Conclusion: Genital Geographies

Summary

When most Americans hear the term “female circumcision,” they typically do not place its practice in the context of the United States, nor do they label it a medical procedure. Despite the long history of various clitoral surgeries, the notoriety of James Burt, and the contemporary use of female circumcision in the United States, probably most Americans, upon hearing the term, envision the practice generically as African. This is most likely because, in this country, by far the most popular attention on the procedures labeled under the term female circumcision have been in an African context. Though published accounts in the medical literature of female circumcision as practiced on the African continent had occurred decades prior, and while activists like Fran Hosken in the 1970s worked to bring the issue of female circumcision—what she described as misogynistic mutilation—forward, it was not until the early 1990s when the issue aroused a good deal of public attention in the United States.

During the 1990s, A. M. Rosenthal covered the topic extensively in the New York Times, writing numerous opinion pieces about “female genital torture” as practiced in certain African countries and within certain immigrant communities in the United States. Additional articles appeared during this decade in the American lay and medical press decrying the procedures as practiced both abroad and domestically by immigrants, labeling them as human rights violations. A particular loud voice was that of the novelist Alice Walker, who researched female circumcision for her 1992 novel, Possessing the Secret of Joy. In 1993 she, together with filmmaker Pratibha Parmar, produced a book and a movie documenting their view of female circumcision in Africa, Warrior Marks: Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexual Blinding of Women. In this book, Walker wrote about her surprise to discover that “women are often blamed for their own sexual mutilation.” Their genitals were seen as “unclean” and “monstrous” unless they were circumcised. “The activity of the unmutilated female vulva frightens men and … the clitoris challenges male authority.” It must, Walker wrote, be “destroyed.”

Walker and others argued to stop using the term “female circumcision,” as they believed it was unclear and not encompassing the extent of the various procedures and to instead use “female genital mutilation.” Spurred on by such reports and activism, Representative Patricia Schroeder introduced legislation in the US Congress outlawing female genital mutilation in America.