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...tends to centre around two positions: outright condemnation and a cultural-relativist laissez faire approach. This paper critiques such treatments on the grounds that neither provides for an intercultural exchange through which alternatives can emerge. The debate regarding rights and female genital mutilation is at an impasse. I attempt here to develop the premises of that debate beyond the rigidity of theoretical models. For those who would see female genital mutilation eradicated, it is not enough to have a clever, defensible argument. The debate needs instead to expand its parameters with ideas that can engage with the cultural complexities in which this practice operates.
'It is still possible to say that practices such as female genital mutilation are simply wrong, which means ... that any code which did not condemn such suffering would be unworthy of respect.'
--Chris Brown (1)
'There's a paradox in every paradigm.'
--Ani Difranco (2)
Introduction
Female genital mutilation is an issue fraught with ethical complexity. It lies at the heart of the contested possibility of a universal human rights, invoking questions of cultural sovereignty, appropriate international and intercultural norms and the place of women's rights in culture. To date, the relationship between various parties to this conversation has not been an equal one. Western commentators have at their disposal a number of established international discourses through which condemnation of female genital mutilation appears to emerge with an incontrovertible logic. Accordingly, Western censure tends to take the form of the value system that produced both the critics and the discourses in which they operate. Given that cultural expression is inherently interconnected with culture itself, such critiques are often interpreted as hostile to the core values of the peoples that practise female genital mutilation. It is not difficult, therefore, to comprehend the accusations of cultural imperialism that arise in this context. We are all bound by the limitations of our own cultural experience, whether in endorsement or in criticism. This very subjectivity constitutes the substance of the debate regarding female genital mutilation, and is also directly implicated in the positions defended therein.
It is already clear that female genital mutilation engenders a larger set of ethical and normative problems than a dualistic moral framework can comfortably contain. In this paper, therefore, I intend to evaluate problems implicit in the intercultural conversation around this issue, largely characterised by its treatment by Western commentators. To a certain extent the article utilises female genital mutilation as a lens through which to assess broader themes of human rights and international relations. I hasten to emphasise, therefore, that the practice is not simply a metaphor to be employed casually in such discussions. On the contrary: it is a painful and dangerous practice that affects the well-being of millions of women. I have chosen to address the issue from a more removed perspective in order to create the conceptual space within which it may be understood in a larger cultural context. This is not to make a relativist defence of female genital mutilation, but rather to insist that value-saturated criticism from outside, itself bound up in a culturally-determined ethics, is neither an appropriate, nor effective, response.
The problem of duality--or, more specifically, of dichotomy--is a recurrent issue in the area of intercultural communication, and it is necessary for me to dwell briefly on its place in this article. There is a tendency in scholarship to characterise as dualistic those concepts or issues implicated in the notion of 'culture' which actually represent poles of a subtle spectrum. This tendency is both reductive and difficult to avoid, and indeed at certain points this paper participates in the oversimplifying narratives it purports to critique, warranting some pre-emptive explanation. The most significant dualistic model to consider is that embodied in the categories of 'Western' and 'non-Western', which operate in this paper as imperfect signifiers rather than assumptions of cultural homogeneity. While 'Western' is used in the accepted sense and generally characterises the mainstream perspectives of people living in societies such as Australia, Western Europe and North America, 'non-Western' is employed despite its obvious problems because the function of the term is to demonstrate that these cultures represent the West's 'Other'. Thus the semantic role of these terms is to resonate within the larger argument as signifiers of the Western perspectives they represent.
It is worth noting, further, that the main aim of this paper is to transcend the impasse of a debate whose positions have grown rigid. If, as I contend, the experiential limitations of our own culture inform our approach to the norms of Other cultural systems, then it must be acknowledged that this argument too is subject to such constraints, although I would suggest that this does not qualify its conclusions. Our various cultural subjectivities can only be reconciled through a concerted intercultural empathy.
The first part of this article outlines the practice of female genital mutilation in its geographic, medical and cultural dimensions. It delineates the parameters of the debate, from the notion of a universal ethics to the so-called 'radical cultural relativist' perspective, and also considers the place of women's rights within the human rights rubric. (3) The second section of the article interrogates Western ethical norms through the examination of existing attitudes to female genital mutilation. Its contention is that internal conditions within Western society have been the catalyst for the nature of contemporary denunciation of the practice, and that approaches have manifested as positions either of ineffective condemnation or misguided empathy. The final part of the article utilises Michael Walzer's concept of minimal and maximal moralities in order to describe a model which develops the premises of the debate and proffers a constructive alternative to the international community's approach to the subject. I conclude that the debate around female genital mutilation has been characterised by over-simplification on both sides, largely through a failure to recognise and engage with the complexity, fundamental to this issue. I argue that the international community needs to utilise Walzer's 'thin' moral encounters, but not to mistake them for a more comprehensive empathy in any normative response.
Rights and Relativism
A recurring attribute of female genital mutilation is its plurality. It is not a single practice, ranging in form from the ritual scraping or cutting of the clitoris, to infibulation, the custom's most extreme variety. (4) Nor does genital mutilation belong exclusively to any one tradition: although located primarily in Africa, forms of female genital mutilation are known to have been performed medically and ritually in diverse regions and cultures. These include indigenous North America, Asia and even among 'middle-class white Americans in the late nineteenth century and ... early twentieth century' as a perceived cure for 'hysteria, nymphomania, lesbianism and "excessive" masturbation'....
NOTE: All illustrations and photos
have been removed from this article.
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