Introduction: Rethinking the History of Female Circumcision and Clitoridectomy in the United States

Summary

The history of the clitoris is part of the history of sexual difference generally and of the socialization of the body's pleasures … it is a story as much about socialization as about sex.

—Thomas Laqueur

In August 2012, Reuters carried a story entitled “Gynecologists Alarmed by Plastic Surgery Spread.” The story concerned several surgeons across the United States performing gynecological surgery meant to enhance or enable women's sexual response. The surgeries, known collectively as female genital cosmetic surgery, include vaginal tightening, a reduction or removal of labia, and female circumcision. Women seeking to learn more about the surgeries, the article reported, run the gamut of ages, from teenagers to those in their late seventies. These women's interests in the surgeries, critics claim, are driven by impossible bodily ideals, ideals encouraged by the availability of pornography and marketing by physicians performing the surgeries.

Though exact numbers of women who have undergone one or all of these surgeries are unavailable, their notoriety and increasing availability in certain parts of the United States has grown. Indeed, as I write this in the winter of 2014 from my offi ce at Northwestern University's medical school in downtown Chicago, I know that if I went outside, walked west on Chicago Avenue, turned right on Michigan Avenue, and walked a few more blocks, I would be at the Watertower Building, where Otto J. Placik, a plastic surgeon, performs female circumcision (though he calls it “clitoral unhooding”) for $1,000 plus operating room and anesthesia fees. Placik is just one of many physicians who perform female genital cosmetic surgeries now in the United States and abroad; indeed, so many are now performing them that several international conferences have been established to, as the International Society of Cosmetogynecology says, “promote the advancement of knowledge, skill and excellence in female cosmetic medicine and surgery through education, training and fellowship.”

Both the popular media and academics have weighed in on what the rise in these surgeries means about the female body, female sexuality, and the role of medicine. Activists have protested outside of clinics where physicians perform these surgeries, and though to a less dramatic extent, the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology (ACOG) also protested them when in 2007 the college recommended practitioners not perform the surgeries since their safety and efficacy were unknown.