File spoon-archives/postcolonial.archive/postcolonial_1998/postcolonial.9811, message 83


Date: Sun, 15 Nov 1998 18:08:12 -0500 (EST)
From: Christina VanderVorst <cvvors25-AT-calvin.edu>
Subject: Re: female circumcision


Throughout this discussion I am reminded of Fanon's criticism of
colonizers who portrayed the cultural practices of the colonized as
barbaric.  Fanon was specifically referred to the wearing of the veil
and the cloistering of women in Algeria and said, 
	Every veil that fell...was a negative expression of the fact that
	Algeria was beginning to deny herself and was accepting the rape
	of the colonizer...willingness to attend the master's school and
	to decide to change its habits under the occupier's direction and
	patronage. (A Dying Colonization, p.42)
This quote troubles me as I consider female circumcision through Western
eyes.

It troubles me because it forces me to question if there is a morality
which transcends culture.  And what are the boundaries of that morality?
A morality which condemns sadistic practices?  But surely the Algerian
colonists would have considered the veiling and cloistering of women as
sadistic and demeaning.  And yet I don't agree with their agressive
attempt to obliterate the practice.

What do you think?  Is the abandonnment of female circumcision, a
centuries'-old practice, assenting to the rape of the neo-colonizer?

N.B. I am not equating veiling/cloistering to female circumcision.
Rather, I am interchanging them as practices of the colonized
which are condemned by
the colonizer.



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