FEMALE GENITAL MUTILATION Words by Chanel Trezise and Sienna Sulicich Trigger Warning: Mentions of non-consensual surgery. In 1992, Elle Dit featured an article by Elisa Reed titled ‘Female Circumcision.’ The foreign phrasing immediately drew our attention. The original article focuses on educating people about the human rights issues surrounding the practice of female circumcision. This practice is now described as Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), and it is a cultural practice that is still prevalent throughout parts of Africa and the Middle East. It is slowly decreasing worldwide due to greater education and Western intervention, but not as quickly as activists had hoped (Pashaei et all, 2016, 2). The discourse surrounding ‘female circumcision’ has shifted in the last thirty years and now has been brought into the light with demanded intervention. The evolving discourse of intervening with the cultural practice of removing women’s genitalia – either partially or fully — exhibits the growth of interest and politics surrounding this cultural practice. 30
This is a narrative we are keen to deconstruct, because with it requires a necessity to negotiate the blurred lines between defending the human rights of women of color and their children, and the social and cultural repercussions of well-intentioned ‘white-saviour’/’missionaryactivist’ which can and will be felt in the everyday lives of these people. The subject itself is complex and difficult to approach. Intervening in the cultural practices of other countries, particularly countries of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds, has many implications relating to colonialism and the persistence of the self-constructed ‘white authority’. It raises many serious questions as well as hypocrisies of the ‘white’ intervener. Are we to repeat history if the white patriarchal former colonisers are allowed to police bodies of women of color and their children yet again? By way of intervening, are we to perpetuate the endemic and ongoing racist narratives thatconstruct the cultures of people of color as
