Between Rites and Rights: Excision in Women's Experiential Texts and Human ContextsIn 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 unprecedented 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 the African "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. These women have relocated their struggle to the West, where they seek empowerment and wrestle with the law. While showing the limits of autobiography, Between Rites and Rights boldly interweaves Freudian hysteria, the surgical age, the world of high fashion, male circumcision’s "fearful symmetry,” and Western body modification. |
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Abdi Abu-Sahlieh African Ahmadu Alice alternative rites Aman Aman's anthropologist Arabic Atiya's autobiography Barry Bintou blood bodily body modification ceremony Chapter Christian clitoridectomy clitoris context cultural custom Daughter of Mumbi defloration Desert Dawn Desert Flower Dirie's discourse Dogon Efuru Egyptian European evoked excision experience Face of Eve Facing Mount Kenya female body Female Circumcision female excision female genital female sexual feminist French gender genital mutilation genitalia girl child Herzi Hidden Face human rights husband infibulation initiation irua Islam Kassindja Keïta's Kenyan Kenyatta Kesso Kesso Barry Khady Kikuyu later legs London male circumcision Malimouna marriage memory missionaries mother Muslim Muthoni narrative Nawal Nawal El Saadawi novel operation orgasm pain Paris pleasure practice quoted Qur'an recalls ritual Saadawi scar self-writing sister Somali Soninke story Sudan Thiong'o tion tradition trauma tribade unexcised University Press vagina virginity vulva Waciuma's Waiyaki Waris Dirie Western woman women wound writing young Zabus