File spoon-archives/postcolonial.archive/postcolonial_1998/postcolonial.9811, message 85


Date: Sun, 15 Nov 1998 19:47:24 -0600 (CST)
From: Mousumi Roy Chowdhury <mou-AT-owlnet.rice.edu>
Subject: Re: female circumcision


Hi Joseph,
         I really liked your insights. Can you cite some examples of
recent writings etc in media or magazines regarding female circumcision?
Like you, I don't think that the point is to support FGM in the name of
cultural relativism, but to reiterate the fact that the discussions or
condemnations taking place so far from the site, hardly helps to stop it.
Incidentally, talking of ideology, while I was going through some of the
clitoridectomy eradication literature during the colonial period, I was
struck by the fact that the very missionaries who were trying to stop it
in the name of women's well being, hardly cared when African women were
being subject to back breaking lab blabor in their own farms. Even if it
was in their power to get machineries--this is the 1920s--to make the work
easier, they preferred these women to labor, and suffer permanent damage
to their health. Why, I wondered, would they deploy the rhetoric of
women's health in another sphere?
Mousumi Roy Chowdhury
mou-AT-owlnet.rice.edu   



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