Rethinking Human Rights and Culture Through Female Genital Surgeries

Abstract

The article revisits the relationship between culture and human rights through the analysis of one traditionally condemned cultural practice known in human rights law as female genital mutilations. The analysis draws on anthropological and medical literature and demonstrates importance of interdisciplinary analysis to any enquiry within the area of relationship between culture and human rights. An analogy between the traditional practice of female genital mutilations and the less widely publicised female genital aesthetic surgeries practiced in many Western countries serves as a methodological tool. Laws and attitudes towards both practices are compared demonstrating many similarities and thus the difficulty of drawing a clear-cut line between a cultural and a-cultural practice. In this light human rights' insistence on condemnation of the practices of the Other exclusively appears as hegemonising, racialising and ultimately discriminatory in its effects. Some suggestions as to how a more adequate human rights approach could look like are made as well as the constant necessity for interdisciplinary enquiry in human rights law is emphasised.

Knowledge and perceptions of female genital mutilation among African immigrant women in Windsor, Canada

“…FGM/C has been reported as a violation of human rights (Bewley, 2010;Hosken, 1981;Jaeger, et al, 2008;Krivenko, 2015), and serves as a rite of passage to adulthood, a method to ensure premarital virginity, social acceptability, marital chastity and marriageability (Jacobson et al, 2018;Johansen, 2016;Oljira et al, 2016), to promote femininity, modesty, for cleanliness and as a religious requirement (WHO, 2008). In addition, empirical evidence from home and host countries documents its consequences on the physiological (Skaine, 2005), psychological (Shell-Duncan and Hernlund, 2006), sexual functioning (Berg and Denison, 2012), fertility and infertility (Almroth et al, 2005;Larsen, 2002;Larsen and Yan, 2000), and obstetrics and gynecological health (Chalmers and Harshi, 2000;Wuest et al, 2009;Zurynski et al, 2015Zurynski et al, , 2017 of girls and women.…”

Female Genital Mutilation and Female Genital Cosmetic Surgery

“…With the increasing attention on female external genital aesthetics, more and more women seeking help from physicians to change the appearance of their external genital surgery [38]. But actually, the information about the "normal" shape and size is mostly from the cosmetic surgery advertisement in magazines or pornography videos, and most of the pictures are "beautified" by software [39].…”

Anti-FGM discourses as constructed by NGOS in the Maasai community in Kenya

“…Neither surgeries are performed for medically justifiable reasons, but FC is Othered on the premise of consent not being obtained. Krivenko (2015) describes the discourse of human rights' knowledge on FC as "hegemonizing, racializing, and discriminatory". She seeks to challenge whether the international community would still call for prohibition of FC, if a woman desires this surgery for aesthetic and well-being purposes.…”

“…When examining FC and genital cosmetic surgeries, the overlapping nature of both surgeries suggests that the final outcome is to alter genitalia via surgery as a means of improvement depending on the subjective definition in both instances. Krivenko (2015) has noted that when FC is described by the World Health Organization, terminology such as "excision, "removal", "cutting", and "harmful" are used; compared to medical practitioners describing Western surgeries as "augmentation", "reduction", "rejuvenation", and "amplification" when describing cosmetic surgery, implying the latter form of modification is achieved without "cutting. "…”