ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the legacy of tremendous contributions by all webinar participants, academics, and activists to a series of webinars on female genital mutilations and related practices as an epistemological, political, and transformative project of far-reaching impact. Cross-cultural work on female bodies and patriarchal inscriptions matters because such an approach entails comparative perspectives, intersectionality, and interdisciplinarity. Passionately engaged scholars and activists as well as reflective, critical voices probe themes of locally contingent significance and their interconnections. Feminism, has laid bare the intimate entanglement of sexual violence with legitimation of injustices intrinsic to gendered hierarchy, power, and subjugation, sustaining a hegemonic masculinity that feeds on strategic or random acts of violence for sustained control. Gender hierarchy undergirds such inequality, with women both symbolic carriers of collective identity and physical canvases of identity inscriptions. Feminist analysis reveals the interplay of discourse and power, of privilege and resources, of knowledge and naming, of tradition and control.
