Between Rites and Rights: Excision in Women's Experiential Texts and Human Contexts
Between Rites and Rights: Excision in Women's Experiential Texts and Human Contexts
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Abstract
In the past five decades and over three generations, African women writers have introduced a new autobiographical discourse around their experience of excision that brings nuance to the female genital mutilation debate. Spanning pharaonic times through classical antiquity to the onset of the twenty-first century, this study shows how this experiential body of literature—encompassing English, Arabic, and French—goes far beyond such traditional topics as universalism and cultural relativism, by locating the female body as a site of liminality between European and African factions, subject and agent; consent and dissent; custom and human rights. Women across Africa's “excision belt” have broken away from the male discourses of anthropology and psychoanalysis and have fled from “the cult of culture” and from religious and patriarchal surveillance. They have relocated their struggle to the West, where they seek empowerment and wrestle with the law. While showing the limits of autobiography, this book interweaves Freudian hysteria, the surgical age, the world of high fashion, male circumcision's “fearful symmetry,” and Western body modification.
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Front Matter
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Introduction
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Part One The Cult of Culture
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Part Two Speaking from Memory: Religion and Remembrance
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Part Three From Sealing to Opening Up: Sex, Exile, and Empowerment
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Seven
The Sealed Condition: From the Beginnings to Freud and Herzi
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Eight
Silence, Exile, and the Spectacle of the Fashioned Body Aman, Barry, Dirie: Aman, Barry, Dirie
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Nine
The Whole Woman and the Law: Keïta, Ahmadu, Kassindja, Dirie, Khady, Abdi, Korn
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Ten
The Exciser
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Conclusion: Between Rights and Future Rites
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Seven
The Sealed Condition: From the Beginnings to Freud and Herzi
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End Matter
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