United States of Women Summit on FGM

When the United States of Women Summit took place, powerful women speakers descended onto the Capitol to give insightful speeches on the issues facing women in the modern world.  Whereas addressing these important issues is imperative, we must remember that this is a Summit held in the capital of the most powerful country on the Earth.  The speakers will present their ideas in an eloquent manner and call for women’s empowerment, but the message must not be critical of any policies of the US government.  It must maintain the de-politicized agenda that is so common in contemporary feminism.  Gender must take center stage; political economy must not be invoked.  Tying gender to political economy would be truly rebellious and capable of overturning the entire exploitative system.  Therefore, the women speaking at the Summit must stick to what contemporary feminist discourse has given them: solely their gender.

The Summit’s first pillar was on violence against women.  Speakers discussed incidents including rape and genital mutilation.  In an “international” violence against women speech, Jaha Dukureh, founder and CEO of Safe Hands for Girls, an organization working to end female genital mutilation, spoke to the audience about sexist traditions such as FGM, arranged marriages for young girls, and patriarchal silencing of women’s experiences.  She delivers a commendable condemnation of these problems; however, none are placed into any historical context that brings in other factors outside of gender.  Also, because she is an African woman, it is surprising that she falls back on the older Western elitist feminist narrative that confines non-Western women to cultural issues as a way of securing their own hegemony in the discourse.  This could be a result of her background being raised in America at an early age, graduating from a New York high school, and attending Georgia Southwestern State University.  The contemporary feminism that limits perspectives to exclusively gender-based analyses runs rampant in the United States.  It is the dominant feminism that occupies mainstream feminist’s minds.  Dukureh seems to employ this in her international gender-violence speech by focusing on female genital mutilation and patriarchal norms, while ignoring policies related to the global economy, climate change, or the military.

An essay by Cheryl Johnson-Odin titled “Common Themes, Different Contexts: Third World Women and Feminism” touches on the discursive element in feminism’s history to which Dukureh appears to fall prey.  She writes:

Female circumcision is one issue which can be raised in a manner which is disconnected from the broader struggle.  That is, it is tied to an indigenous cultural context which frequently posits an opposition between women and men.  In Africa, problems of nutrition, infant mortality, illiteracy, healthy-care delivery, skill training, etc., are of central importance in women’s lives, and many African women have expressed that they wish these issues had the same kind of exposure within the feminist movement in the West as does female circumcision.  But to raise these other problems requires feminism to take an anti-imperialist position; it necessitates identifying and fighting against the structural elements in many developed countries which participate in the oppression of Third World women.¹

Many feminists are willing to nominally challenge imperialist positions such as wars.  But economic policies in our globalized world are not often tied to gender, especially in foreign countries.  Therefore, when feminists speak about African women, it usually is in the context of an abstract patriarchy that forces FGM on women.

Chandra Talpade Mohanty criticizes this by saying that “defining women as archetypal victims freezes them into ‘objects-who-defend-themselves,’ men into ‘subjects-who-perpetrate-violence,’ and (every) society into powerless (read: women) and powerful (read: men) groups of people.”²  By not contextualizing the violence into a broader historical context, women are left on the victim side of the patriarchal binary.  This type of feminist discourse traps women into a victim status based on their gender.

Political, economic, and imperialistic components, as well as ideologies, are not analyzed.  This is what makes Dukureh’s speech so acceptable at the US Summit.  However, Egyptian writer Nawal el Saadawi, who received a clitoridectomy, explains that Western women often go to countries such as the Sudan and “see” only clitoridectomy, but never notice the role of multinational corporations and their exploited labor.  This was the case when Fran Hosken, American writer, feminist, and social activist, wrote on FGM in Africa and the Middle East.  She visited el Saadawi in her home in Cairo where upon el Saadawi shared information with Hosken on political and historical matters.  Hosken did not use any of this material in her writing on the women in this region.  She was pre-occupied with the issue of clitoridectomies, rendering her analysis ahistorical. ³

After Dukureh’s remarks on FGM and patriarchy, we must be careful when applying it to our feminist paradigms.  Without historical context, it means very little because our understanding of the issue is isolated to the discursive realm where gender is the main deterministic factor in women’s lives.  We must force back into the feminist movement an insistence on viewing women as more than a gender, as human subjects in historical realities that operate within political, economic, cultural, and discursive systems.  The Summit must not act as an impassioned show that distracts us from our mission to dismantle all of the obstacles to women’s lives all over the world.

1. Cheryl Johnson-Odim, “Common Themes, Different Contexts: Third World Women and Feminism,” in Third World and the Politics of Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 322.
2. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Clonial Discourses,” in Third World and the Politics of Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 58.
3. Angela Gilliam, “Women’s Equality and National Liberation,” Third World and the Politics of Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 218-219.