Body Circumcision

Body Circumcision

Introduction

A theory of figuration is proceeded by feminist scholar Elizabeth Grosz as a remedy for the biological/organic/natural incompleteness of human beings, an expansion of Freud's idea that one of the primary causations of human unhappiness is our inability to master our own bodies, a condition that renders a conception of our bodies as transient structures with a limited capacity for adaptation and achievement. Elizabeth Grosz writes that we understand our bodies as a unified and cohesively organized structure only through their social and physical inscription. Material renderings of the human figure allow us to manage and administrate our embodied experience of the indeterminate, amorphous, and rather uncoordinated potentialities of having a flesh-and-blood body (Grosz, 1992). Renderings of the figure thus become social triggers signalling eventualities. When we see what we are supposed to look like, our potential becomes that much more definable; the unknown metastases of the flesh-and-blood body that occur over the course of human development are thus mitigated as a constant source of unease.

Discussion

The term 'circumcision' goes for a direct comparison with the removal of the male foreskin, yet some of the practices associated with female genital modification are far more damaging, risky and invasive (Fausto-Sterling, 2000). Thus the phrase female circumcision is often preferred because it translates easily into the various languages used where female genital surgeries are commonly performed in the name of religion, culture, or tradition. However, this phrasing is problematic, in so far as it suggests that female genital surgeries are akin to male circumcision (Claire, 2005). While male circumcision involves the removal of some or all the foreskin from the penis, female genital surgeries vary greatly. In their simplest form, they involve the removal of the clitoral hood and the piercing, nicking, or removal of the clitoris. However, some types of female genital surgeries also include the removal of the labia minora and the labia majora, and others involve the sewing together of remaining external genital tissue in order to decrease the size of the vaginal opening. In addition, the risks associated with female genital surgeries are typically much greater i.e. both long term and short term than those associated with male circumcision (Blumer, 1969). Consequently, many regard the use of the phrase female circumcision as unhelpful and inaccurate.

Various studies of body transformations remind us of the social significance for women of conformity with ideals of the proper or real woman, arguing that in this particular cultural context clitoridectomy provides women self-esteem, cultural recognition and scope for the exercise of agency. These genital modifications imply entirely different dynamics of power, different narratives of sexuality and of idealized masculinity and femininity, and quite different implications for women, men's and intersex people's experiences of sex. But from an anthropological perspective, the contrast between these forms of intervention in the body force us to look beyond ethnographic accounts of rituals and rites of passage and to think more comparatively about the politics of genital modification.

Elizabeth Grosz persists on the irreducibility particularity of the bodies of ...