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March 2004
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Female Circumcision: Who Speaks? by Sarah Van Geffen This past summer I spent some time interviewing Sudanese women who have come to Canada either as immigrants or as refugees and are now living in the greater Toronto area. The women who I spoke with knew from the beginning that I was interested in knowing about female circumcision (FC) and how it had affected their lives. Many women took this opportunity to talk with me about other facets of their lives including their experiences growing up in Sudan, the reasons why they left, and how their lives have changed since moving to Canada. FC was a topic that naturally emerged out of my conversations with the women, but it did not dictate the interviews. What did however, was how the aforementioned points in each women’s life were affected by poverty, poor health care systems, lack of education, gender inequality, the government, and their own political activism. It was within this wider context that FC became a point of discussion. It was the point of view of many of the women that I spoke with that these underlying issues, the lack of money to fund better education for example, contributes to keeping the practice of female circumcision alive. It was also the opinion of many women that the funding and energy spent to eradicate FC takes away from funding to create better health care, education, and to decrease the level of poverty in the country. Though every woman I talked to believed that FC was a violation of human rights and a problem that needs to be dealt with in Sudan, they thought that there are larger issues that affect women and men in Sudan that are more pertinent, and that only after dealing with them can female circumcision be addressed. My research, for which I have conducted these interviews, pertains to the Western debate on FC and how “Westerners” view the practice and deal with the issue abroad and at home. Much of the research that has been done to this point fails to include the voices of women who come from societies where FC is practiced; thus, leading to a lack of understanding of the practice, the roles that women play, and more importantly how the issue should be dealt with, as can be seen from interviews I conducted. As well, much of this irresponsible research has led to negative stereotypes about women who practice female circumcision and the societies in which they live, resulting in their further marginalization. It is because of this that the relationship between women who practice FC and those in the West working to eradicate it can be defined as a “one-way-street” marked by power and domination. It is my hope that by illuminating these problems within the literature and the research about FC it will be possible to create a space where more progressive, meaning more locally informed, research and development projects pertaining to FC can take place. In the meantime, it is the job of every person who reads about issues that do not directly affect their lives, such as FC, to be constantly critical of what they read and try to decipher whose voice(s) is/are being revealed. |