Re: Jane -- about "genital cutting"


"Crowfoot" <pagemail@xxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:pagemail-EAED2E.22083308032006@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
An answer from a colleague in England:

Me: An author and academic on a usenet list that I frequent
has recently claimed (as part of excoriating liberals for their
failures in recent times) that female academics, particularly in
Women's Studies, have taken to excusing FGM as an integral
part of the cultures that practice it which no one from the West
has any right to criticize, let alone demand that it be abolished.
Anybody come across this?

Her: "Yes, but I thought it had died out. It was pretty common in the
late 1980s and early 1990s and rather infected social services in the UK
to disastrous effects. It's why the UK has only relatively recently
started to prosecute parents who take their daughters for the
"operation" abroad (they closed down the Harley street practitioners a
little earlier).

"The issue however is twofold and a little more complicated. The first
aspect was the influence of post-modernism and the realisation that it
was women in many countries who were the enforcers of the practice. That
made it quite hard for women who were trying to get their heads around
multi-culturalism to deal with. To protest seemed like a colonialist
imposition.

"Things changed almost as soon as there were women of these cultures
protesting who could be supported. These women however ask for practical
support and tend to be unhappy at political protest linked to the "f"
word. [Meaning here, I think, "feminism", not FGM]
So while there is now a lot of work in the UK around genital cutting --
which includes the training of midwives and nurses to work in areas
where it is common to try and change attitudes -- it is not linked to
the feminist movement per se, although it is usually sponsored by
feminists.

"So that the current generic stance in many departments of women's
studies is that opposition can be supported but cannot be imposed."

Which, in a nutshell, means game, set and match to Jane - as always.

Mique


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