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 --- from list postcolonial-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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