forms of surgery comparable to ethnic “mutilations,” and which have been the object of controversy among medical professionals–are culturally acceptable, and thus to not fall under art 312.3 of the penal code (159ff). Furthermore, what Erlich calls a form of “misogynie médicalisée” [medicalized misogyny] was the reason why excision was frequently performed (as were ovariectomy and hysterectomy) from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century: to treat nymphomania, hypertrophy of the female genitalia, masturbation, and lesbianism. A famous seventeenth-century French surgeon named Dionis is credited with being the first one to recommend excision “comme remède à la lascivité féminine” [as a remedy against female lasciviousness] (Erlich, “Notions de mutilation” 156).[2] To defend the practice on strictly cultural relativist grounds is thus as misguided as to condemn it on universalist and humanitarian ones, since complex psychological phenomena both in Europe and elsewhere have motivated its existence, and only education and information combined with an open and tolerant approach to different definitions of identity and sexuality will eventually help eradicate excision.
Can one oppose the practice on a feminist epistemological ground that might allow us to argue that in all of the above cases, the common denominator is a–conscious or unconscious, individual or collective–example of misogyny and homophobia which aims at curbing all manifestations of female sexuality, and thus represents a universal fear and hatred of women which must be countered by the appeal to a universal approach to human rights, the only means of protection for female children in misogynist cultures? Ideally, perhaps one can. But to condemn excision as a violation of human rights is to arbitrarily presume that such a practice is the only culturally sanctioned form of violence that deserves to be denounced, whereas we know that many other forms of violence are not repressed by law in the Western context, and that some of our own practices are objectionable and shocking to Africans.
Erlich expresses doubts about some of the radical Western feminist arguments, and states that it is “un étrange paradoxe” that women’s right to pleasure and to the integrity of their bodies
passe par une législation qui légitime l’avortement, mutilation majeure dont la légalisation a effectivement contribué à la libération féminine dans notre société, mais qui est encore considérée par bon nombre de nos concitoyens comme un crime et jugée en tant que tel dans ces cultures aux moeurs mutilantes, que notre activisme humanitaire a décidé de traiter par des moyens eux- memes mutilants. (“Notions de mutilation” 161)
[is linked to a legislation that legitimates abortion, a major mutilation the legalization of which did indeed contribute to female liberation in our society, but which is still considered a crime by many, and judged as such in those cultures that practice mutilations, and that our humanitarian activism has decided to treat by mutilating means.] To accept the legality of abortion, but to criminally repress the performance of excision is one of those paradoxes of contemporary legal practice that seem to arbitrarily condemn “exotic” or “foreign” barbaric practices regardless of precedents in our own culture that are legal and acceptable to a majority because they are situated within a particular framework of rights and gender that no longer shock our sense of fairness or interfere with our freedom to live according to our own values. Although Erlich does not elaborate on the parallel he draws with abortion, the suggestion is provocative and compelling because it does seem to put the abortion issue within a context of reproductive rights that forces a reexamination of both feminist individualism and modern notions of freedom of choice.
Given the social stigmas that still attach to unwed motherhood among the middle classes, and the financial and emotional difficulties that will continue to be involved in raising a child as a single parent so long as the responsibility for doing so is primarily the mother’s, one might argue that there is no real “freedom of choice” for many women to decide to have an abortion. Indeed, aren’t some of them–like the African women influenced by their communities’ views on excision– deciding to have an abortion because it is the only possible solution in an economic and cultural context that might force them to choose between a career and motherhood, or to gain acceptance within their own social or professional communities as women who are truly in charge of their own lives and reproductive capacities? The rhetoric in favor of abortion has stressed the rights of women to choose, and that is why the law should protect that right and sustain the legality of the procedure. Note also that the parallel Erlich draws between abortion and excision is not based on a religious view of the fetus as different “person” whose rights are in conflict with those of the mother (as the fundamentalist Christian right would have it), but more on a view of pregnancy as a “natural” consequence of female sexuality, just as we might see the clitoris a “natural” part of the female body. In this view, abortion, like excision, simply imposes cultural constraints on physical reality, and both procedures can arguably be defended by their proponents as cultural steps taken to avoid biological determinism.
The question of choice thus remains problematic when one focuses not just on individual rights, but on the way such rights may be in conflict with the broader social, religious, or communitarian values to which an individual woman has to subscribe if she is to remain a respected member of her community, as opposed to being a “free” agent in our increasingly atomized capitalist culture. Here again, the modern individualist view of freedom leaves much to be desired, since identity remains so closely linked to particularist views of reproductive rights and sexual choices, and in the case of women choosing motherhood, to their–by no means universal–right to health care, day care, and social programs that will help in the task of raising children.
What this suggests is that radical individualism is an empty word for women, whether they live in “traditional” societies that uphold practices that are shocking to us, citizens of modern states that theoretically protect human rights, or are such citizens living under a comforting illusion of choice that does not sustain critical scrutiny whenever we examine the supposedly “voluntary” acts that involve sexuality and reproduction. Similarly, ritual practices are not adhered to “voluntarily”: the mother, like S*mit* Coulibaly, who solicits the services of a woman to excise her daughters, believes that she is conforming to the traditions of her community, and that failing to do so would jeopardize her daughters’ chances of being accepted by their community of origin. Furthermore, refusal to allow excision of the daughters runs the risk of endangering the mother’s opportunity to engage in the slow process of liberation that now allows African women living in France to oppose polygamy, to work, and to enroll in literacy programs so long as they are not perceived by the immigrant community as imposing these “new” values on their own daughters: “Si en plus on s’approprie les filles on sera rejetée par tout le monde, renvoyées au village…,” [If on top of all this we seem to be appropriating the girls, we’ll be rejected by everyone, sent back to the village…] as one woman exclaimed. Her fear is echoed by most of the Soninké of Mali who participated in the study conducted in Paris by Catherine Quiminal (190).
At stake is the definition of tradition itself, the way it forms part of a network of power within which conflicting notions of freedom, community, and authority hold ground. Quiminal is well aware of this.
Comme toutes les traditions, les mutilations sexualles des femmes ne sont traditions que dans la mesure où les intéressées n’one d’autres possibiltés que de les subir sous peine d’etre exclues de leur communauté. Dès lors qu’elles sont contestées, les traditions apparaissent pour ce qu’elles sont: expression d’un rapport de force, arguments d’authorité. (183)
[Like all traditions, the sexual mutilation of women is a “tradition” only to the extent that the women concerned have no choice but to submit to it or else be excluded from their community. As soon as they are contested, traditions are revealed to be but the expression of power relations, arguments of authority.]
Excision makes clear how power relations are inscribed on the female body by virtue of its subjection to particular sexual traditions. Indeed, the reasons for this practice have to do with complex definitions of masculinity and femininity that construct the clitoris and the male prepuce as vestiges of the opposite sex that must be eliminated for a “proper” sexual identity to exist. Thus, the female body is considered “too masculine” and socially unacceptable when not marked by excision. Malian women are culturally dependent on this view of sexuality that forms the basis of their feminine identity. This situation illustrates well Michel Foucault’s insight that “the political technology of the body” amounts to a “system of subjection” (26) of individual persons within a specific cultural code.
It is interesting to note that in the African context, the discourse on female sexuality defines femininity in terms of binary cultural inscriptions (male circumcision/female excision) rather than purely biological categories of male/female (Erlich, La Femme blessée; Lionnet). One becomes a female person after having submitted to a cultural process, one is not simply born a “woman.” Similarly, a “person” is not a person until he/she has been marked by society in a way that gives him/her dignity and social status within a specific ethnic group. Isaac Nguema has stressed that throughout “traditional” Africa “la personne humaine n’a de valeur qu’à l’intérieur de son groupe ethnique … la personalité juridique … s’acquiert au fur et à mesure que la personne franchit les étpes de la vie: à l’occasion de la circoncision … du mariage … de la naissance des enfants” [the person has value only as a member of her own ethnic group … the legal personality … develops as one goes through different stages of life: on the occasion of circumcision … marriage … and the birth of children] (Nguema 215). Thus, he argues, the African notion of “person” is a more interactive and dynamic one compared to the Western one which he sees as “abstraite, mécanique, statique, matérialiste” [abstract, mechanistic, static, materialistic] and intolerant of genuine solidarity since an absolute view of individual rights will necessarily enter in conflict with a genuine form of familial of cultural solidarity.
Problems then arise because the power of Malian culture to invest meaning in the individual body is at odds with the French State’s power to construct that body’s biological integrity according to modern notions of individual rights. When Malians fall under the authority of the French courts on French territory, their bodies are invested with full responsibility for their actions and intentions, and they become liable to imprisonment, not so much because the performance and/or abetting of excision is a violation of the rights of children, as the application of art. 312.3 would suggest, but because the state locates meaning and identity in the individual, autonomous body of its citizens. Because the Coulibalys reside in France, it is the authority and sovereignty of the French courts that are exercised. It is the Coulibaly’s identity as immigrants that supersedes their “Africanness.” Sylvie Fainzang is well aware of the specifically legal aspect of a dilemma which is increasingly familiar in a pluralistic society, and which faces all those who live in two cultures, with a foot in each world:
L’excision est donc pratiquée pour se conformer à une loi; elle est le résultat d’une conformité à une pratique collective et de la soumission à une contrainte sociale. Les individus se retrouvent pris comme dans un étau entre deux Lois contraires: la conformité à l’une entrainant ipso facto le non-respect de l’autre. (180)
[Excision is thus performed in order to obey a law; it results from the need to conform to a collective practice, and from the fact of being subjected to a social constraint. Individuals are thus caught as in a vise between two opposing Laws: to obey the one ipso facto leads to breaking the other.]
Both laws represent two systems of power which hold sway over individual responsibility, undermining the very possibility of assigning individual blame. These cases demystify the fiction of the sovereign subject since the subjectivity of the defendants can easily be shown to be the site of conflicting and contradictory constraints. The “power-knowledge relations” (Foucault 27) created by the courts’ intransigence is a reflection of the absolute non-commensurability of the two cultural systems that interface in these cases.
Indeed, since excision can very well be defined as a “custom” in the technical sense allowed by French law (according to art. 327 of the penal code), this should exempt it from criminalization, just as corporeal punishment of children is exempt because it is considered an acceptable form of parental behavior sanctioned by “custom” as understood by this law (Merle and Vitu). The crux of the matter here is clearly a question of which jurisdiction has authority on the persons accused, and what constitutes “custom” or tradition or precedent under that jurisdiction. Guidicelli-Delage puts it clearly:
Dans le conflit de cultures que constitue l’excision, toute position qui pourrait laisser croire à une tolérance de cette pratique sur le territoire français est condamnée au nom de l’ordre public interne et des principes fondamentaux de l’homme. La culture qui est la notre ne peut qu’affirmer haut et fort son rejet de l’excision. Mais par quelle voie l’affirmer? La voie judiciaire actuellement pratiquée, la voie législative, ou encore une :”troisième voie.”..? (206-207)
Within the conflict of cultures that excision foregrounds, any position that might suggest a tolerant attitude toward this practice on French territory is condemned in the name of our own internal public order, and of fundamental human principles. Our culture can only proclaim its vigorous opposition to excision. But by which means can it do so? The judicial way, as is currently done, the legislative way, or yet a “third way” … ?]
For Guidicelli-Delage, there is no doubt that the only worthwhile and effective approach is the “third” one, that is, cooperation with those African countries that are slowly struggling to put in place new cultural forms by educational, and not repressive, means: “Il faut pour chasser une ancienne coutume qu’une nouvelle prenne sa place, qu’une nouvelle culture se forge at non se voit imposer” [The way to phase out an ancient custom is to allow a new one to replace it, to let a new culture to forge itself, not to impose one from above] (210). To apply abstract Enlightenment values in a rigidly intolerant legal way is to undermine the system’s own claim to universality since it thereby condemns practices that form part of a network of social values which are the scaffolding upon which rests the global equilibrium of a different culture. These practices are not just irrational and aberrant abuses as many uninformed Western critics would like to believe. It is in fact possible to see them as part of a coherent, rational and workable system, albeit one as flawed and unfair to women as our own can be.
The March 8th, 1991 ruling marks the Coulibalys as subjects of/to the French State. Ironically, their identity is thus reconstructed by the same court that might ultimately decide whether or not to grant them citizenship, in accordance with recent decisions about the right of immigrants to full French citizenship. Interestingly, then, it is the same sort of power relations that impose a different “national” identity (and the customs that go with it) on immigrant families whose right to citizenship is not even clear that is also central to the construction of sexual identity in the cultures that allow excision. Sylvie Fainzang explains:
L’analyse des discours relatifs à cette pratique révèle qu’il s’agit en fair, avec les mutilations sexuelles, de faconner les individus de manière à les rendre aptes à assumer le role social qui leur est réservé en raison de leur sexe. Cette différenciation sexualle est motiváe par une volonté de différenciation des statuts sociaux…. Le marquage sexuel que réalise l’excision est la condition de l’accés à un statut social spécifique, celui de femme, soumise àl’autorité de l’homme. La pratique de l’excision repose donc sur la volonté de créer les conditions (physiques) de la domination (sociale) de l’homme sur la femme. (177-178)
[The analysis of discourses relating to this practice reveals that sexual mutilations are a means of disciplining individuals, of rendering them fit for the social role which is reserved for them because of their gender. This sexual differentiation is motivated by the will to distinguish among different social statuses…. The sexual marking provided by excision is the necessary condition of access to a specific social status, that is of woman subjected to the authority of man. The practice of excision thus depends on the will to create the (physical) conditions of the (social) domination of woman by man.]
On the one hand, we have immigrants who are subordinated to French law, on the other, females brought under the authority of males. In either case, it would seem that we are very far indeed from any individualist conceptions of rights. It is a conception of identity as subordinate to either the state (France) or the ruling patriarchy (in Mali) that governs the (il)legitimacy of parental behavior. It is therefore pointless to claim that the issue opposes communitarian values to universal ones, since the actual conflict hinges on the opposing claims of two different communities, one of which would like to believe that its culture is a “universal” one.
What does appear to be “universal” when we carefully examine the whole cultural contexts within which the debate is situated is the way in which different cultures, for better or for worse, impose similar constraints on the bodies of their members, especially when those bodies are already marked by the sign of the feminine. Both cultures–the French and the African–have ways of disciplining and socializing the body that denote highly complex socio-cultural organizations, and the work done by the Centre Droit et Cultures attests to the long-term educational process that still needs to take place in order for African immigrants to liberate themselves from age-old customs, and for the French legal system to accommodate the increasing diversity that is now French society. This diversity has the incontestable merit of underscoring the injustices and inequities of our own culture, and of reminding us that “le barbare, c’est d’abord l’homme qui croit à la barbarie” [The barbarian is first and foremost the one who believes in barbarism] as Levi-Strauss once put it (22).
Notes
1. I wish to thank the Rockefeller Foundation and the Center for Advanced Feminist Studies at the University of Minnesota, and the University of California Humanities Research Institute, for supporting my research and writing during the 1991-92 academic year. Back to main text
2. This medical “solution” to the “problems” of female sexuality reaches its apex during the Victorian era in Britain, and continues to be performed until the 1950s in the United States: “Reprise par LEVRET, cette solution radical inaugure une stratégie répressive de la sexualité féfminie don’t le sadisme va s’accenteur tout au long du XIXe siècle. Appliquée pour la première fois en 1822 par GRAFFE au traitement de la “folie masturbatoire,” la clitoridectomie est érigée en panacée quarante ans plus tard par BAKER-BROWN, chirurgien britannique de renom qui passe à la postérité comme le champion de l’excision “thérapeutique.” A la meme époque, l’américain BATTEY, autre grand mutilateur propose l’ovariectomie q’il qualifie de “normale,” c’est-è-dire la castration féminine, enguise de traitement de divers troubles nerveux. Culminant à lépoque victorienne en Angleterre et aux Etas-Unis, cette mysoginie médicalisée va se prolonger dans ce dernier pays jusqu’au courant du XXe siècle, où elle trouvera encore e’ultimes adeptes jusque dans les années cinquante. Ainsi les indications médicales des mutilations sexualles évoluent du domaine de la pathologie morphologique à celui de la pathologie psychologique” [Adapted by Levret, this medical solution inaugurates a strategy of repression of female sexuality the sadism of which will increase all through the 19th century. Clitoridectomy was first used in 1822 by Graefe to treat “masturbatory madness,” and forty years later, it was chosen as a panacea by Barker-Brown, the famed British surgeon who will be remembered by posterity as the champion of “therapeutic” excision. At about the same time, Battey, an American, and also a great mutilator, proposes ovariectomy, that is female castration, which he defines as “normal,” as a means of treatment for a number of nervous ailments. This medicalized form of misogyny culminates in England during the Victorian era, but in the United States, it will continue to be performed during the 20th century, with some doctors still prescribing it in the 1950s. This is how the medical uses of sexual mutilation evolve from the domain of physical pathology to that of psychological pathology] (156). Back to main text
Works Cited
Erlich, Michel. La Femme blessée. Paris: L’Hartman, 1986.
—. “Notions de mutilation et criminalisation de l’excision en France.” Droit et Cultures 20 (1990): 156.
Fainzang, Sylvie. “Excision et ordre social.” Droit et Cultures 20 (1990): 180.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.
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