ABSTRACT
This chapter raises several critical issues related both to female genital mutilation itself and to related practices, all under the control of a patriarchal, traditional, and conservative assault on women’s and girls’ bodies. Evelyn Accad adds an epilogue to her essay in which she speaks openly about the mutilation of her own body in the form of a mastectomy, yet another inflicted (heavily male) medical war on women’s bodies. A Museum of Enduring Beauty in Malacca, exhibits powerfully present standards and differing concepts of beauty in various cultures from pre-historic times to the present, beauty that may last and that women endure: foot-binding, scarification, lip plates and labrets, elongated necks, dental alterations, ear ornaments, head deformation, tattooing, corseting. Evelyn Accad also confronts the challenge in reconciling particularity and generality, the local and the global, the individual and the universal.
