Knowledge is made for cutting: genealogies of race and gender in female circumcision discourse (2010)
This study is a Exploratory research regarding All FGM/C with the following characteristics:
Author(s): Kaitlin E. Noss
FGM/C Type(s): All
Health area of focus: None.
Objective: Explore how this violence has persisted in neo/colonial eras as part of the white western feminist ‘care of self’ technique of
displacing female abjection through the pleasure of whiteness,analyzes examples of current female circumcision discourse within U.S.
feminist contexts and western-based anti-circumcision projects operating in Kenya. This analysis reveals that,despite recent critiques from postcolonial scholars and activists,this knowledge produced around female circumcision perpetuates discursive and material violence against Kenyan Maasai communitie
Study Population: Not stated
Findings: The idea of development as it emerges in this historical moment is inextricable from contemporary ideas of the body—from road infrastructure to education goals,the discourse and practices of international aid originating from multinational organizations and small NGOs alike predominantly center around western understandings of the proper care for and development of the human body as the primary unit of civilization itself. The specific genealogical exploration of female circumcision discourse that I have endeavored to outline is only one entry point into this paradigm. It is particularly provocative to explore this western preoccupation because it occurs just at the juncture of individual and societal regulation,wherein surveillance at the bodily level is bound to the control of populations at large. Excavating the historical forces that perpetuate this preoccupation among western feminists leads those of us still hopeful about feminist activism away from blaming individuals and toward a deeper awareness of how race,gender and neocolonialism operate to entrench global inequality—and toward understanding how this occurs at the level of our very self-identities. Thinking through this dynamic can be an incredibly sobering and encouraging undertaking—one that demands rigorous and focused historical and sociological explorations into the relationship between development and the body and the feminist potentials therein. I now turn toward the beginnings of that exploration in a brief look at how current trends in international development work in Kenya and Maasailand relate to the bio-necropolitical processes that operated during formal colonialism.
Geographical coverage
Region(s):Not specified
Country(ies):Not specified