2019 Volume 7 Pages 27-45
There have been controversies concerning the issue of “female genital mutilation (FGM)” in international community. This study sheds some light to the controversies by arguing the dispute of “FGM” as a discourse in Michel Foucaultʼs sense and situating it in the politics of the female body and sexuality in post-colonies. By doing this, it shows that the controversies presume the unquestioned premise of the universality of the modern medical science. This paper puts ʻFGMʼ into parentheses, because it considers that the category ʻFGMʼ is not self-evident.
The dispute of “FGM” has been characterized as an opposition between the universalist camp by international organizations and Western feminists who sees it as “a harmful practice and a violation of the human rights of women”, and the cultural relativist camp by anthropologists who view it as one of the local practices of body modification. However, in the 1990s, several studies started to deal with the dispute of “FGM” as a discourse and argued it in terms of the self-representation, the concealment of Western patriarchy, and the feministsʼ complicity with imperialist exploitation.
Considering the studies mentioned above, this study will focus on the medical scientific gaze penetrated into the discourses on “FGM”. Since the 19th century when the institutionalization of modern medical systems was launched in colonies, scholars have clung to categorizing “FGM” from medical scientific viewpoints. The project of categorizing “FGM” in medical terms is culminated in WHOʼs classification of 4 types of “FGM”, subsuming anthropological works and religious discussions. This project might be one of the post-colonial developments of the controlling system by modern medical science. This study aims to overcome the “FGM” controversies by examining the medical scientific gaze that implicitly underpins both universalist and cultural relativist. (264)
