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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.

This book is about tradition. But even more than tradition itself, it is about the questions surrounding tradition. The tradition central to this book is that of Yiddish poetry written by women and draws from Ezra Korman’s 1928 anthology of women Yiddish poets, Yiddishe dikhterins: Antologye. Korman collected Yiddish poems by seventy women writers who published between 1586 and 1927. The earliest figures printed either poems with an all-encompassing religious context; the poets in the late nineteenth century reflected the emerging ideas of Jewish nationhood; and the twentieth-century poets composed in the milieu of radicalism, modernism, and historical trauma. From Korman’s collection, one might assume that in 1928 women poets held an accepted place in Yiddish literature. In fact, his volume was the first and only collection ever to be compiled in Yiddish to highlight the work of women poets and to suggest that they wrote within a tradition. There are many questions pertaining to this particular body of work, which this book seeks to address, including: Do these poems constitute a tradition of poetry? Did women poets write with an awareness of creating within or outside of a tradition? And perhaps, most important of all, of what does this tradition consist? And what value or profit lies in using it as a critical category?