ABSTRACT
The rather sensationally headlined article above was passed on to me a few years ago by a friend. It suggests that ‘female genital mutilation’ is not merely an African practice and discusses a range of genital modifications being undertaken by women in the United States and the United Kingdom as a form of ‘body art’ or as a means to increase sexual pleasure. While surfing on line a few weeks later, I came across a Newsweek interview with Eve Ensler, creator of the Vagina Monologues. Asked to comment on the relevance of the title of her newest play, The Good Body, Ensler responds that ‘everything women do is about being good’. In every culture, she suggests, this imperative to be ‘good’ is linked with particular ways of controlling women through ‘mutilating, hiding, fixing, reducing, shrinking’ female bodies: ‘There’s skin lightening in some countries, female genital mutilation in another, fattening a bride in another, and dieting and anorexia in another’ (Ozols, interview with Ensler 2004). Writing more recently in The Guardian, Kath Elliot (2008) contends that while ‘designer vaginas’ are the ‘latest thing in cosmetic surgery’, they are ‘are too close to mutilation to be connected with female empowerment’. From her perspective, both cosmetic labiaplasty and ‘female genital mutilation’ fall ‘firmly under the banner of ‘harmful cultural practices’. These articles represent only three mainstream examples of how socalled ‘African’ practices of female genital cutting (FGC) are linked with ‘Western’ body-altering procedures.1 There are many more.2
