ABSTRACT
In the American academy, the experience of the last two decades of literary and cultural criticism seems to have created almost insurmountable differences between ‘Western’ modes of analysis of the concrete status of women in various non-Western cultures, on the one hand, and non-Western women’s subjective experience of their own position, on the other hand.1 Is it possible, in such a climate, for a critic based in the academy to ‘illuminate’, as Fatima Mernissi has put it, non-Western social contexts within which the ‘structural dissymmetry’ of gender is embedded?2 To attempt to do so, I would like to take as case in point the issue of female genital excision which has again come to the attention of public opinion in France and other Western European countries where African immigrants are having it performed on their daughters.
