ABSTRACT
Female genital mutilation cements females’ lesser status by reproducing social expectations and gender stereotypes that repress girls and women throughout their lives. In essence, FGM provides the blueprint for a gender caste system strictly reinforcing – and ceaselessly reproducing – female inferiority even if this debilitating reality is defied, denounced, and interpolated as false by articulate, courageous survivors whose memoirs and speeches encourage solidarity and partisanship. This chapter contends that understanding and cultural sensitivity, essential as they are, cannot obviate the clear moral imperative to oppose acts, regardless of desire or motive, that have been defined as torture.
My objective is to illuminate the complex challenges to women posed by FGM throughout the life cycle, examining rites of passage, the quadruple interlinking circles of femininity, feminine obedience, elder women, and bonding. Taken together, these factors prompt one unassailable response to the subject from the modern world: rejection.
