Male genital mutilation:beyond the tolerable?

For liberals like Martha Nussbaum, Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) has come to mark the boundary of toleration. By impairing physical, sexual and psychological functioning, the likes of Nussbaum believe the non-western practice to fulfil, most clearly, the conditions for proscription according to the harm principle. However, those same liberals assume the western practice of male circumcision, generally, to be benign or, even, necessary. As there is seen to be no harm, there is no reason to intervene. I argue that this assumption is erroneous, highlighting evidence that suggests that, according to the criteria of sexual diminution, pain and coercion employed by liberals to criticize FGM, circumcision can be viewed as a harmful act of Male Genital Mutilation (MGM). I highlight the qualitative similarities in the harmfulness of FGM and MGM in order to establish in Nussbaum an empirical and, I argue, ethnocentric oversight in which the criteria of harm are inadequately applied to the latter. I then attempt to identify the obstacles to Nussbaum’s recognition of this harm, arguing that she is party to culturally constituted beliefs in the medical and sexual necessity of the practice and, importantly, the methodological tenet of gender oppression. Having attempted to explain obstacles to the recognition of harm, I then consider the possibility that Nussbaum’s inconsistency is grounded in toleration of religious obligation, arguing that MGM should stimulate certain liberals to reconsider their engagement with theology. My aim is to enable liberals to overcome, often justifiable, claims of ethnocentricity, in order to develop a consistent approach to harmful cultural practices

Theorizing 'African' female genital cutting and 'Western' body modifications: a critique of the continuum and analogue approaches

Making links between different embodied cultural practices has become increasingly common within the feminist literature on multiculturalism and cultural difference as a means to counter racism and cultural essentialism. The cross-cultural comparison most commonly made in this context is that between 'African' practices of female genital cutting (FGC) and 'western' body modifications. In this article, I analyse some of the ways in which FGC and other body-altering procedures (such as cosmetic surgery, intersex operations and 19th century American clitoridectomies) are compared within this feminist literature. I identify two main strategies of linking such practices, which I have termed the 'continuum' and 'analogue' approaches. The continuum approach is employed to imagine FGC alongside other body-altering procedures within a single 'continuum', 'spectrum' or 'range' of cross-cultural body modifications. The analogue approach is used to set up FGC and other body-altering practices as analogous through highlighting cross-cultural similarities, but does not explicitly conceive of them as forming a single continuum. Two key critiques of the continuum and analogue approaches are presented. First, because these models privilege gender and sexuality, they tend to efface the operation of other axes of embodied differentiation, namely race, cultural difference and nation. As such, the continuum and analogue approaches often reproduce problematic relationships between race and gender while failing to address the implicit and problematic role which race, cultural difference and nation continue to play in such models. This erasure of these axes, I contend, is linked to the construction of a 'western' empathetic gaze, which is my second key critique. The desire on the part of theorists working in the West to establish cross-cultural 'empathy' through models that stress similarity and solidarity conceals the continuing operation of geo-political relations of power and privilege

Targeting Patients Who Cannot Object? Re-Examining the Case for Non-Therapeutic Infant Circumcision

Recent restatements of the case for routine circumcision of normal male infants and boys typically base their arguments on a range of medical evidence showing circumcision to have a protective effect against certain pathological conditions. It is then assumed that this evidence leads automatically to a clinical recommendation that circumcision should either be “considered” or strongly urged. Closer analysis reveals that the recommendation of infant or child circumcision has less to do with the medical benefits than with the historic origins of the procedure, the convenience to the operator and the status of the patient. It is further suggested that it is not clear that the medical benefits of infant or child circumcision outweigh the risks and harms, and that this style of advocacy fails to pay due regard to basic principles of bioethics and human rights that are accepted in other areas of medical practice