#enculturation

Introduction Practices of female circumcision in Africa and other places have emerged in the past two decades or so as a highly visible arena of body politics in a globalized women’s health activism. As such, the recently evolved campaign to eradicate these practices has formed into a powerful discourse intertwining feminist politics and scientific and medical knowledge in pursuit of the common goal of protecting ‘female bodies’ from ‘harm’. Referring to such diverse and heterogeneous practices as ‘female genital mutilation’ (FGM), many of those seeking their eradication condemn them as ‘barbaric’ and as harmful to female bodies and sexuality. They are also viewed as evidence of the universal oppression of women by men and male dominated social structures.

My goal in this paper is to problematize such images using both contemporary feminist theories of bodies and my own personal narrative as a circumcised woman. My approach to this paper is expressed well by Sharon Traweek who states, ‘I am going to write some stories for you, and I will be in some of them; I want you to know how I came to learn about [them] and I want you to understand how the stories some. . . . write might be different from what you expect’ (1992: 432). Throughout the paper I employ the phrase ‘anti-FGM discourse’ to identify various perspectives and strategies, especially in the west, that have played an important role in the shaping and promotion of the eradication of female circumcision as practiced mainly by Africans. My usage of the phrase ‘anti-FGM discourse’ is not meant to imply that all those who are opposed to such practices are alike or that they can easily be collapsed under one homogeneous rubric. Some are located in the west, some in Africa, some are women, some are men, and some are feminists. They embrace various means of stating their views against female circumcision practices, even as they agree that these practices are harmful to female bodies and must be eradicated. One of my interests in this paper is how such conclusions have been arrived at. I am also aware that the phrase ‘female circumcision’, itself a western construct, is troubling because it implies that cultural practices that involve female genital modifications in Africa have no unique histories and meanings of their own, outside of what is already understood in the west to be male circumcision.

Similarly, by using the term ‘west’, or even the term ‘western feminists’ for that matter, I am not trying to imply that the view from this part of the world is monolithic by any means (Mohanty, 1991). Rather, as Mohanty puts it, ‘I am attempting to draw attention to the similar effects of various textual strategies used by writers which codify Others as non-western and hence themselves as (implicitly) Western’ (1991: 52).

I argue that much of the ‘anti-FGM discourse’, as currently formulated, overly homogenizes diverse practices, is locked in a colonial discourse that replicates the ‘civilizing’ presumptions of the past, and presents a universalized image of female bodies that relies upon particularized assumptions of what constitutes ‘naturalness’ and ‘normality’.

After introducing anti-FGM discourse, I will discuss the case of Fauziya Kasinga, who came to symbolize the female circumcision debate in the United States in the mid-1990s. Media representations of Kasinga’s story perpetuated troubling colonialist assumptions in the dichotomy of an enlightened west as refuge from the ‘backward’ and ‘barbaric’ traditions of Africa. Her case also presents a dichotomy between normal versus mutilated female bodies that structures anti-FGM discourse. From this case I critique such dichotomies via contemporary theories of bodies emerging from feminist science studies and cultural studies. In the light of these theories which promote the notion of enculturated bodies, I present a personal story of my own circumcision experience, not as a celebration of female circumcision per se, but as a means of rewriting the narrative of female circumcision in other feminist terms. What I hope my story will convey is that bodies do not exist in a vacuum; they are made and negotiated through everyday rituals and performances that can be simultaneously acceptable and problematic. The decision to avoid as well as to opt for female circumcision is both within the realm of cultural possibility. In my conclusions I suggest to feminists and other activists interested in differences, that seemingly ‘oppressed’ women have more complex stories to offer, no matter how inappropriate and awkward such stories may appear from one’s own cultural vantage point. Taking such complexities seriously could be one way out of the problematic current tendency to represent Others only as passive victims and objects of knowledge.

Introducing anti-FGM discourse To enter anti-FGM discourse in this sense is to immediately be drawn into a battlefield filled with conceptual oppositions already in place: science/superstition; medical knowledge/tradition; healthy bodies/unhealthy bodies; normal sexuality/abnormal sexuality; civilized/barbaric; modernity/backwardness; expert/non-expert; educated/ignorant – and the list goes on. In employing these dichotomies, anti-FGM discourse has emerged powerfully over the past few decades as one that rewards those who embrace its premises and punishes those who question them. For instance, a recent informal internet poll by the BBC showed that 92 percent of respondents believed that female circumcision could not be justified (BBC News, 1999). Comments on the website regarding female circumcision included comparisons of female circumcision with slavery and human sacrifice, with numerous references to the ‘barbarism’ and ‘horrific’ nature of such practices (BBC News, 1999). Dissenting opinions were dismissed and treated as if they were the defenders of Nazis and slaveholders. Needless to say, being a dissenter in this discourse is a risky proposition.

Ubiquitous in the literature on practices of female circumcision is the three-category topology of ‘sunna’, clitoridectomy, and infibulation, organized in order of perceived increasing degree of severity. These three forms are mobilized from one text to another in virtually identical form, representing what is considered to be the ‘reality’ of all practices of female circumcision on the continent of Africa. Specific practices from diverse locations are forced into one or another of these categories. And as the phrase ‘female circumcision’ loses ground on the basis that it fails to capture the horror of the mutilation involved, those who insist on employing the phrase (and not the preferred phrase ‘female genital mutilation’) risk being accused of being too uncritical of such practices.

It is this power to create oppositions between all that is considered ‘normal’, and hence desirable, and what is considered to be ‘pathological’, hence undesirable (Canguilhem, 1991), as well as the power to mobilize allies with similar views (Latour, 1987), that has enabled the anti-FGM discourse to generate its force in activist and policy settings and to be successful in making us forget about its constructedness. In this discursive setting, female circumcision becomes unquestionably harmful, where the only remaining issue to be explored is how, once and for all, to eliminate these practices. However, the centre maintained in anti-FGM discourse is subject to contradictory meanings, images and practices that carry legacies of colonial representations of ‘third world’ societies as ‘savage’ and ‘barbaric’, even while claiming to be pursuing their collective well-being – a civilizing mission if ever there was one.

These images that infuse the west’s understandings of female circumcision are not new. Some date back to early white, male travellers and explorers who reported such practices in their travel monographs and diaries. For example, one 17th-century German explorer in Africa horrified and amused his German readers as he entertained them with the following sensational story:

The girls also have their special circumcision; for when they reached their tenth or eleventh year, they insert a stick, to which they have attached ants, into their genitories, to bite away the flesh. Indeed, in order that all the more be bitten away, they sometimes add fresh ants. (in Gollaher, 2000: 190)

Such stories were rarely questioned and assumed to be true. The main task of such writers was to report on what they thought they already knew – ‘natives’ had been pre-defined as ‘savage’ and ‘barbaric’, dwelling in the ‘refused places’ described by Mudimbe (1994). As such, these explorers and travellers worked to confirm, reinforce, and even enhance the already established western images of ‘primitive’ cultures.

Later such images would become articulated within the language of colonialism as one of the reasons Africa needed to be colonized. As with other cultural practices, female circumcision would be judged as a violation of the colonizers’ notion of good Christian morals and values, and as contrary to progress, civilization, and modernity (Kratz, 1994). Recently, these same issues would reappear yet again, but with a new twist. As Kratz (1994) suggests, the practices of female circumcision now enter a new discourse of not only ‘women’s health and well-being’ (articulated within the rhetoric of western feminism), but also that of the ‘universal oppression of women’ and more specifically ‘universal male domination of women’. Even in these modern times, sensational stories continue to be told about the processes of African female circumcision. The American Medical Association (AMA), for example, claims that ‘the instruments most commonly used to perform FGM are razor blades, kitchen knives, scissors, glass, and in some regions, the teeth of the midwife’ (AMA, 1995: 1714, emphasis added). While not a single group is identified which employs such crude instruments, such statements are presented as a matter of ‘fact’ from one text to another in almost identical language.

In addition, the history of colonialism and neo-colonialism has afforded the more powerful west the right to intervene in the lives of its ‘third world’ Others; a right which is not reciprocal. And through the anti-FGM movement, the west has acquired yet another chance to gaze at African women’s genitals. After all, it has been a while now since the genitalia of a South African woman, Sarah Bartman, were sliced from her and displayed in a museum in Paris, France; part of the continuing eroticization and fascination with African women’s sexuality on the part of neocolonial European societies. Dawit (1994) notes a similar voyeurism in the making of a CNN news programme where a young Egyptian girl’s circumcised genitalia were displayed on video for ten minutes. I suggest that such sexual fascination and voyeurism continues to play an important role in the ways in which the practices of female circumcision are understood in some communities. It is such a tendency to voyeurism that prompted Walley (1997) to write that modern medical discourse may in fact be performing the dual role of using the objective ‘language of science to construct the issue as outside of “culture,’’ while simultaneously offering a sanitized way of continuing the preoccupation with genitalia and sexuality of African women’ (Walley, 1997: 423).

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Seeing female bodies through the lenses of feminist science studies As Kasinga’s case suggests, the presumption of the dichotomies presented above facilitates problematic representations of female bodies in anti-FGM discourse. This discourse represents a meta-narrative on female bodies in which, as with colonial discourse, a particular perspective is universalized to stand for all. In this narrative, a ‘natural’ female body has ‘normal’ genitalia as opposed to the ‘mutilated’ ones that result from female circumcision. Female bodies are seen as corporeal or biological entities only, represented as easily separable from their cultural context. For some feminists, such as Alice Walker, such practices result in ‘a distortion of the original anatomy’ (Walker and Parmar, 1993: 19). Elsewhere, Walker invokes a popular biblical view: ‘We can tell you that the body you are born into is sacred and whole, like the earth that produced it, and there is nothing that needs to be subtracted from it’ (Walker and Parmar, 1993: 19). In an interview on Bravo (Walker, 1994), when asked whom she is representing in her mission to eradicate the practices of female circumcision, Walker responded: ‘I am not speaking for anybody. I am not speaking for Africans. The body of a woman is a universal treasure, precious. It should not be mutilated. Period!’ Fran Hosken similarly states, ‘The female genitalia that are created “perfect” are deliberately crippled and altered according to custom’ (Hosken, 1993: 32). Here the search for a normal body and normal genitalia becomes not only a medical scientific concern but a religious one as well. However, while feminists such as Walker and Hosken have been at the forefront of the FGM eradication movement, other feminists have questioned this dualism between nature and culture (body and mind). Grosz, for instance, has problematized such dualisms showing how they are directly rooted in Cartesian thinking, in which ‘the body is . . . understood in terms of organic and instrumental functioning in the natural sciences’ (Grosz, 1994: 8), and from the western Judeo-Christian’s notion of the ‘human body’, as ‘part of a natural or mundane order’ (1994: 8).

As Franklin notes, ‘debates concerning the body, embodiment, and corporeality have become increasingly central to cultural theory in the past decade’ (Franklin, 1996: 95). These debates have disrupted the view of the body as a natural, biological entity with its own physical reality separated from culture. Instead, these new studies of bodies have urged us to see the body as a site of enculturation, performance and embodiment (see for example, Butler, 1994; Franklin, 1996; Gatens, 1996; Grosz, 1994; Haraway, 1997; Terry and Urla, 1995).

For example, Gatens argues that ‘human bodies are diverse and, even anatomically speaking, the selection of a particular image of the human body will be a selection from a continuum of difference’ (Gatens, 1996: vii–viii). Furthermore, many anatomical depictions that are supposed to represent the ‘human body’, according to Gatens, can be viewed as depictions of particular groups of people or individuals and not others. She urges us to abandon the question, ‘How is the body taken up in culture?’ to a question more relevant to this study, ‘How does culture construct the body so that it is understood as a biological given?’ From these perspectives, I suggest that the assertions of a universalized ‘normal’ body in anti-FGM discourse hide the particularity of bodies as practised and imagined from particular cultural and historical standpoints.

By speaking generally about the ‘harmfulness’ of female circumcision, anti-FGM discourse problematically implies that it knows exactly how an ‘unharmed’ body looks. Gatens’ lesson is that one must learn to see the forms and functions of the body as a product of the ways in which each particular culture organizes, regulates and remakes itself, for better or for worse. According to Haraway, ‘The point is to learn to remember that we might have been otherwise, and might yet be, as a matter of embodied fact’ (1997: 39).

Other constructivist perspectives in science, technology, and medical studies have raised similar concerns regarding the representation of human bodies, pointing out how the nature/culture dualism implicit in some medical conceptions of bodies typically ignores not only how such a dualism is culturally produced and maintained, but also how each acts in the production of the other (Callon and Rabeharisoa, 1998; Latour, 1993; Mol and Law, 1998; Whatmore, 2002). Kwaak, for instance, describes two conversations that took place between herself and a Dutch friend and between herself and a Somali friend. The Dutch friend told her ‘what struck her most about the practice of infibulation was the fact that it was so unnatural’ (Kwaak, 1992: 781). This statement reflects the presumption that a normal body, a ‘natural’ body, is always uncircumcised, like hers. Kwaak also remembers a Somali female friend who said to her that it is western women who seem to behave unnaturally: ‘first, they had hair on their arms and legs; second, they did not cover their hair . . . and thirdly she showed great disbelief concerning the fact that western women still had their ugly genitalia and pubic hair’ (1992: 781). Kwaak’s point is that there is a deep chasm between what these two cultural positions view as normal and natural. However, rather than offering a critical perspective that would have been utilized to problematize the two equally exclusive accounts, Kwaak resorted to what Latour (1993) calls a ‘purification ritual’, of separating nature from culture, with those who are successful at doing so being assigned to the category ‘modern’. Conversely, those who are deemed unable to separate the two – those non-moderns who have yet to adopt the scientific worldview and remain mired in nature/culture mixing and blending – have a clouded view of the ‘natural’ since cultural values allegedly get in the way of objectivity. In the end, Kwaak concurs with her (objective) modern Dutch friend’s view, while she is ultimately baffled by the views of her (non-objective) Somali friend: ‘An educated Christian woman I knew in Somalia, [who] just had her third child . . . When I returned from a short visit to the capital, I was surprised to hear that she had been re-infibulated again’ (Kwaak, 1992: 781).

By the same token, the American Medical Association (AMA, 1995) and the World Health Organization (WHO, 1982, 1997, 1998) explain that practices of female circumcision are ‘medically unnecessary’, and thus should be eradicated. Yet while these two institutions admonish members to refrain from participating in ‘unnecessary’ African female circumcision practices, even under the clinical conditions of a hospital setting, culturally acceptable (even expected) male circumcision and elective cosmetic surgeries are not included in their directive. In many western cultural settings, for instance, a ‘normal’ penis is a circumcised penis, while breast implants have now helped define the ‘ideal’ female body. Open virtually any biology textbook (in the US) that shows human male genitalia and you are likely to see a picture of a circumcised penis. In other words, the default image of a normal penis in western contexts is a circumcised penis (see especially AMA, 2000). In fact, not only is the AMA’s (2000) depiction of the normal penis a circumcised one, but also the colour of the diagram clearly depicts the human male as being ‘white’. Meanwhile, within such contexts, the most common explanations that parents give for opting for male circumcision according to Eisenberg, Murkoff and Hathaway, ‘in addition to just “feeling it should be done,’’ include: . . . The locker room syndrome. Parents who don’t want their sons to feel different from their friends or from their father or brothers often choose circumcision’ (1989: 18). African women who claim the same thing for their daughters, on the other hand, are depicted as ignorant, genital mutilators, and in need of western education.

Recently, cases of intersexuality have presented yet another contradiction within the anti-FGM discourse. As an effort to ‘correct ambiguous genitalia’ or ‘abnormal genitals’, such cases involve ‘Cutting off part or all of a girl’s clitoris if it is considered abnormally large or aesthetically repugnant’ (Gollaher, 2000: 203). In 1997, Rolling Stone magazine published a story entitled, ‘The True Story of John/Joan’, about a male infant whose genitalia were supposedly disfigured during the circumcision procedure. One paediatric urologist from Rhode Island insisted that ‘I don’t think it’s an option for nothing to be done. . . I don’t think parents can be told, this is a normal girl, and then have to be faced with what looks like an enlarged clitoris, or a penis, every time they changed the diaper. We try to normalize the genitals to the gender or reduce psychological and functional problems later in life’ (Urology Times, 1997: 10–12).

By constructing categories of what is ‘medically necessary’ and ‘medically unnecessary’, both the AMA and WHO in the above sources assume that what is medically necessary is a universal reality that is not produced through specific cultural, political, and historical values and interest, as opposed to practices deemed unnecessary. However, we can reassess this dichotomy through feminist science studies theory that suggests that all knowledges are mediated – that there is no such thing as unmediated reality that exists ‘out there’ waiting to be discovered or to be described. The concepts of ‘situated knowledge’ and ‘embodied knowledge’ help to explain this point. According to Haraway (1991, 1997), situated knowledge is never about seeing the world ‘clearly’. It is never about mapping the world from unmarked positions. It is always about accountability, somewhereability, locatability, positioning(s), responsibility, and partiality. In this sense, embodied or situated knowledge is useful because it allows for mobility beyond fixed stations or beyond the sites of the final and only word. Haraway writes:

All that critical reflexivity, diffraction, situated knowledges, modest interventions, or strong objectivity ‘dodge’ is the double-faced, self-identical god of transcendent cultures of no culture, on the one hand, and of subjects and objects exempt from the permanent finitude of engaged interpretation, on the other. No layer of the onion of the practice that is technoscience is outside the reach of technologies of interpretation and critical inquiry about positioning and location; that is the condition of articulation, embodiment, and mortality. The technical and the political are like the abstract and concrete, the foreground and the background, the text and context, the subject and the object. (Haraway, 1997: 37)

In this sense, according to Haraway (1991), the only way to have a view/vision is to be standing from somewhere in particular. Furthermore, as Haraway continues, ‘Vision is always a question of the power to see – and perhaps of the violence implicit in our visualizing practices’ (1991: 192). Butler makes a similar point when she asks: ‘Indeed, how is it a position becomes a position, for clearly not every utterance qualifies as such? It is clearly a matter for certain authorizing power, and that clearly does not emanate from position itself’ (Butler, 1994: 160).

I argue that such feminist science studies perspectives offer useful guidance and metaphors needed to understand what is done away with when anti-FGM discourse constructs meanings of female circumcision through such a dualistic approach. They help to raise the question, what forms of violence and silencing does anti-FGM discourse introduce, replicate, and maintain? If the idea of embodied knowledge was to be applied by anti-FGM discourse, then a possibility of envisioning bodies differently might emerge, that is accountable to local specificities and variations, rather than replicating the western view of a ‘natural body’.

Telling my story of irua ria atumia The feminist idea of embodiment or culturally situated bodies provides an important means of locating and critiquing problems in anti-FGM discourse. One problem with anti-FGM discourse is its refusal to recognize differences – ignoring the diversity of female circumcision’s forms and histories. Perspectives that present bodies as ‘figures of performances’ (Butler, 1990, 1994); as sites of ‘imagination’ (Gatens, 1996); as ‘collectively distributed’ (Callon and Rabeharisoa, 1998); and as ‘a matter of embodied fact’ (Haraway, 1997), can help transform assumptions in the female circumcision debate, pushing participants to rethink the relationship between nature and culture in the representation of bodies. To re-emphasize my point, these perspectives share a common trait in their ability to redirect us away from the conventional assumption which, according to Grosz, refuses to ‘acknowledge the distinctive complexities of organic bodies, the fact that bodies construct and in turn are constructed by an interior, a psychical and a signifying view-point, a consciousness or perspective’ (1994: 8).

Taking such views seriously, I draw upon the recollection of my own personal experience as a Gĩkũyũ woman from Kenya who underwent irua ria atumia, the circumcision ritual that marks the passage to womanhood, to demonstrate how ‘normality’ regarding bodies is culturally produced. My intent in this section is not to provide yet another universal account of how female circumcision should be viewed, or even a comprehensive or ‘authentic’ view of Gĩkũyũ practices, but rather to demonstrate the situatedness of bodies in relation to such practices, all the while recalling Haraway’s point that ‘Location is also partial in the sense of being for some worlds and not others’ (1997: 37, emphasis in original). Additionally, I see myself as a post-colonial product; a hybrid; raised as a Catholic in a rural peasant family in central Kenya, now living and teaching in the US – with all ambivalences about cultural practices that such a mixture can produce. Such a story matters to me first of all because it is rendered invisible and unimportant by anti-FGM discourse.

In Gĩkũyũ, context, culture and bodies are not held separately, and they are historically tied very closely to circumcision, for both women and men. The oral history I encountered while growing up presented irua ria atumia (female circumcision) as a ritual that was appropriated by the Gĩkũyũ women, from a neighbouring ethnic group, as a way of introducing a celebration of ‘womanhood’ to a culture that only celebrated ‘manhood’. Yet this empowering image was reconfigured within Christianity. As Edgerton notes, ‘for reasons that remain obscure, the church did not object to the [Gĩkũyũ] practices of circumcising teen-aged boys, but it regarded the circumcision of adolescent girls as barbaric’ (Edgerton, 1989: 40). To me this reflects a common Judeo-Christian assumption that circumcised male bodies are normal and acceptable, and even that painful passage to manhood is desirable. On the other hand, the same tradition upholds a presumption that female bodies are innately passive and should be protected from such pain. Contrary to missionary concern, for Gĩkũyũ women, as for men, enduring pain bravely is also integral to the passage of womanhood, as Kratz (1994) observed. Additionally, given the dominant view that men transcend nature while women remain nature-associated, it is possible to suggest that irua offers a clear case in which women disrupt such a paternalistic dualism as a way of marking their entry into culture.

While the cultural significance of female circumcision has been waning in the past few decades, due mainly to church pressures, its cultural importance was still strong enough during my youth that I saw it as a necessity. It may seem ironic, given the tales of ‘flight from torture’ told in the media, but my parents refused to allow me to be circumcised, as it was against Catholic teachings. I had to threaten to run away from home and drop out of school before my parents relented and allowed me to be circumcised. The procedure was performed with a medical scalpel in a local clinic run by a woman who was a trained nurse in the western sense, and also a relative of an important Gĩkũyũ female medical healer and powerful leader of the early 20th century, Wairimũ Wa Kĩnene. During the operation, the hood of the clitoris was cut through its apex which caused the hood to split open and the clitoris to become more completely exposed. Such exposure has been associated with sexual enhancement. However, any generalization here might be unwise as it is likely that women’s experience of irua varies, perhaps significantly.

Performed in a time of many social transformations in the 1970s, my circumcision was not the communal experience it would have been in earlier decades, an event that would have tied me forever to other women and men of my ‘age-set’ (riika). However, despite shifting cultural forms, circumcision still continued to be fundamentally important in that those who were circumcised were inscribed with the status and privilege of ‘womanhood’. Usually performed on girls aged 14–16, Gĩkũyũ female circumcision, like many other forms, does not involve holding young women down so that they cannot escape their ‘torture’ from ‘mutilating villains’. Rather, it is a chance for teenage girls to demonstrate their bravery by unflinchingly accepting their moment of pain, as mentioned in some Gĩkũyũ songs.

Prior to my circumcision, my circumcised age-mates still considered me (16, at the time) a child. With their newly acquired ‘womanhood’, they wore a new ‘no nonsense’ attitude that demanded the attention of most adults around. I was not allowed to join the more serious conversations about topics such as menstrual cycles, pregnancy, and sexual fantasies. I could not talk to other adults without having to worry about the words I chose to employ, without having to worry about interrupting someone. I was required, with all the other little kids (!), to cover my ears with my hands whenever grown-ups made sexual jokes with one another that children were not allowed to hear. All the uncircumcised girls (Irĩgũ) and boys (Ihĩĩ), seen as childish and immature, were required to respect and to give up their seats when requested. In fact, the most profoundly humiliating insult that one can level at a Gĩkũyũ adult is to accuse them of acting like an ‘uncircumcised’ boy or girl. Today, however, as the importance of female circumcision declines, this insult has less power over women than it does over men, for whom circumcision remains a must.

By completing my irua, I became a Gĩkũyũ woman. And even though the concept of ‘age-set’ had been disrupted by the time of my circumcision, I entered a category whose pleasures and benefits were previously denied to me. As a 16-year-old girl, I just wanted to become a woman like many other Gĩkũyũ girls, problematically or unproblematically.

Historicizing Gĩkũyũ female and male irua (circumcision) While somewhat dislocated in the post-colonial context, the cultural coding of bodies was even more profound prior to colonialism, when circumcision formed an unambivalent focal point for group identity. Through circumcision, cultural and historical events that happened throughout Gĩkũyũ history would be recorded upon the bodies of women and men, who by virtue of being circumcised together, not only formed a tight bond (an agegrade or age-set known as riika, or mariika in the plural), but a specific name would be allocated to signify both these bonds and the particular historical event that took place during that moment. Kenyatta wrote:

The irua marks the commencement of participation in various governing groups in the tribal administration, because the real age-group begins from the day of the physical operation. The history and legends of the people are explained and remembered according to the names given to various age-groups at the time of the initiation ceremony. For example, if a devastating famine occurred at the time of the initiation, that particular irua group would be known as ‘famine’ (ng’aragu). In the same way, they have been able to record the historical moment when Europeans introduced a number of maladies such as syphilis into the country, for those initiated at the time when this disease first showed itself are called gatego, i.e., syphilis. Historical events are recorded and remembered [in the body] in the same manner. Without this custom a tribe that had no written records would not have been able to keep a record of important events and happenings in the life of the nation. (Kenyatta, 1959: 129–30)

It is not uncommon to this day to hear older Gĩkũyũ generations of women and men identify themselves with the names of their riika (age-grade). For instance, my grandmother’s riika is that of ndege (airplane), signifying the moment when airplanes were first observed in Gĩkũyũ society.

Far from maliciously torturing women, circumcision not only gave Gĩkũyũ women some access to social, political and economic power in an undeniably patriarchical society, but it also allowed them to be keepers of Gĩkũyũ history, a valuable responsibility. Furthermore, apart from their obvious gendered differences in relation to the surgical operation and cultural expectations associated with each, there was little difference in the ceremonial aspects of female and male circumcision. Both women and men were circumcised on the same day, they wore the same ceremonial clothing, they both were secluded in the forest (for educational instructions) for the same time period.

For the Gĩkũyũ, the circumcision initiation did not stand by itself, but was integrated with other social activities, such as ngwĩko, a communal sexual practice for newly circumcised women and men after the healing period. According to my grandmother (Njoki), ngwĩko itself was accompanied by a series of long dances that took place throughout the day after which, as the night approached, groups of women and men were paired and moved together into a kĩrĩrĩ (women’s hut), or a thingira (men’s hut). During this time, both women and men were expected to engage in sexual activity where both would take multiple sexual partners in a one-night session so that they might attain the ultimate sexual excitement through the process of ngwĩko (see Edgerton, 1989; Maloba, 1993; Kenyatta, 1959; Kratz, 1994; Leakey, 1977; Shaw, 1995). As Shaw points out, ngwĩko trained Gĩkũyũ women ‘to respond to a wide range of bodily sensations, and the period of socially sanctioned sexual activity allowed her time to appreciate her own body’s responses’ (1995: 79). Furthermore, sexual activity between members of the riika could take place for the rest of their lives, regardless of marital status. It might be possible here to compare ngwĩko with another practice that is performed by the Baganda people of Uganda that is referred to as okukyalira ensiko, or simply ‘visiting the Forest’. As Kilbride and Kilbride (1990) explain, soon after their menstruation and sometimes even before, young girls would be taken to a secluded place in the forest where their ‘labia minora’ would be physically massaged outward in order to elongate it:

Elongation narrows the vaginal entrance and keeps it ‘warm and tight’, an attribute highly desired by Baganda men. Ssenga [father’s sister] teaches the girl specific utterances and techniques appropriate during intercourse. Traditionally, women are taught to not only desire sex but to also lead an active sex life. A woman is expected to reach orgasm several times before the man and respond throughout intercourse with vigorous body movement. A man is evaluated by women according to the length of time coitus is maintained before his orgasm (about thirty minutes is typical). A too-rapid male ejaculation is likely to evoke female anger and comparison with, for example, a ‘hen’ (enkoko) who, of course, has rapid coitus. A second erection soon after orgasm is also expected of men. (Kilbride and Kilbride, 1990: 92)

For Christian missionaries, practices of okukyalira ensiko and ngwĩko were seen as immoral acts displaying African ‘promiscuousness’ that was an even greater affront to Christian values than female circumcision itself. As one missionary testified:

The most important rite among the Kikuyu was (and still is) that of initiation. The sign of initiation for both sexes is circumcision. . . . The physical operation is the same in all areas although the rites vary quite considerably from place to place. In every case, however, the ceremonies are accompanied by dancing and immorality. After the ceremony the initiates are allowed to wander around the countryside for several months singing and dancing. During this time they are given instruction in matters relating to the tribe, to fighting, and to sex. As we shall see later the church was compelled to denounce the immoral practice [ngwĩko], which accompanied initiation together with female circumcision as injurious to the body and degrading to the soul. On the other hand, until recent years the church has done nothing to replace the sex instruction, which was given at initiation. (Cole, 1959: 130)

To missionaries, ngwĩko epitomized the vices of fornication and promiscuity. Therefore, prohibiting both ngwĩko and female circumcision was seen as necessary in order to conquer such vices. Thus, according to Kenyatta, many women and men ‘have been punished and regarded as sinners by missionaries simply for having been found sleeping together in such a manner’ (1959: 152). In contemporary times, ngwĩko has been suppressed to the point of eradication. By the time of my own circumcision, ngwĩko was already relegated to history. Irua, on the other hand, has only been partially suppressed, despite legal prohibition and years of church activity. However, it is clear that the importance of irua is now less than it was in the past. If I were a girl growing up today, it is not clear to me whether I would have the same desire for circumcision that I had in the 1960s and 1970s.

A reflexive look at irua ria atumia My intention here is not to suggest that irua for the Gĩkũyũ is better or any less problematic than other cultural practices that mark women’s bodies in one way or another. And probably no amount of critical reflexivity will protect me here from those who, when criticized for imperialist and arrogant representations of ‘Others’, are quick to dismiss such criticism as nothing more than a mindless defence of tradition. However, far from blindly celebrating the Gĩkũyũ irua ria atumia and my experience of it, I am perfectly aware that it is never possible for any cultural practice, no matter how small, powerful, acceptable or desirable, to be non-problematic. For values and interests only exist in competition with other values and interests. Consider that, to some extent, the deployment of circumcision rituals is part of an attempt to galvanize an essential ‘Gĩkũyũ identity’ in relation to neighbouring ethnicities and later to colonial intrusions. In 2003 a contemporary Gĩkũyũ social movement called Mũngiki is engaged in what one would call a dangerous form of revivalism, even fundamentalism, of ‘Gĩkũyũ culture’ in the face of social change. Embracing female circumcision as an important component of this revival, some Mũngiki members are reported in the Kenyan media to have resorted to violence against some Gĩkũyũ women who resist this reinscription. As Edward Said makes clear in Culture and Imperialism, one danger here lies in the assumption that there is such a thing as one uncontaminated (Gĩkũyũ) ‘identity’ or ‘culture’ that exists ‘out there’ in the first place – and into which some would automatically (or forcibly) be included while others are excluded.

At the same time, to re-emphasize a question I raised earlier, in the presence of so many religious and other cultural disputes over practices of female circumcision, is it possible to say that the decision to refrain from such practices is not equally a product of specific values and interests? For example, should we say that those in my village who refrained from practices of female circumcision but who chose Christianity instead (like those who assert ‘science’ as on their side) cleverly and safely managed to escape the markings of culture? Are their bodies any less culturally marked than those whose bodies underwent practices of female circumcision? To answer ‘yes’ to these questions allies one with common fixations (feminist or otherwise) on dichotomies of bodily oppression (via circumcision) versus freedom (via eradication). I instead would like to move the dialogue to rethink this idea that bodies exist outside of cultural performativity, and to look at multiple and heterogeneous ways in which not only cultures, bodies, and sexualities emerge in contextualized entanglements, but also the kinds of negotiations and ambiguities that are involved in such processes. For instance, while circumcised women are at times invited to describe its impact on their sexuality or their ability to achieve orgasm, there is no interrogation of the constructions of ‘sexuality’ and ‘orgasm’ upon which the discussion is based.

Also, it is important to point out that all genital operations (like all other physical operations) come with the risk of infections and bleeding, and irua is not an exception to such problems. This is especially the case in places where the healing practices that once accompanied irua have been discontinued and the new healing procedures are expensive, or have not been adopted due to fear of prosecution in places where circumcision is outlawed. My question is how do we situate the potential for infections associated with female circumcision in the context of similar risks with the multitude of other body modifications practised by people worldwide? Besides those of female circumcision, consider similarities with abortion practices, which, when driven underground, routinely result in serious health problems and even death for women and girls. Yet our consistent call is for ‘safe and legal’ abortions, rather than their eradication, on the basis that women should control their own bodies. Also consider the host of legal and fashionable body modifications (in the US especially) such as tattooing, piercing, penis/clitoris slicing, tongue slicing, and cosmetic procedures (including botox injections, liposuction, breast implants, and female genital trimming) that escape the ‘mutilation’ label. How is it determined which of these practices leads to a risk that warrants the emergence of a global eradication movement? How do we discuss these issues without creating an imperialistic impression that only those with some social, political, and economic power and who live in the west have rights to take risks with their bodies?

Conclusion: listening to the Other in ways that seriously matter Hopefully, what my story conveys is that there are ways of looking at the female circumcision issue which go beyond colonialist stories of barbarity and primitivity; stories that surely leave the represented without a sense of agency. Practices of female circumcision involve negotiations, ambiguities, complexities, and contradictions that must be addressed and not dismissed, even as we problematize them. What I hope, at least partly, to accomplish is not to resolve issues once and for all but rather to promote a dialogue which I find seriously lacking or closed-off by current anti-FGM discourse which often presumes a universalized perception of embodied women. Indeed, writings from different margins, and in particular those of post-colonial feminists, such as Chandra Mohanty, Trinh Minh-ha, Gayatri Spivak, Francoise Lionnet, among others, have taught us that beyond our desire to figure out and maintain what ‘women’ have in ‘common’, the question of ‘difference’ is something that we must learn how to address. That is, even as we extend our hands for a ‘common theoretical and ethical ground from which to argue for political solidarity’ (Lionnet, 1995: 3) with other women everywhere, we must learn how to do so ‘without objectifying the “other” woman, or subsuming collective goals under the banner of sameness’ (Lionnet, 1995: 3).

Such a goal may seem difficult to attain given such entrenched images of the Other. Yet Spivak concurs that such an attempt is a must. She states: ‘however unfeasible and inefficient it may sound, I see no way to avoid insisting that there is a simultaneous other focus: not merely who am I? But who is the other woman? How am I naming her? How does she name me?’ (Spivak, 1990: 179).

In other words, women whose everyday life practices are culturally situated at the margins have given us unique insights into how they survive and negotiate structures of power, but also more importantly, how they resist such structures in the best ways they know how. In this sense, they seem to be saying to us – indeed, as my own mother once told me – ‘Please! Before you go naming me and all my troubles, just know that I also have a say in that!’ I interpret my mother’s statement as meaning that, first, she is not a passive victim, and second, if I care enough to listen, I might just learn that she too has something to say regardless of whether I perceive it as ambiguous, contradictory, or inappropriate.