Clean, smooth, and pure

Let me delve a little more deeply into the moral aesthetics of female circumcision in Hofriyat, which superficially at least resembles the Barbie aesthetic just described. Before I do, it is worth recalling that, as feminist theory teaches us, aesthetic conventions are never neutral, they are political. They are also strongly normalizing. As anthropologists well realize, power in all societies works, as it were, “from below,” as selves are formed and bodies shaped in dynamic everyday relations among human agents, social institutions, cultural meanings, conventions, and constraints; in interactions between subjects and their humanly constructed environment of objects, spaces, and others: through practical engagement with the world (Bourdieu 1977, 1990; Foucault 1990). The “modern” disciplines and techniques of power identified by Foucault (1979, 1990) have nonbureaucratic parallels in quotidian social life, suffused as it is with what Comaroff and Comaroff call “power in the nonagentive mode.” Nonagentive power “proliferates outside the realm of institutional politics, saturating such things as aesthetics and ethics, built form and bodily representation, medical knowledge and mundane usage” (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992:22).²¹ Thus, as I have argued elsewhere (Boddy 1989, 1998), it makes better [50]ethnographic sense to view FGC in Sudan as nonagentively embedded in everyday life than imposed by coercive agentive restraint. In the process of acquiring culturally appropriate aesthetic sensibilities, the social order is internalized “by the hidden persuasion of an implicit pedagogy” (Bourdieu 1990: 69), and power is embodied, made self. There are implications here for exploring the upsurge in demand for cosmetic surgeries in the West (Rodrigues 2012).

In what follows I contextualize the Hofriyati practice by mapping its cultural logic as I learned it the 1970s and 1980s, when consensual notions of propriety—purity, cleanliness, integrity, “closure”—governed behavior and ideals of physical form, architecture, foods, odors, and the objects of daily life. Tracing images of propriety through these disparate domains led to a horizon of intelligibility where ideological, practical, and sensory realms converged (Boddy 1989).

In villages and towns along the main Nile, girls and boys underwent genital operations at roughly the same age, in prepubescence, usually before age ten. The procedures respectively oriented children to their incompletely shared social world, establishing differences in their sensibilities and adult perspectives. A girl’s body was feminized by the removal of boyish outer flesh, then enclosed by infibulation and the courtyard walls behind which the now mature female should remain. Her body was made clean and smooth (depilation and exfoliation by smoke bath completed the process when she became a bride); her womb was protected, unexposed. The boy’s body was masculinized, uncovered, opened to confront the world. Each sex was made visibly distinct and socially complete by its respective operation. As with labiaplasty in the West, FGC in Sudan enforced strong heteronormative ideals. The Hofriyati female body, however, also became both metonym and icon for village society, guarded against external threat by her own scar tissue, household walls, and the defensive efforts of local men.

Indeed, infibulated wombs were analogous to houses in function and form. The men’s door to the courtyard is called the khashm al-bayt, “the mouth of the house,” a term that also refers to a man’s descendants; a woman’s vaginal opening is akh-khashm al-bayt al-wilāda, “the mouth of the house of childbirth.” The front of the courtyard is the men’s area and place where guests—strangers—are entertained; like the vagina, it is the part of the house (body) that is penetrable under controlled conditions from without. The house’s protected inner part, its “belly” (buton), by implication its “womb,”²² is women’s domain, a private space where kin and close friends gather. The honor and integrity of the family were preserved when women stayed within courtyard walls and outside forces were kept at bay. Likewise, the in-marrying village, logical extension of the house, was safe, protected.

Infibulation, by enclosing the womb, contained and safeguarded uterine blood, the source of a woman’s fertility and her village’s wellbeing. Local concepts of procreation stipulated that a child’s bones and sinew (hard body parts) are formed from the semen or “seed” of its father, while its flesh and blood (soft parts) are formed from its mother’s blood. Such contributions were thought complementary, if differently weighted: flesh and blood are, after all, ephemeral, and bones relatively [51]enduring even after death. Like the skeleton that structures the body, patrilineal descent structures human relations in a lasting way. While preferred marriages are patrilineally endogamous (to cousins within the father’s line), in practice marriages traced through maternal kin are highly valued, even should prospective spouses belong to different local lineages. Indeed, relationships traced through flesh and blood, that is, through women, bind the village’s skeletal (and inherently centrifugal) descent groups, providing connective tissue that will eventually succumb to entropy and decay unless renewed by successive intermarriages. The social body—the endogamous village—was thus also homologous with the physical one; both are virtuous entities.

Moving from the esoterically social to the practical and mundane, wombs shared qualities with jars used for mixing bread, kisra, the wafery sorghum pancake that is the staple in northern Sudan. Kisra in turn is analogous in composition to the body of a child. Just as a child is made in the womb from male seed joined with female blood, kisra dough is made by combining grain produced by male labor with water that women fetch from wells or the Nile. The vessel used for mixing kisra, a narrow-necked pot called a gūlla, often substituted for by a lidded enamel bowl (korīya), must be impervious, such that the contents cannot seep out when the batter is left to prove. In these features, and in its shape, women said, the kisra container resembled an infibulated pregnant womb.

It is a short step from these images to others involving food. Foods that are encased, such as eggs, tinned fish, and tomato paste, and fruits surrounded by rinds or peels are prized as “clean” and “neat” (nadīf), for their enveloping layer conserves moisture and protects the contents from dirt. The adage “a Sudanese girl is like a watermelon because there is no way in” works on several levels at once: the enclosing rind guards both the seeds and the moist red flesh inside. Consuming clean foods such as these is said to “bring blood,” thereby capacitating female fertility. Color is significant: Orange Pekoe tea, referred to as “doctor’s blood,” is highly recommended for pregnant women. Foods that are white are also regarded as clean and said to increase the body’s blood; those that are both white and enclosed (such as eggs) are considered especially beneficial to women who wish to conceive.

These associations ramified: a fetus miscarried during the second trimester would be wrapped and placed inside a gūlla, like the unfinished kisra it resembled, then buried within the courtyard. The unmarked grave was typically dug near the kitchen, the women’s area in the interior, or belly, of the house. Methods for handling other failed pregnancies are intelligible by this logic. A stillborn was wrapped as a corpse and buried along the outer wall of the compound just to one side of the men’s entrance or “mouth of the house.” As the infant’s body had emerged from the metaphoric house fully formed (formed by the womb’s internal heat much as kisra is baked by the heat of a woman’s griddle in the belly of the house), it was laid to rest near the wall of the house/maternal body next to the orifice through which it had passed and its father (formally, legitimately) comes and goes. The path of the stillborn was arrested in the womb; s/he fell short of entering the world of other families, descent lines, and houses, for that requires breath, the obvious presence of a soul. Infants who breathe then die are buried like any other person, in the cemetery on the fringe of the desert beyond cultivated and humanly occupied space.[52]

Such features of everyday logic—a logic of enclosure personified by the socially mature female body—situated infibulation in a cultural and historical order that made the practice thinkable, indeed doable. They suggested a world where meaning resides in qualities that bodies and objects share, where images do not reduce or condense to underlying truths but are themselves truths—self-referential, recursive, nonreductive. Here bodies and objects were iterative, inherently relational, implicating other bodies, objects, and humanly constructed space in an unremitting cycle of significance.

Undergoing infibulation viscerally oriented a girl to this specific “universe of probabilities” and significances (Bourdieu 1990). Through exposure to the connections immanent in the practical acts and objects of quotidian life, the meaning of her reshaped body was gradually built up and continuously revived. The routine tasks of fetching water or baking bread that girls assumed as they grew up, their everyday movements across thresholds, into a room or out of it, all reverberated with tacit meanings. They coalesced to identify her self with her fertility, the need to bear children in morally appropriate ways. They were practical metaphors by which subjective reality, anchored in pain and embedded in bodily memory, was periodically renewed. Women were asked to relive their traumatic experiences as they matured: actually, when their bodies were opened and reclosed with each delivery; vicariously, when they witnessed others’ circumcisions and births; and symbolically, as they performed their daily routines. When social conventions are affixed to bodily sensibilities, the former—and the gendered power relations they imply—are rendered natural and unquestionably real. The very walls of a family compound, its layout, with women’s quarters in the back, men’s in the front, spoke to the woman of her body/self, for she was housed within her own “body” when she was bodily present in the house (Boddy 1998: 102). The congruity and interwovenness of ideas that identified infibulation with procreation and social wellbeing made them especially powerful, compelling, and politically effective. When I began doing research in Sudan, FGC was deeply rooted in villagers’ world, as it had been when colonial officials first encountered it and began to work for change.

Colonial efforts

Seen ethnographically, female circumcision was not an obsolete or isolable “trait” that colonizers or their foreign successors could extract from its matrix like a rotten tooth or expect women to discard as “evil” on outsiders’ advice. Nor was it separable from male circumcision, for the practices defined the genders in complementary ways. Yet to Europeans arguing from a scientific view of human anatomy presumed to be ideologically neutral and historically transcendent—unmediated, culture-free—the practices were wholly incommensurable. Male circumcision was seen as a minor procedure. That there was little outcry about unhygienic operations performed on Sudanese boys suggests that colonial interests lay less in the altruistic betterment of native health than with economic growth, discussed below—and since male circumcision is religiously required in Islam, with avoiding incendiary affronts to that faith.[53]

The story of colonial attempts to convince Sudanese to quit FGC is complex (see Boddy 2007), and here I can address only a couple of points. The practice came to official (male) attention in the 1920s, when, as intimated above, a shortage of suitable labor to fuel economic development was attributed to low birth rates, and these in turn were blamed on near universal pharaonic circumcision in the Arabic-speaking north. While the belief that infibulation limits population growth has been shown to lack basis,²³ it seemed plausible at the time, as the practice can negatively affect a woman’s reproductive health. Following the devastating loss of life in World War I and the influenza pandemic that ensued, international concern was everywhere focused on female reproduction, the politics of the womb. Comparatively little concern was raised regarding female sexuality, human rights, or the maintenance of bodily integrity, issues that became prominent in campaigns to end FGC from the 1980s on. This indicates why in 1920s colonial Sudan, infibulation was condemned as barbaric, but not so-called “simple clitoridectomy,” the acceptability of which was eventually enshrined in law (Boddy 2007).

So repulsed were the British by infibulation that its meanings were hardly explored. Sudanese women were not consulted; its significance was gleaned from Sudanese men or merely assumed. The practice seemed utterly irrational: in all but closing the wombs of prepubescent girls, older women and men inflicted untold suffering on their daughters so as to control their sexuality and maintain family honor, while in fact compromising the very thing—fertility—they sought to protect.

Ina Beasley, Controller of Girls’ Education in Sudan from the late 1930s through the 1940s, confessed “the difficulty” she and her colleagues had experienced “in trying to understand the mentality of people who could practice this human cruelty and yet be first-rate individuals in other ways” (Beasley 1992: 401). She repeatedly taught her pupils that “such operations are useless as a means of promoting chastity,” a commonly invoked rationale, because virtue “can only be implanted by proper moral education and maintained by the individual’s own conscious effort.”²⁴[54]

Liberal notions of agency such as Beasley’s were based on assumptions that human nature is inherently presocial; an individual can transcend her historical context and social training through an act of will. They acknowledged that selfhood is mediated by social relations, but not that these very relations, along with the humanly fashioned environment in which and through which they occur, actually produce the knowing self and the virtuous subject, if not in a self-conscious way. In other words, it was not within their purview to recognize that people, as Mahmood (2004) puts it, come to “inhabit” socially inculcated dispositions and values, and thereby produce themselves as subjects within the context of their own possibility. Given the individualistic stance of colonial officials, and their strong belief that British gender relations were “natural” and “normal” while those of Sudanese were anything but, it seems clear why early abolition efforts met little success.

Political efforts may have been stymied, too, by how British midwifery instructors taught the human body in ways that implicitly, if unintentionally, affirmed the value of infibulation. The women who founded Sudan’s first midwifery school were sisters, Mabel and Gertrude Wolff. Knowing that native birth attendants also performed female circumcisions, the Wolffs took a pragmatic stance. They did not support a peremptory ban on the procedure but, controversially, taught a less damaging operation using sterile implements, local anesthetics, and antiseptic solutions. In this way they hoped to “reduce harm,” and gradually bring about abandonment of genital cutting as Sudanese became better educated. Because few midwifery trainees were literate, the sisters elected to work with rather than against local knowledge, taking heed of pupils’ experiences and invoking their embodied memories. They used images that first summoned, then attempted to revise women’s cultural dispositions. They taught in Arabic, incorporating words from “women’s vocabulary.”²⁵ They built discursive bridges between local understandings and their own by creating scientific analogies to the objects and acts of Sudanese daily life with which women’s bodies are metonymously linked, though whether they grasped that relation is not clear from the evidence at hand. By these means they devised an ingenious and powerful synthesis of biomedical and lay techniques that bent to local practice even as they strove to undermine it. The strategy of linking lessons to women’s daily lives was hardly novel or unique, but may have complicated the sisters’ aims. For instance, in a report about her first year’s work, Mabel Wolff wrote,

I illustrate by local colour all their lectures as I find they understand and assimilate them better,—viz. in giving them an anatomy and physiology lesson I compare the body to a house and the organs [to] the furniture—the functions of the lungs as windows that air the house etc. etc.²⁶

She lectured, “the body resembles a furnished house and all the contents have a special use.”²⁷[55]

Did her students feel a surge of recognition? Clearly these were analogies they could understand, a native “house” being homologous not just with the human body in local thought, but with an infibulated female body at that. The Wolffs did not invent this association but, unwittingly perhaps, invoked it. Student midwives may well have gleaned from classroom images that their much maligned “commonsense” was more scientific, hence less barbaric, than they’d been told. But to the Wolffs any resonance between local ideas and biomedical constructs was heuristic, not sincere. Their mission remained uncompromised: to substitute rational science for harmful cultural practice and fallacious belief (Boddy 2003, 2007).²⁸

The Wolffs’ lesson book advised, “Should a midwife do circumcisions . . . she must perform the operation with all cleanliness just as she would a labour case, and attend the case daily for seven days, or more if necessary, in order to avoid infection of the wound.”²⁹ Though clearly beneficial, such counsel insinuated biomedicine into local practice, thereby wrapping “tradition” in biomedical mystique, lending it new authorizations (though it needed none), and fostering syncretisms that seemed likely to ensure the custom’s resilience.

Recall the practical logic of enclosure that informed infibulation in Hofriyat while reading the following passage from the Wolffs’ lesson book:

Most illnesses are caused by the entrance into the body by way of the mouth [khashm], the eyes, the nostrils, through the skin or a wound (or ulcer) of minute living things which cannot be seen except under a microscope. Just as there are a great variety of insects and seeds, so there are microbes. . . . There are microbes that will turn milk sour and meat putrid and food poisonous, but if food is sterilized and kept in sealed tins, the microbes cannot penetrate and the contents such as tomato sauce, milk, sardines and numerous other foodstuffs, will keep good for long periods but as soon as the tin is opened microbes get on the food and it will soon be poisoned and unfit to eat.

If our bodies are healthy and strong like the sealed tins, the microbes cannot harm us, but if microbes get a hold of us, they may give us some illness according to what microbe has infected us.³⁰ (My emphasis)

Such analogies made perfect vernacular sense.

Khartoum

Let me now shift to my recent research with several Hofriyati families who have relocated to Khartoum. Again it’s a complicated story, and I have not yet finished the work, but some prominent issues have emerged. Several urban Hofriyati families have elected not to have their daughters cut, or even to have them undergo the milder “sunna” intervention of removing the clitoral hood. There appear to be several reasons for this, important among them a greater awareness that genital [56]cutting is not unanimously sanctioned by Islamic scholars. But that is not the whole of their rationale, and to explore it further requires us to consider implications of the current political economy for gender relations and health.

Beginning in the late 1990s with the discovery of oil reserves, Sudan’s economy began to improve after years of decline. By 2003, negotiations with the International Monetary Fund had produced a reformed banking system, restructured taxes and tariffs, and privatized social services, including and especially healthcare. The stage was set for oil revenues to flow when the decades-long civil war between the Islamist government in Khartoum and the secularist/Christian south was brought to an end. In 2005, the Comprehensive Peace Agreement was signed, allowing international access to oilfields at least until July 2011, when the independence of South Sudan was declared. Between those years, when north–south power-sharing accords were in force, rising fortunes tempered the state’s Islamic zeal and lightened the atmosphere in the urban and rural north. Women could go bareheaded in public without fear of official censure, though most Muslim women still modestly covered their hair.

Oil exports sent the economy soaring in 2006, 2007, and the first part of 2008, with GDP growth at almost 10 percent per year.³¹ During the monetary crisis of 2008, growth declined but did not stall, hovering around 5 percent per year. Though Sudan fell into recession after the split with South Sudan, it is now beginning to recover lost ground. In 2015, GDP was estimated to have grown by 3.5 percent.³²

During the oil boom, roads were laid to connect once remote parts of the country, and a new mega-dam was built on the main Nile to provide hydroelectric power to the north. Private capital, imported foods, electronic equipment, and all manner of Chinese goods rushed in. Universities were built or extended in most major towns. Automobiles, once closely regulated, were suddenly widely available for purchase by bank loan, with interest. So too were cell phones and satellite-fed TVs. Peace, growing prosperity, and the relaxation of government controls led to greater possibilities for some, but increased precariousness for many, in part because of shifting consumption patterns and new ideas about what constitutes a normal life.

For decades, Hofriyati and other Arab Sudanese have placed a high value on educating girls. This concern waned after 1989 during the first years of Islamist rule, but as state restrictions on women’s deportment relaxed, it revived. Economic growth helped produce an emergent bimodal attendance rate at high schools and universities (Sudan Government 2010; CRIN 2011), that is echoed in other parts of the world. These days, more young women than men are enrolled in post-secondary [57]institutions, and it’s rare for a Hofriyati family not to have a daughter who is studying at a college or university or has recently graduated from one.³³

The cell phone is a contributing factor here: with it, parents and brothers feel they can monitor a young woman and ensure she is safe when outside the home, even when attending a coeducational school (Boddy 2016, and in press). Moreover, so few men now enroll in university that coeducation has become a moot point. If the graduation ceremony I attended in January 2010 at the Sudan University of Science and Technology is any indication, less than a fifth of university students today are male, a figure anecdotally confirmed by students at the University of Khartoum in 2015.

I was repeatedly told that that fewer young men continue to “read” because they need to work for pay, so as to contribute to their parents’ household expenses, subsidize their sisters’ educations,³⁴ and accumulate savings toward their own future marriages. Some young men take on several jobs in order to make ends meet. Thus more twenty-something Hofriyati daughters than sons have university educations, but few of either are married or permanently employed. An increasing number remain with their natal families and participate in the grey economy through which goods and services are distributed via domestic extensions of the market, among family and friends. This situation has been contributing to some intriguing shifts in the realm of marriage and family life (Boddy 2013, 2016, in press).

Typically, men must work for many years before they can afford to marry. The price of a modern wedding is high: unless a prospective couple are very close kin, the groom’s parents are wealthy, or the bride-to-be is particularly religious and agrees to modest proceedings, it can cost tens of thousands of Sudanese pounds. The expense is all but fully borne by the groom and his kin.³⁵ The typical age gap between bride and groom has thus widened, with men typically marrying between their mid- to late thirties and early fifties, and many women between their late twenties and early forties.³⁶ As more consumer goods become available, expectations rise as to what a proper wedding should entail and the time it takes to collect [58]the needed funds is increased. Young men generally seek work abroad, where wages, although perhaps low, are nonetheless paid in foreign currency, providing a hedge against the unstable Sudanese pound as well as domestic inflation rates that currently hover around 16.5 percent.³⁷ Those who cannot leave the country see the buying power of their earnings diminish year by year. This too is contributing to ever-later marriage. Moreover, while marriages in the past were almost always arranged by a couple’s parents, today single women seek companionate spouses of their choice; several have successfully eluded “good” matches arranged by kin (Boddy in press).

Ubiquitous satellite TV has fueled local aspirations on this front: characters in American films and serials from Egypt and Turkey have become role models for Hofriyati girls. New terms, such as “love story” and djikies, from the English slang word “chicks,” have entered everyday speech, referring to romantic heterosexual relationships based on mutual attraction and care. As state morality monitoring eased, one began to see couples walking side by side in city streets or sitting together in cafés—acts formerly punishable by imprisonment or the lash. While waning surveillance and the flood of foreign images have helped ease cross-sex relations, the protocols of television viewing have contributed as well.

Satellite TV has reshaped domestic space. Televisions are communal objects; only better-off Hofriyati households boast more than one set. Women and men of all generations now watch together, in the same room, even if they are not immediate kin. Exposure to standard broadcast Arabic streamed throughout the Middle East has been eroding formerly marked distinctions between men’s and women’s speech while drawing together male and female worlds. But if TV engenders communal experience, the effects of cell phones are less clear.

Mobile phones are individual means of communication, plentiful and relatively cheap, and in constant use by women and men regardless of age. Although Internet videos and Facebook posts may be widely shared among family and friends, cell phones have also fostered new sensibilities of intimacy, privacy, and secrecy, especially among younger Sudanese. Courtyard walls are no longer obstacles to cross-sex communication. So as to maintain personal space should a parent find a phone unattended, Hofriyati daughters regularly delete records of incoming and outgoing calls and use the phonebook function solely for family-approved contacts (Boddy 2016). Combine this with greater opportunities for youth to meet, and it is hardly surprising to learn that unwed pregnancies are on the rise.

A pregnant girl has few options: abortions are illegal and risky to procure. It may be possible to disguise her condition under loose-fitting clothes, and kin may be willing to help until the birth. But the appearance of a newborn in the family may be difficult to explain, and infants are being abandoned on public buses, beside busy roads, and on the steps of mosques in ever higher numbers, averaging 110–20 per month in Khartoum alone (Goddard 2007; UNICEF Sudan 2007; [59]WUNRN 2007; Al Jazeera 2009). In February 2016, Maygoma, Khartoum’s foundling orphanage, had to close its doors as it had no more room. Needless to say, the situation is one of grave public concern (Boddy in press).

On the other hand, since so many people are formally marrying later in life, more couples are failing to conceive within the expected first year of marriage.³⁸ In vitro fertilization offers a remedy permitted under Islam (Inhorn 2004, 2006) and several IVF clinics have sprung up in Khartoum over the last half-decade. But the costs, again, are high—at least US $5000 per attempt—and few couples can afford it. Faced with these compound pressures, the government declared that foundling adoption is an honorable and charitable act and smoothed the way for prospective foster parents to receive a child (Goddard 2007; Polgreen 2008; Sudan Government 2010; Boddy in press). Still, Islamic modesty and inheritance protocols, together with a strong social stigma attached to adopting nonkin, let alone those of illicit liaisons, prevent this from being an ideal remedy for childlessness (Boddy 2013, in press; see also Bargach 2002; Inhorn 2004; Mattson 2008). As Marcia Inhorn (2006: 95) notes, Islam “privileges—even mandates—biological descent and inheritance. Preserving the ‘origins’ of each child, meaning his or her relationships to a known biological mother and father, is considered not only ideal in Islam, but a moral imperative.”

The economic exigencies of late marriage and problematic fertility, together with the demand for biological offspring, are shaping the context in which the practice of FGC is being rethought, and at least some Hofriyati no longer allow it to be done. The explicit reason for stopping, they say, is that FGC causes health problems. This knowledge is not new: Hofriyati said as much to me in the 1980s, yet insisted that because tahūr created aesthetically and morally proper female bodies, they would continue to practice it despite the negative effects that might ensue. Indeed, infibulation was considered to promote health by hastening maturation in a sickly girl. So what has changed? For one thing, biomedicine has become the first and most acceptable resort for people seeking solutions to health concerns of all sorts. In the past, women having fertility problems or domestic difficulties might suspect themselves possessed by zayran, zār spirits, and consult a ritual specialist in an effort to obtain relief (Boddy 1989, 2013). But Islamist suppression of the zār as a heretical cult appears to have borne fruit. It is certainly possible that the displacement of zār as a remedy for fertility trouble has increased women’s dependence on biomedicine. The rise of IVF clinics is a case in point, though I know that some women undergoing fertility treatment also consult popular Islamic healers who appeal to zayran. Still, the current ambiance of “rationality” and anti-“superstition” in Sudan has been influential in persuading some Hofriyati to abandon FGC.

Medical education programs on Sudanese TV have spread the message that FGC is harmful to women’s health. Such shows are popular with Hofriyati women, who bear primary responsibility for the reproductive success of their marriages [60]and for family wellbeing. Women tune in to learn about treatments for common complaints such as “lazy colon,” hemorrhoids, diabetes, or hypertension, and are hearing about FGC in this context. Yet the practice has long been medicalized; in the 1920s, recall, the Wolff sisters introduced biotherapeutic methods to the traditional cutting, suturing, and aftercare of girls. Women are therefore accustomed to think about the procedure in medical terms, just as they also regard pregnancy and birth as needing medical intercession. Although information on FGC’s harmfulness aired on radio in the past and is widely taught in schools, I suspect that the visual immediacy of respected male doctors discussing the practice on communally watched TV is having a greater effect in getting women and men to discuss it.³⁹ While the WHO has long advocated against (further) medicalizing FGC lest embedding it in a biomedical context ensure the custom’s persistence, ironically, and contra to WHO expectations, colonial era medicalization may be contributing to its present demise. Hofriyati now view the practice in terms of women’s health, biomedically defined, and are increasingly prepared to rethink their gender aesthetics, or, perhaps, to link these strands.

In light of all this, a key factor convincing families to heed medical counsel against the practice has been the state’s partial withdrawal from the medical arena. Under structural adjustment initiatives, as well as continuing high levels of military spending, public funding for healthcare has been slashed. In the 1980s medicine was fully socialized, with private consultations available after-hours. But today few services are funded solely by the state, most are privatized, and even government-supported hospitals and clinics require fees for use. The majority of pensioners and the formally employed have private health insurance that provides family coverage, yet even those lucky enough to have such plans complain that they pay less than half the expense of a hospital stay, operation, or course of prescription drugs. Accidents, catastrophic illnesses, and chronic ailments such as the ubiquitous diabetes and hypertension put inordinate strains on meager budgets and require contributions from the broadest networks of kin. Indeed, the emergency medical demands of kin often stymie or postpone young men’s marriage plans. If practicing FGC causes problems for the health of girls and women that could drain family resources, it now makes economic sense to stop. While not the only reason for the decision, financial worries are a contributing factor given the escalating costs of living, making a family, and enabling social continuity. FGC is slipping out from under the aegis of morality, just as, perhaps, the once “enchanted” female body is falling increasingly under biomedical purview (Boddy 2013). Absurdly, of course, this is happening just as the enchantedness of biomedicine is revealing itself in the expansion of nonmedically necessary cosmetic procedures such as labiaplasty in the West and beyond.[61]

The upshot

The recent and growing popularity of labiaplasty and other procedures under the rubric of FGCS vividly exposes the similarities between “us” and African “Others,” however much hegemonic discourse obfuscates such correlations and physicians flat-out deny them (Dalal 2014). Respecting contextual differences, practices that bring the female body to accord with an elusive ideal of womanhood in Hofriyat formally parallel the normalizing disciplines of Western, indeed global, femininity. Both derive from a presumption that female bodies are in need of improvement and continuous monitoring; both enlist women as agents of their self-modification and enjoin them to self-surveillance and restraint; both work to instill in women a desire to conform, to become who and what they “ought” to be (Boddy 1998; cf. Bordo 1993). My aim here is not to trivialize FGM/C, but to detrivialize and expose as equally political—equally subordinating and, in Foucault’s sense, productive; equally worthy of critique—practices of Western femininity such as FGCS. If Western women and men resist placing their cultural practices in the same light as those of Sudanese and other African groups, and insist on seeing in the latter a form of violence absent from their own, this is because Africa remains for them a locus of the aberrant and exotic, in terms of which they are oppositionally defined. Hofriyati gender constructions are distanced from “us” in abstract time and space (Fabian 1983) in ways that our own are not, and perhaps, because they are taken for granted, can never be (cf. Bordo 1993: 50; see Gunning 1992; Hale 1994).

Yet it’s clear in the hard light of day that the notional gap between “us” and “them” can no longer be sustained. Here is why. First, the Internet knows few bounds. Spicy music videos and pornography created in the West circulate globally and are now commonly seen in Sudan, where porn DVDs can be rented from tobacco kiosks, or films watched online for as little as one SDG per day—about sixteen US cents at official rates of exchange, far less at black market rates. According to instructors at Ahfad University for Women in Omdurman and several independent scholars in Khartoum, Western porn is commonly watched by both women and men, alone or in sex-exclusive gatherings. In 2014 I attended a lecture at a public elementary school in a poor neighborhood of Omdurman warning children against watching aflam sex (sex films) on the net. One must therefore presume that Sudanese are exposed to the same images of hairless, surgically reduced, or photoshopped female genitalia that are compelling young Western women to question their normality.⁴⁰

Second, and in troubling consequence, though fewer young Sudanese women have undergone “traditional” FGC than ever before, gossip and rumors abound of husbands sending their uncut brides home to their mothers, asking for them to be fixed because their bodies don’t look right. This, presumably, is because Sudanese men’s experience of women’s naked bodies and their notions of normality, like those of Western women seeking labiaplasties and of their husbands and boyfriends who encourage them to go, have been shaped by the biomedically or digitally altered “closed” and “smooth” ideal.[62]

Whether or how often this actually happens in Sudan seems irrelevant: the message is there. Western-led international efforts to convince Sudanese, Somali, and other African women and men of the propriety of the “natural,” uncut vulva so as to reduce women’s suffering and perhaps save lives comes to naught in a world where hegemonic images of idealized altered women’s bodies circulate unimpeded. How long before these “new” cosmetic surgeries are widely available in Africa? They are already on offer in Ghana, Egypt, and South Africa, after all.

The anthropologist in me savors the tidy exposure of biomedicine’s cultural construction in this case, and decries the hypocritical narrative of African barbarity that persists in the righteous West. My feminist side is not too surprised by the strong similarities between idealized women’s bodies in late-twentieth-century Sudan and the early-twenty-first century West, even down to the words—clean, smooth, modest, invisible, closed—used to describe them. The politics of aesthetics are subtle and hard to withstand. Yet there is something even more troubling about the convergences and contradictions outlined here. For they expose the multiple ways that techniques and concepts of the gendered body linked to global neoliberalism saturate the most intimate levels of human life in the twenty-first century, no matter who we are or where we live.

Acknowledgments

This is an updated version of a keynote address delivered to the symposium “The Surgical Re-construction of Sex,” at the University of Zurich, on June 13, 2013. I am obliged to Drs. Monika Gsell and Bettina Dennerlein, from the Department of Gender Studies at the university for their kind invitation to present this address, and for the opportunity to reflect on current practices in the West that it and our ensuing conversations supplied. My research has been generously funded over the years by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the H. F. Guggenheim Foundation, and at the University of Toronto by the Connaught Fund, Research Completion Fund, Chairs Research Fund, and Jackman Humanities Institute. I am deeply indebted to Ahfad University for Women, Omdurman, for ongoing affiliation and assistance between 2008 and 2016, especially to Nafisa Bedri and my intrepid research assistant Nada Habash. Special thanks to Samia El Nager, Gada Kadoda, and Ellen Gruenbaum for enlightening conversations, and to Margret Otto and members of the International Knowledge Sharing Conference on Women and Girls’ Health in Sudan, Khartoum, October 2015. I also wish to thank my Canadian research assistants, Leah Shumka and Lyota Bonyeme. I am grateful to Michael Lambek, Amira Mittermaier, and an anonymous reviewer for helpful advice on an earlier draft of the manuscript. As ever I am profoundly grateful to “Hofriyati” for their many kindnesses, hospitality, assistance, interest, and care.

Le normal et l’aberrant au sujet de l’excision féminine: Paradigmes changeants

Résumé : Dans ce cours, je présente les résultats préliminaires de mes travaux en cours au Soudan, tout en revenant sur une de mes observations dans le passé au sujet de l’ablation génitale féminine au Soudan à la lumière de la pratique de plus en plus fréquente de la chirurgie esthétique génitale féminine en Occident. En dépit de similarités frappantes au niveau de leurs rationalisations esthétiques, cette pratique se repend en Occident tandis que les pratiques d’excision Soudanaises “traditionnelles” demeurent un sujet de censure et de campagne internationale d’abolition. Au moins l’une des procédures, la “Barbie,” résulte au même résultat excision traditionnelle. Plusieurs familles Soudanaises avec qui j’ai mené des recherches ne pratiquent plus l’excision féminine. J’examine les raisons de ce choix en parallèle avec les raisons justifiant la chirurgie esthétique génitale en Occident, et l’ironie du sort qui associe ces deux contextes.

Janice BODDY is Professor of Anthropology, University of Toronto, Canada, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and past president of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion. Her books include Wombs and alien spirits: Women, men and the zar cult in northern Sudan (1989), Aman: The story of a Somali girl (co-authored with Aman and Virginia Lee Barnes, 1993), and Civilizing women: British crusades in colonial Sudan (2007). She is coeditor (with Michael Lambek) of the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to the anthropology of religion (2013).

Janice Boddy
Department of Anthropology
University of Toronto
19 Russell Street
Toronto, Ontario
Canada
M5S 2S2
janice.boddy@utoronto.ca