ABSTRACT
Making links between embodied practices1 understood to be rooted in divergent cultural contexts has become increasingly common within a range of feminist literatures. These cross-cultural comparisons are employed in part as a strategy to counter cultural essentialism – the production of culture-specific generalisations that depend on totalising categories such as ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’, ‘First World’ and ‘Third World’ or ‘the West’ and ‘the Muslim world’.2 Feminist theorists have, for example, drawn links between ‘African’ female genital cutting (FGC)3 and ‘Western’ cosmetic surgery as a means to interrogate racialised binaries which depict these practices as fundamentally different and discrete. This book examines how these cross-cultural comparisons function as a rhetorical device with particular theoretical, social and political effects. It asks why and how are cross-cultural parallels or commonalities among embodied practices drawn by feminist theorists and commentators and what do these analogies do? What knowledges, hierarchies and figurations do these comparisons produce, disrupt and/or reify in feminist and other critical theory, and how do such effects resonate within media, culture and politics? The cross-cultural comparison most commonly made by feminist theorists
in the service of anti-cultural essentialism is that between ‘African’ female genital cutting and ‘Western’ body modifications, such as cosmetic surgery, intersex surgery and nineteenth-century clitoridectomies. Isabelle Gunning (1991) argues, for instance, that although FGC has been represented by Western commentators as a ‘barbaric’ and ‘patriarchal’ cultural practice of the ‘other’, female circumcision is ‘part of our own history’ (211). Circumcisions performed on American and English women as a ‘cure’ for mental illness in the nineteenth century, she suggests, were explained by ‘the same kind of rationales’ as African practices of FGC are today, such as a belief in their health benefits (203, 218).4 African FGC and American clitoridectomies should thus be seen as cultural ‘analogues’.5
