It was the structure that initially placed them in a situation where selling a kidney could even be considered as a valid option. Yet they could have gone down another desperate pathway, so selecting that option was an expression of agency (albeit limited). However, most interesting is not the agency demonstrated when they chose to sell a kidney, but the agency they demonstrated in their representation of themselves and their choice. It is the men who chose to present their actions as brave, as the result not just of economic desperation, but of heroism. It is the men who chose to show themselves as brave providers, who would do anything – make any choice – to ensure their family’s wellbeing.
STOP & THINK
How do socially marginal men attempt to contest victim discourses and simultaneously assert their own critique of their positioning within the organ market through local perception of masculinity?
Globalization: The body
Body organ trafficking
As a result of consumerism, the media, the tourist industry and global migration, people in most societies have changed the way they think about the body. The vulnerability of bodies is apparent within the context of globalization, illustrated by a rise in global organ-trafficking in which the human body is viewed as a pure commodity. It is mostly the poorest and the most disadvantaged people of the global South who sell their organs and other body tissues to affluent people in First World countries. In the UK, tens of thousands of people are on the waiting list for organ transplantation. Organ procurement is based on a voluntary system, where individuals choose to donate organs. There is more demand for the organs than supply in this process, and many people never receive the organ they need in order to survive. This has led to an increase in transplant tourism, where buyers from the UK, the USA and Europe travel to developing countries in search of affordable kidneys and other body parts.
Virtual bodies
Cyber-culture and new media technologies have expanded and extended the way the body looks and functions in the boundary between the real and virtual, as the human and the machine overlap and merge (this is explored more fully in Chapter 11). Since the internet has become a common public sphere of social interaction, networking and recreation, the constitution and definition of the body has become even more fluid in cyberspace. Interaction in the virtual world does not require physical presence. Through the mediated image of the self, humans communicate and create versions of their own bodies in this cyberspace. Virtual places, such as Second Life, free the body from its physical limitations, as it can be rewritten through an avatar or a visual representation of the user. In real life, humans encounter characteristics such as gender, race, ethnicity and age, but in the virtual world the avatars transcend biological and social status variables. The global capitalist economy has also fuelled female sexual slavery, sexual tourism and the trafficking of women and children, especially from undeveloped countries. These exploited people provide examples of how bodies are shaped through technological, political, economic and cultural traditions in the modern global world.
Female genital cutting in Ghana (Saida Hodžić)
In my book The Twilight of Cutting (2016), I introduce you to the worlds of Ghanaian women and men who have been most engaged in and affected by anti-genital-cutting campaigns: cut women, healers who tended to their wounds, circumcisers, NGO workers who campaigned against cutting, nurses taught how to watch over cut women and their children, health volunteers who saved girls from bleeding, chiefs who banned cutting, government officials who sent circumcisers to jail, lawyers who liberated them from prison, and others. The Ghanaians’ transnational collaborators, including their donors, former colonial administrators (British) and missionaries (French), researchers, and activists from the global North, are the book’s secondary characters on purpose: I acknowledge their continued power but refuse to amplify it.
The Twilight challenges the intersections of racism and eurocentrism that drive policies and projects that treat cut girls and women as objects of concern or as prospective criminals, rather than as active agents in their own lives, political subjects and worthy recipients of supportive policies of care. Everything we know and feel about female genital cutting has been shaped by racism and eurocentrism. Media, government bodies, NGOs and activists misunderstand cutting as a solely injurious practice, misrecognizing the meanings and values claimed by many cut women and girls. Not just cutting itself, but entire cultures of people that have historically practised cutting are misconceived as barbaric, brutally patriarchal, violent (punitive) and unchanging. These misconceptions devalue entire peoples and, in turn, legitimize denying them humanity, dignity, equal worth and supportive care. When people who have historically practised female genital cutting receive attention, they are treated as potential criminals and are surveilled, which means that they are closely followed and watched over but not looked after by the government. They are treated with suspicion, disbelief and distrust: when they say that they have ended cutting or that they do not intend for their children to get cut, their words are neither heard nor trusted. They are seen as unwilling to change their ways and intent on keeping their traditions.
The Twilight of Cutting shows that African women and men who campaign against cutting are not exceptional warriors fighting against their communities; instead they are trying to work with those communities and change them from within. Anti-cutting campaigns are sites of collaboration and struggle. Ghanaians engaged and affected by them have ethical dilemmas and political concerns about the divergence between law and justice and healthcare and governmental care that are relevant globally.
Rather than treating cutting as an African problem to be debated by Westerns, I show how it became a particular kind of a problem for Ghanaians starting in colonialism. Ghanaians are not protagonists in someone else’s story, but drive the story, although I (a Bosnian-German-American feminist anthropologist, a former refugee and a perpetual non-citizen), as an observer and a writer, am embedded in the narrative and control what is said and how it said. Indeed, knowledge and anti-cutting policies go hand in hand; Chapter 1 of The Twilight shows how both anthropology and feminism have been entangled with anti-cutting political projects for over a century.
The reorientation of debates about female genital cutting so that it centres the perspectives of the various Ghanaians involved in its endings is the book’s primary contribution. It entails showing a radical plurality of perspectives. Many activist documentaries and texts about cutting present multiple voices, but devalue and vilify those they see as abhorrent, such as the grandmothers who insist on having her granddaughters cut, or the circumcisers who perform the procedure. The Twilight suspends judgement and foregrounds understanding, leading to unexpected insights, linkages and new ways of comprehending both the endings of cutting and the common worlds we inhabit. Here, I highlight two main reorientations it leads to: the book shifts the debate about cutting from individual rights to social justice, and from punitive law and ‘carceral feminism’ to a critique of criminalization.
From individual rights to social justice
The common women’s and reproductive rights frameworks highlight the individual body, as well as woman’s empowerment, autonomy, choice, freedom, control over her body. The question is not whether this framework is right, but whether it is sufficiently comprehensive; The Twilight shows that it is not. The rights framework treats cutting as an isolated phenomenon: it singles out genitals, neglecting women’s overall bodily health and well-being, and it separates the concern about cutting of girls and women from the broader conditions in their communities. Ghanaian women from whom I learned about the endings of cutting do not feel empowered. Rather, they teach us that women’s bodies and their abilities to determine the fate of their bodies are shaped by the conditions