ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the process of clitoral reconstruction and the meaning of this surgical process undergone by some excised women living in France. It explores the concept of ‘needs’ in relation to the women’s request for reconstructive surgery after excision. Need is here understood as the encounter between women’s demands for ‘reparation’ and medical responses to these demands. In this chapter I particularly focus on the French context, where the debates around clitoral reconstructive surgery began. I will refer to concepts from law (such as restorative justice) and from social policy (such as needs and social needs). The reparation of excision through a medical procedure is an example of a biopolitics where technologies are aimed at responding to moral questions and social debates through intervention on bodies.
