A Reflection on the Cultural Meanings of Female Genital Cutting ...

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since the capacity to experience orgasm from a Western point of view, makes a woman
more of a ‘real’ woman. Furthermore, given the importance attached to sexuality as
closely related to personal identity and self-fulfilment, the cutting of the clitoris also has
the implications of a ’mutilation’ of a woman’s potential for liberation in a more
extended sense.
This understanding of sexuality and the self is not universal, but a specific Euro-
American culture model. By reacting according to is this model, Westerners commonly
draw conclusions that give rise to misleading implications of female genital cutting. An
illustrative example is an advert in a Swedish newspaper. 13 Instead of ‘Seminar on
female genital mutilation’, it said ‘Seminar on mutilated femininity’. The Somali
women present at the seminar were deeply humiliated, and emphasised with rage, that
“It is our genitals that are mutilated, not our femininity.”
Global Power Relations
This leads us to reflect on the context of global power relations. Because of the North’s
hegemonic position in the world, it has the monopoly to set the agenda, to formulate
and decide the priority of problems to be settled in the international political arenas.
Western feminists have tended to act according to this power structure, and in their will
to fight for the right of women in the Third world, have unreflexively reacted in
paternalistic ways (Mohanty 1999). At the United Nation’s Second World Conference
on Women in Copenhagen 1980, for instance, Western feminists vexed women from
Third World countries by debating on the quality of clitoral versus vaginal orgasm.
Finally, representatives of the South protested, pointing out that the acute problems
concerning the majority of women of the Third World are lack of clean water and fuel,
high maternal- and child mortality (Bexar 1997). The critique persists today (cf.
Mohanty 1999). I do not wish to belittle or ridicule Western feminists’ struggle, but aim
to draw attention to the problems arising when agendas and research questions are not
analysed in relation to global power relations.
Conclusion
Understood in its cultural context, excision among the Joola in southern Senegal is
about so much more than girls' clitorises. It is done so that a girl can pray and be part of
the women's secret society, to acquire the secret knowledge that is both a practical,
theoretical and mystical embodied knowledge that essentially transforms the girl into a
real Person and Woman. In fact, the very same implications that the clitoris has come to
have in the West, the absence of the clitoris seems to have among the Joola nowadays,
particularly among the older women and men.
It is interesting to note that, contrary to common Western assumptions, sexuality is not
emically perceived as a cultural reason to excise women, but in the last ten years it has
become a reason for younger men to react against excision. 14 In fact, sexuality and
13 Göteborgs-Posten, 1996.
14 These findings on male resistance correspond with recent studies from other parts of Africa and from
studies on Africans in Sweden (cf. Almroth &Almroth-Berggren 1998, Johnsdotter 2000, Skramstad
1990).