ABSTRACT
We start with a prologue featuring Nick Hadikwa Mwaluko (2013, 2016), a queer, trans Tanzanian American writer and activist whose quest for “a truly universal language where I not only exist but am imagined as central,” is for “a language that directs me towards the parts of myself it makes bleed.” Only displacement, the “queering” of power, and the importance of context in the queer academic and activist practices (Liinason and Kulpa, 2008) engender what Mwaluko calls “a visibility-language which does not shy away from the complexities and suffering that looks at the messiness, the complexity, the pain it causes me for being me, and intentionally addresses my suffering with accountability and empathy.” And it is this statement from which we fashion a critical hermeneutics for our volume, a multiple-voice discourse on patriarchal inscriptions, on assumptions that normalize deeply gender-coded meanings about gender, sexuality, sex, and legitimacy of violence. We intend our prologue, “Ontology,” to function not so much in the nature of an analytical framework, nor would this suit the open-ended debates that capture the state of the field of scholarship and activism in the field of female genital conversations and related practices at this moment in time but as a critical interpretive lens through which to read our contributions on challenging assumptions about the world we either take for granted or are fearful of questioning. When Mwaluko queers the way power and privilege are complicit in institutionalizing and legitimating imposed life cycles of exemplary heteronormativity while stigmatizing and silencing others, we offer our approach as a guiding pathway to engage with a diversity of ontological and epistemological contributions to what are complex and ongoing debates.
