Between Rites and Rights: Excision in Women's Experiential Texts and Human Contexts
Chantal Zabus
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 ag ... More
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.
Keywords:
women writers,
excision,
female genital mutilation,
female body,
human rights,
cult of culture,
patriarchal surveillance,
male circumcision,
high fashion,
Africa
Bibliographic Information
Print publication date: 2007 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780804756877 |
Published to Stanford Scholarship Online: June 2013 |
DOI:10.11126/stanford/9780804756877.001.0001 |