The Female Circumcision Controversy
The Female Circumcision Controversy
An Anthropological Perspective
Ellen Gruenbaum
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia
Copyright © 2001 Ellen Gruenbaum
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gruenbaum, Ellen.
The female circumcision controversy : an anthropological perspective / Ellen Gruenbaum.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8122-3573-8 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-8122-1746-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Female circumcision. I. Title.
GN484 .G78 2000
| 392.1—dc21 | 00-041803 |
For my parents,
Ruth and Luther Gruenbaum
Contents
Introduction: Grappling with the “Female Circumcision” Controversy
3. Marriage and Morality
4. Ethnicity
5. Sexuality
6. Economic Development
7. Change
8. Involvement
Appendix: Organizations That Focus on Female Genital Cutting Issues
Glossary
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Grappling with the “Female Circumcision” Controversy
To outsiders, the practice euphemistically known as “female circumcision” is shocking. That people surgically alter the genitals of young girls and women, usually in painful and unhygienic procedures that can cause grave harm to their health, seems truly horrible. Why do loving parents allow such things to happen? How can they bring themselves to celebrate these events? How can they justify the practice when occasionally a girl dies from the injuries?
The horror female circumcision evokes is grist for outrage, electrifying a cry for urgent change. At the new millennium, there are still millions of girls and women in dozens of countries who bear the scars of cutting done to their genitalia early in life. Worldwide, it is estimated that an additional two million girls too young to give their consent undergo some form of female genital cutting each year. How can this be?
This book offers an exploration of the female circumcision practices themselves, the reasons they are done, examples of the social contexts, the health, social, and sexual consequences, and the controversies surrounding the process of change. It addresses many of the most frequent questions and challenges I have encountered in teaching and lecturing about these topics, with the intention to improve understanding, reduce simplistic denunciation, and provide a solid grounding for those who decide to support reform efforts. For people outside the cultural contexts where female circumcision is still practiced, developing understanding requires much more than merely knowing the facts or arriving at a philosophic position for or against. To allow readers more opportunity to consider the social contexts and the human experience, I include narratives and examples from my ethnographic research in Sudan.
The Practices Known as “Female Circumcision”
“Female circumcision” is one term used for the cutting and removal of tissues of genitalia of young girls to conform to social expectations. There is tremendous variation in the practices and their meaning. In some cultural contexts, these operations are done on very young children, including infants and toddlers (Shandall 1967, Toubia 1993, Abdal Rahman 1997). Anne Jennings has reported southern Egyptian girls undergoing the procedure at age one or two (1995:48). Most commonly, it is done to young girls between the ages of four and eight. But there are other cultural contexts (e.g., the Maasai of eastern Africa) where it is young teens, around the time of marriage (fourteen to fifteen or even older), who are circumcised.
While I consider it important to resist generalizing about the types of genital alterations around which the controversy unfolds, the variant forms can be differentiated and grouped. The least severe forms of the operations (excluding those that merely wash or prick the clitoris or prepuce without removal of any tissues) are those where a small part of the clitoral prepuce (“hood”) is cut away, analogous to the foreskin removal of male circumcision. Toubia asserts that in her years of medical practice in Sudan, Egypt, and the United Kingdom, she never saw any circumcisions that precisely fit this description (1996). Nevertheless, it is referred to elsewhere, at least as a theoretical possibility, and is discussed later in this volume. This form is grouped with those that include the cutting, pricking, or partial removal (or “reduction”) of the clitoris under the rubric of “sunna circumcision.” This term “sunna circumcision” is in fact applied to a wide variety of surgeries, and the term itself offers serious problems of interpretation of the meaning, propriety, and religious associations of the surgeries. The basic translation of the word “sunna” is “tradition,” and it usually connotes the traditions of Islam’s Prophet Mohammed, meaning those things that he did or advocated during his lifetime.1 In Sudan, some use the term “sunna” for even more severe forms of female circumcision than the reductions just described.
Full clitoridectomies are termed “excision” or “intermediate” by most writers. These are more severe forms of surgery that include removal of the prepuce, the clitoris, and usually most or part of the labia minora, or inner lips. In Sudan this form is usually called sunna even though it is more serious than what some writers mean by sunna. The reason for this is that the folk classifications, in many areas at least, consist of only two forms, sunna and pharaonic circumcision, even though the operations vary a great deal from one circumciser to another and the sunna terminology seems to be applied to any circumcisions that are not “pharaonic.” Midwives and others also use an imprecise term, nuss (“half”), for some of the in-between forms.
Pharaonic circumcision entails the removal of all the external genitalia–prepuce, clitoris, labia minora, and all or part of the labia majora—and infibulation, or stitching together, of the vulva. Once healed, this most extreme form leaves a perfectly smooth vulva of skin and scar tissue with only a single tiny opening, preserved during healing by the insertion of a small object such as a piece of straw, for urination and menstrual flow. The extremely small size of the opening makes first sexual intercourse very difficult or impossible, necessitating rupture or cutting of the scar tissue around the opening. In a variation of infibulation that is slightly less severe, the trimmed labia minora are sewn shut but the labia majora are left alone. Reinfibulation is done after childbirth.
In short, the variety