Genital Cutting and Western Discourses on Sexuality

Abstract

This article explores dominant discourses surrounding male and female genital cutting. Over a similar period of time, these genital operations have separately been subjected to scrutiny and criticism. However, although critiques of female circumcision have been widely taken up, general public opinion toward male circumcision remains indifferent. This difference cannot merely be explained by the natural attributes and effects of these practices. Rather, attitudes toward genital cutting reflect historically and culturally specific understandings of the human body. In particular, I suggest that certain problematic understandings of male and female sexuality are deeply implicated in the dominant Western discourses on genital surgery.

Projected Cultural Histories of the Cutting of Female Genitalia: A Poor Reflection as in a Mirror

“…In contrast to male circumcision, clitoridectomy was soon abandoned, at least in Great Britain: "Much favoured by American practioners, who appear to have performed it well into the twentieth century, clitoridectomy never became established in Britain as an acceptable treatment for female masturbation" (1996: 61). There are also important points to be made by juxtaposing current views of male and female circumcision: for example, Bell (2005) has shown how discourses and assumptions about medical and sexual consequences of male and female circumcision are related to today's cultural (Western) constructions of male and female sexuality.…”

Male and female genital cutting among Southern Thailand's Muslims: rituals, biomedical practice and local discourses

“…Harrington 1968; Korotayev and De Munck 2003), although this was the original definition provided in the Ethnographic Atlas of George Peter Murdock (1967:161). The use of the term mutilation for male practices is nowadays used confined to anti-male circumcision movements in USA (Gollaher 2000;Bell 2005). …”

Discourses on sexual pleasure after genital modifications: the fallacy of genital determinism (a response to J. Steven Svoboda)

“…As the American anthropologist Kirsten Bell (2005) has so convincingly argued (her work is also discussed by Svoboda), the descriptions of negative or positive effects with regard to sexual pleasure of female and male circumcision have everything to do with how we construct sexuality in the first place. Notions about (too) strong a male libido will result in conclusions that the male circumcision and reduced sensitivity are advantageous (examples given by Frisch 2011Frisch , 1377, while there will be assumptions that '[a] woman's sexual instincts, being fundamentally more delicate, will be crippled by any form of genital surgery' (Bell 2005, 136).…”