Feminism, Culture and Embodied Practice: The Rhetorics of Comparison (Transformations)

Feminism, Culture and Embodied Practice Within both feminist theory and popular culture, establishing similarities bet...

Author: Carolyn Pedwell

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Feminism, Culture and Embodied Practice

Within both feminist theory and popular culture, establishing similarities between embodied practices rooted in different cultural and geopolitical contexts (e.g. ‘African’ female genital cutting and ‘Western’ cosmetic surgery) has become increasingly common as a means of countering cultural essentialism, ethnocentrism and racism. Feminism, Culture and Embodied Practice examines how cross-cultural comparisons of embodied practices function as a rhetorical device – with particular theoretical, social and political effects – in a range of contemporary feminist texts. It asks: Why and how are cross-cultural links among these practices drawn by feminist theorists and commentators, and what do these analogies do? What knowledges, hierarchies and figurations do the comparisons produce, disrupt and/or reify in feminist theory, and how do such effects resonate within popular culture? Taking a relational web approach that focuses on unravelling the binary threads that link specific embodied practices within a wider representational economy, this book highlights how we depend on and affect one another across cultural and geopolitical contexts. This book is valuable reading for undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers in Gender Studies, Postcolonial or Race Studies, Cultural and Media Studies, and other related disciplines. Carolyn Pedwell is Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. Her research interests include feminist and postcolonial theory; gender, cultural difference and ‘the body’; and the transnational politics of emotion and affect. Her work has been published in Feminist Theory, Feminist Review and Body and Society.

Transformations: Thinking through Feminism Edited by Maureen McNeil Institute of Women’s Studies, Lancaster University Lynne Pearce Department of English, Lancaster University

Other books in the series include: Thinking Through Feminism Edited by Sarah Ahmed, Jane Kilby, Celia Lury, Maureen McNeil and Beverley Skeggs Thinking Through the Skin Edited by Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey Strange Encounters Embodied others in post-coloniality Sara Ahmed Feminism and Autobiography Texts, theories, methods Edited by Tess Cosslett, Celia Lury and Penny Summerfield Advertising and Consumer Citizenship Gender, images and rights Anne M. Cronin Mothering the Self Mothers, daughters, subjects Stephanie Lawler When Women Kill Questions of agency and subjectivity Belinda Morrissey Class, Self, Culture Beverley Skeggs

Haunted Nations The colonial dimensions of multiculturalisms Sneja Gunewserau The Rhetorics of Feminism Readings in contemporary cultural theory and the popular press Lynne Pearce Women and the Irish Diaspora Breda Gray Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology Kirsten Campbell Judging the Image Art, value, law Alison Young Sexing the Soldier Rachel Woodward and Trish Winter Violent Femmes Women as spies in popular culture Rosie White Pregnancy, Risk and Biopolitics On the threshold of the living subject Lorna Weir Feminist Cultural Studies of Science and Technology Maureen McNeil Arab, Muslim, Woman Voice and vision in postcolonial literature and film Lindsey Moore Secrecy and Silence in the Research Process Feminist reflections Róisín Ryan-Flood and Rosalind Gill

Working with Affect in Feminist Readings Disturbing differences Marianne Liljeström and Susanna Paasonen Feminism, Culture and Embodied Practice The rhetorics of comparison Carolyn Pedwell Forthcoming: Sociability, Sexuality, Self relationality and individualization Sasha Roseneil

Feminism, Culture and Embodied Practice The rhetorics of comparison Carolyn Pedwell

First published 2010 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon. OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2010. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2010 Carolyn Pedwell All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Pedwell, Carolyn. Feminism, culture and embodied practice: the rhetorics of comparison / by Carolyn Pedwell. p. cm. 1. Feminism – Cross-cultural studies. 2. Women – Cross-cultural studies. 3. Feminist theory – Cross-cultural studies. I. Title. HQ1155.P43 2010 305.4201 – dc22 2009045751 ISBN 0-203-87753-5 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0-415-49790-6 (hbk) ISBN10: 0-203-87753-5 (ebk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-49790-9 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-87753-1 (ebk)

Contents

1

2

3

4

5

6

Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction: feminism, culture and embodied practice: the rhetorics of comparison

1

Comparing cultures: feminist theory, anti-essentialism and new humanisms

14

Critical frameworks: theorising intersectionality, relationality and embodiment

33

Continuums and analogues: linking ‘African’ female genital cutting and ‘Western’ body modifications

59

Constitutive comparisons: producing Muslim veiling, anorexia and ‘Western’ fashion and beauty practices

85

Weaving relational webs: theorising cultural difference and embodied practice

107

Postscript

130

Notes Bibliography Index

132 152 167

Acknowledgements

This book began as a Ph.D. thesis at the Gender Institute, London School of Economics and Political Science, in 2003. It was reworked during an ESRC postdoctoral fellowship at the Department of Media and Communications, Goldsmiths’, University of London, in 2008 and at the School of Arts and Cultures, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, where I am now based. My thanks go to the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the LSE Gender Institute for funding my research. A great number of people provided tremendous support and guidance throughout the project and have contributed to my thinking about the issues with which this text engages in crucial ways. First, I want to express my enduring gratitude to Clare Hemmings and Anne Phillips, my Ph.D. supervisors at the LSE’s Gender Institute, who sparked my interest in the representational politics of gender, cultural difference and embodied practice and made me feel that the project was worth pursuing. I have benefited immensely from Clare’s and Anne’s careful reading, critical feedback and ongoing encouragement. Thank you, as well, to my other mentors and colleagues at the Gender Institute, Diane Perrons, Ros Gill, Hazel Johnstone, Silvia Posocco, Sadie Wearing and Karen Throsby, who enabled my research in multiple ways and each took the time to engage critically with my work. I am also indebted to the (past and present) members of the Institute’s Ph.D. research seminar, who provided invaluable feedback on my writing and created such a stimulating research environment in which to work, especially Faith Armitage, Deborah Finding, Rebecca Lawrence, Christina Scharff, Róisín Ryan Flood, Jo Brain, Joanne Kalogeras, Marina Franchi and Maria Pereira. My sincere thanks also go to Gail Lewis and Vikki Bell, my Ph.D. examiners, for their careful reading of the manuscript, astute advice on its strengths, gaps and weaknesses, and helpful suggestions of additional source material. Sara Ahmed, my postdoctoral mentor at Goldsmiths’, provided both incisive guidance and enthusiastic support throughout the process of transforming the thesis into a book. Sara’s writing has been inspirational to me in many ways and it has been an honour and privilege to work with her as a mentor. I also benefited from Joanna Zylinska’s very helpful advice and

x

Acknowledgements

feedback during my time at Goldsmiths’. My colleagues at Newcastle have been extremely supportive throughout the process of editing the book. In particular, I have been lucky to work with Stacy Gillis, who has been a wonderful mentor and friend over the years and is now an inspiring colleague. I am grateful also to Deborah Chambers and Liviu Popoviciu for all their support in adjusting to a new environment and for helping to create time for my research. Many thanks also to Ashleigh Sawyer for her fantastic research assistance. My gratitude goes to Lynne Pearce and Maureen McNeil, editors of the ‘Transformations’ series, for their interest in and support for my project and for taking the time to help me improve the text. Thank you also to the two anonymous referees, who provided crucial feedback, and to the editorial staff at Routledge for all their work in preparing the book. I am enormously grateful to the dear friends who kept me going in the various cities in which book was written: in London, Amy, Rachel, Rebecca, Joanne, Deborah, Faith, Christina and Marina; in Toronto, Melanee and Carlie; and in Newcastle, Angharad, Rhodri, Stacy, Mónica, Yvette, Neelam, Simon, Pedro and Martin. I especially want to acknowledge Amy Hinterberger, who provided incisive feedback on the entire manuscript and challenged me to rethink easy assumptions and answers, and Angharad Closs Stephens, who has been an unerring source of critical advice and sympathetic support since we began our Master’s degrees together in 2001. Finally, I want to thank my family. This project would not have been possible without the unyielding faith, encouragement and support of my parents, David and Laurie Pedwell, my brother, Greg Pedwell, and my grandparents, Berkley and Opal Harper and David and Phyllis Pedwell. Earlier versions of chapters have appeared as follows, and I thank the publishers for permission to reprint here: ‘Weaving Relational Webs: Theorising Cultural Difference and Embodied Practice’, Feminist Theory 9, 1 (2008): 87–107; ‘Intersections and Entanglements: Tracing “the Anorexic” and “the Veiled Woman”’, in Gender and Citizenship in a Multicultural Context, ed. E. Oleksy et al. (2008); ‘Theorising “African” Female Genital Cutting and “Western” Body Modification: A Critique of the Continuum and Analogue Approaches’, Feminist Review 86 (2007): 45–66. C.P.

Introduction: Feminism, culture and embodied practice The rhetorics of comparison

Western women have confronted the same problem of female genital surgeries that African women face today albeit in our own cultural context. (Isabelle Gunning 1991: 226)

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

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Another contentious cross-cultural analogy made is that between Muslim practices of veiling and ‘Western’ eating disorders. Mervat Nasser (1999) argues, for example, that the ‘new’ Muslim veiling phenomenon represents a contemporary ‘equivalent’ to the growing ‘epidemic’ of anorexia in the industrialised West. Both practices function as forms of problem solving which, in the absence of real power or control, help women cope with the competing demands of ambitious professional goals and pressure to maintain a traditional female identity. Feminist critics have also linked Muslim veiling and a range of fashion and beauty practices common in Western cultures.6 As Nancy Hirschmann suggests, Western feminists need to ask themselves whether the veil is more oppressive than fashion trends such as Wonderbras, mini-skirts and blue jeans (1998: 361). Cross-cultural comparisons have also been made between gendered forms of domestic violence. In order to deconstruct essentialist thinking which associates ‘culture’ with practices of ‘dowry murder’ in India but not with domestic violence murders in the United States, for instance, Uma Narayan (1997) shows how the two practices represent similar systemic problems of violence that affect roughly the same proportion of women in each nation. She explains how this connection is often unidentified by Western commentators because, ‘in contrast to “dowry murder”, fatal forms of domestic violence in the United States are a problem lacking a term that “specifically picks them out” from the general category of “domestic violence”’ (95). This ‘absence’, she maintains, ‘operates to impede Americans from making the connections that would facilitate seeing dowry murder as a form of domestic violence’ (96). Similarly, Lama Abu-Odeh (1997) offers a comparative review of the ways in which ‘crimes of passion’ in the United States and ‘honour killings’ in Arab contexts have been constructed and evaluated within American and Arab legal frameworks. She seeks to interrogate ‘the fallacy of both the orientalist construction that the East is different from the West and the almost contradictory idea of international feminism that all violence against women all over the world is the same’ (287).7 These kinds of cross-cultural comparisons have emerged out of a long history of feminist and postcolonial critique of the essentialism, ethnocentrism and racism inherent in both mainstream and feminist representations of practices such as FGC and veiling.8 Gaining momentum in recent years, such comparative approaches have been the focus of a number of international feminist academic journals, including Feminist Theory,9 the European Journal of Women’s Studies10 and Australian Feminist Studies,11 as well as other journals spanning a range of fields, such as Metaphilosophy,12 Bioethics,13 the Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology14 and Columbia Human Rights Law Review.15 Growing interdisciplinary interest in cross-cultural links among embodied practices has also been highlighted by international conferences. For example, ‘Genital Cutting in a Globalised Age: A Forum for Interdisciplinary Debate’, a major symposium held at the Royal Society of Medicine in London, UK, in July 2008, aimed to ‘explicitly address the

Feminism, culture and embodied practice

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discursive and legislative inconsistencies relating to genital cutting, and tackle the ideological, political and ethical implications of current practices’ through examining links among FGC, intersex surgery, transsexual surgery, genital cosmetic surgery and male circumcision.16 Linking embodied practices across cultures is also becoming increasingly prevalent in media and popular culture. Writing in the UK daily newspaper The Guardian, Cath Elliot (2008) objects to the essentialist distinctions routinely drawn between FGC and cosmetic labiaplasty. While ‘we rightly condemn female genital mutilation (FGM) when it’s forced on women and girls in the name of culture and tradition’, she argues, ‘we’re quick to embrace it when it’s sold to us packaged in the language of choice’. From Elliot’s perspective, ‘It’s no wonder we face accusations of hypocrisy and cultural imperialism, when glossy magazines carry worthy articles about the horrors of FGM in the developing world on one page, and advertisements offering the latest in designer vaginas in the classified section in the back.’17 Moreover, in the Canadian magazine The Walrus, Marni Jackson contends that ‘Western women have their versions of the veils as well’ (2007: 24). Referencing fanatic weight loss regimes, stiletto heels, tanning beds and cosmetic surgery, she highlights satirical links between Muslim veiling and ‘the ruthless orthodoxy of high fashion, the pressure to expose the flesh, and the curious body coverings (and uncovering) of the secular, middle-class, North American professional woman’ (24). Similar cross-cultural analogies have been made in a range of other mainstream publications, from Newsweek (Ozols 2004) to The Observer (Anthony 2005) to Jane magazine (Catchpole 2004). This trend towards cross-cultural comparison is also highly significant in relation to wider political and institutional discourses focusing on issues of gender, embodiment and cultural practice. From the debates about ‘the veil’ in European and North American schools to fears about ‘female genital mutilation’ in African immigrant communities, the gendered body remains a key site through which anxieties about cultural difference are articulated in multicultural Western societies. In the context of recent public pronouncements on the ‘death of multiculturalism’ in the United Kingdom and ongoing debates about cultural integration and the importance of fostering a ‘British identity’, cross-cultural feminist analyses of embodied practices may be appropriated by both government and media to diffuse the discomfort that cultural and ethnic diversity seem to produce.18 ‘Humanising’ comparisons that link groups and practices across cultural and geopolitical contexts are also very relevant to the conflicts between gender equality and multiculturalism which concern social policy and human rights legislation internationally.19 From this perspective, we might go as far to say that drawing cross-cultural parallels or analogies between embodied practices has become a Western cultural and sociopolitical obsession. This book examines how – and with what theoretical and political implications – cross-cultural comparison now functions as a primary mode through which contemporary ideas about gender, culture and ‘difference’ are articulated in both academic and mainstream discourses.

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It is important to point out that I use labels such as ‘African practices of FGC’ and ‘Western body modifications’ to indicate how particular practices have been differentiated and compared within the literature I am analysing. Such descriptive markers, however, are problematic because they group together a vast range of practices, downplaying diversity, complexity and cross-over, and force cultural and geopolitical dichotomies which are often untenable.20 Indeed, FGC practices are rooted not only in African cultures but also in some Asian and Middle Eastern cultures, and are performed within many Western locations, among both immigrant groups and those born in the West. Cosmetic surgery procedures, in turn, are practised all over the world and assume different forms and meanings in relation to local economic, social and political factors.21 For example, as Meredith Jones notes, ‘in Saudi Arabia a distinctly local practice, the Jamiah, is sometimes used to raise money for cosmetic surgery’ and ‘in Iran nose bandages after rhinoplasties are worn proudly in public as status symbols’ (2008: 33). Cosmetic procedures are also closely linked to accelerating processes of globalisation, as illustrated through the growing phenomenon of ‘cosmetic surgery tourism’ (Jones 2008). These discursive labels also efface the (often antagonistic) historical processes and social relations through which practices have been constructed as ‘African’ and ‘Western’ in the first place, including colonialism, imperialism, slavery and migration (Gilman 1999; Sullivan 2001). Furthermore, they can elide the ways in which embodied practices may develop and gain meaning precisely through their fusing or transgression of national, cultural and/or religious boundaries (Brah 1996a; Bachu 2004; Satrapi 2008). Thus, while I employ such labels in this book for practical and strategic reasons, I seek throughout the course of my analysis to illustrate the ways in which they continue to be limiting and problematic.

Rhetoric, comparison and cultural essentialism Through focusing on how cross-cultural comparisons of embodied practices function as a rhetorical strategy with a range of critical implications, this book seeks to contribute to an important epistemological trajectory within feminist theory. In The Rhetorics of Feminism: Readings in Contemporary Cultural Theory and the Popular Press (2004), Lynne Pearce reads contemporary feminist writing to illustrate how feminist theory is expressed as well as made through a range of rhetorical practices, from the trope of ‘the body’, to narrative and story-telling, to the use of the first person pronoun. Moreover, in Feminist Imagination: Genealogies in Feminist Theory (1999), Vikki Bell deploys ‘an attentiveness to the modes of address and argument’ in feminist theory (1) to examine ‘the exclusions, boundaries, and histories of feminism’ (10).22 Like these authors, I am concerned with how particular knowledges and hierarchies are (re)produced through rhetorical strategies employed in feminist texts. My investigation proceeds from the acknowledgement that feminist cross-cultural comparisons are not purely descriptive


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but are rather constitutive of meaning.23 Cross-cultural approaches must employ what I have termed a ‘metric of commensurability’ to make two or more entities comparable within a single discursive framework. My interest is in examining what is at stake (theoretically, socially and politically) in imposing particular metrics to make practices such as FGC and cosmetic surgery or veiling and anorexia commensurable. The archive of texts the book examines includes a theoretically and politically diverse range of feminist scholarly texts – all of which draw similarities between embodied practices understood to be rooted in divergent cultural contexts. I also link these feminist academic discourses to cross-cultural comparisons within media and popular cultural sites. The great majority of these comparisons are made by theorists working in Western industrialised contexts, although commentators vary with respect to disciplinary and social location, as well as political position. Cross-cultural analogies between embodied practices have also been made by African, Asian and Arab feminists and commentators. For example, Egyptian feminist writer Nawal El Saadawi (1980) and Sudanese doctor and activist Nahid Toubia (1988) have both highlighted rhetorical links between FGC and ‘Western’ bodily practices. Furthermore, Eastern and disaporic Muslim commentators have pointed out how the veil can function not only as a ‘form of resistance to Western ideology and secularism’ but also ‘as a fashion accessory’ not dissimilar to particular ‘Western’ styles and garments (Macdonald 2006: 15; see also Hoodfar 2003: 11). An analysis of the bearing of geopolitical location and positionality on the ways in which such comparisons are made, as well as how they are received by various audiences, would offer a vital contribution to transnational feminist theory. In exploring why, how and to what potential effects cross-cultural comparisons of embodied practices have emerged as a pervasive rhetorical strategy within Western literatures specifically, however, I seek to interrogate in depth the relationship between these forms of knowledge making and wider geopolitical relations and hierarchies in an academic and political context in which ‘Western hegemony’ is contested and fragmented, and yet nonetheless salient.24 The book argues that, although feminist comparisons of embodied practices differ in a number of ways, it is significant that most authors frame their cross-cultural linkings as a means to interrogate cultural essentialism. Culturally essentialist representations ‘depict as homogenous groups of heterogeneous people whose values, interests, ways of life, and moral and political commitments are internally plural and divergent’ (Narayan 1998: 87–8). Furthermore, through constructing various cultural groups and practices as fundamentally and hierarchically distinct, culturally essentialist discourses often reify ethnocentric and racist notions of cultural difference. From the pervasive ‘us/them’ rhetoric employed to ‘legitimise’ the American-led ‘War on Terror’ to the ubiquitous media representations of ‘the veil’ as a sign of Muslim women’s ‘backwardness, subordination, and oppression’ (El Guindi 1999: 3), cultural essentialism is widespread within the contemporary Euro-American

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sociopolitico sphere. As several feminist critics emphasise, it has also pervaded feminist theory and practice, from Second Wave feminist calls for ‘liberated Western women’ to save African women from the ‘unspeakable atrocity’ of female genital mutilation (Daly 1978; Hosken 1981) to contemporary liberal feminist discourses which construct minority (i.e. foreign) cultures as ‘more patriarchal’ on the whole than mainstream (i.e. Western) cultures (Okin 1999: 15). Through illustrating the ways in which particular embodied practices involve similar bodily procedures, discourses and/or rationales, feminist crosscultural strategies seek to reveal the constructedness of essentialist boundaries which distinguish various groups as culturally, ethnically and morally ‘different’. They also aim to encourage critical thinking about the geopolitical relations of power through which embodied practices are represented and (re)produced and query how the term ‘culture’ is employed differentially on the basis of embodied axes such as race and nation. These are clearly important goals. Yet, for many authors, the teasing out of ‘hidden’ or disavowed cross-cultural similarities between practices seems to represent an end point to analysis. This book starts from where most other work in the field concludes – that is, from an interrogation of what may be lost (or problematically reified) in these feminist moves to address cultural essentialism through cross-cultural comparison or analogy. While some authors have interrogated analogies, such as those between FGC and ‘Western’ cosmetic surgery,25 these critiques have generally been made in ways that simply reify the culturally essentialist binaries that many of those who make such comparisons seek to disrupt (i.e. racialised assumptions that ‘African’ women who undergo FGC are oppressed victims of primitive, patriarchal traditions whereas women who undergo cosmetic surgery are self-determining consumers of modern technology).26 This book takes a different approach. While it wholeheartedly supports the imperative to disrupt cultural essentialism and racism which appears to motivate many feminist cross-cultural comparisons, it queries whether these analogies actually achieve the progressive effects they seek. Indeed, the book contends that a more in-depth inquiry into the theoretical implications of constructing various embodied practices as ‘similar’, ‘equivalent’ or ‘universal’ is necessary. It is crucial to ask, for instance, what such cross-cultural constructions of commonality may leave out or cover over. On what bases are links between specific embodied practices made and could crucial historical, social and embodied particularities be effaced in the process? In extracting practices from their discursive-material27 trajectories of production, might the construction of cultural ‘analogues’ or ‘equivalents’ elide the complex relations of power and antagonism through which these practices and their imagined subjects28 have been constituted? Furthermore, it is important to consider what views of ‘the body’ and such feminist comparisons employ. If any attempt to see a multiplicity of embodied practices as equivalent or continuous necessarily depends on imposing one (humanising) vision of embodiment across differently located subjects and practices, might it not be the case


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that any such vision will always include some bodies while excluding others? Moreover, how do cross-cultural comparisons represent relationships between culture, embodied practice and agency? The motivations on the part of particular theorists for comparing various practices should also be explored. If such comparisons are not impelled exclusively by a desire to counter cultural essentialism, what other theoretical and rhetorical objectives are at work here? How can cross-cultural feminist approaches be evaluated within the context of global ‘Western hegemony’, and specifically the dominance of Euro-American academic production? The book identifies two key rhetorical strategies for linking embodied practices across cultures, which I have termed the ‘analogue’ and ‘continuum’ approaches. The analogue approach involves establishing a likeness between (at least) two cultural practices as counterparts. The continuum approach involves situating various practices on a spectrum of embodied procedures deemed similar to varying degrees. Focusing on comparisons made between ‘African’ female genital cutting and ‘Western’ body modifications (Chapters 3 and 5), and between Muslim veiling, anorexia and ‘Western’ fashion and beauty practices (Chapter 4), it conducts an in depth analysis of these approaches and some of their theoretical, social and political implications. The book’s main contention is that, despite their productive possibilities, cross-cultural comparisons risk a range of problematic effects which are central, rather than peripheral, to ongoing feminist efforts to work through cultural essentialism, ethnocentrism and racism. More specifically, in their efforts to establish overarching cross-cultural commonalities between various practices, comparative approaches can efface historical, social and embodied particularities and reify problematic notions of ‘culture’ and ‘agency’. It is also clear that gendered claims to ‘sameness’ can easily slip into essentialist articulations of cultural, ethnic or racial ‘difference’. When employed by privileged ‘Western’ commentators, analogies can involve appropriations which affirm, rather than challenge, dominant cultural and sociopolitical hierarchies. Furthermore, in fetishising the imagined subjects of particular embodied practices as metaphors for their culture, these comparisons can cover over (rather than address) the relationships of power and social antagonism through which salient figures such as ‘the victim of female genital mutilation’ or ‘the veiled woman’ have been (re)constituted. Cross-cultural strategies can therefore defer or close off (rather than enable) in-depth analysis of the specific processes through which cultural essentialism and racism are perpetuated with respect to embodied practices. Importantly, in critiquing particular ‘Western’ feminist theorists, my aim in this book is not to suggest that such authors are individually negligent or problematic. Rather, I seek to locate their texts within the larger context of global power relations in which particular modes of rhetoric and representation are constructed. In doing so, I acknowledge that I do not operate outside such a context, and hence may also recreate some of the patterns which I identify and critique. It is my hope, however, that the disruption, rather

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than reification, of such hierarchies may be enabled by using a reflexive approach which traces and interrogates the ways in which dominant feminist modes of discursive representation are employed. One of the book’s primary propositions is that, rather than illustrating how embodied practices or their imagined subjects are fundamentally similar, we might more fruitfully examine how they are constructed relationally in and through one another. Drawing on a range of critical feminist, postcolonial and queer literatures, I argue that reorienting anti-essentialist feminist analysis from an emphasis on similarity to relationality allows more critical and sustained examination of the complex, intersectional processes through which particular embodied practices and figures have been both linked and constituted differently. To this end, I develop a relational web approach (Chapter 5) that focuses on unravelling the multiple binary threads linking various practices and/or figures within a wider representational economy. Thinking through relational webs, I suggest, enables us to unpack how, rather than being ‘absolutely unrelated, polarised, or analogous’, embodied practices such as FGC and cosmetic surgery ‘are discursive constructs that come to matter in contextually specific ways and in relation to other discursive formation’ (Sullivan 2009: 282–3). A relational web approach may also provide a valuable pedagogical tool for feminist theorists to interrogate and mutually engage with some of the enduring social investments and assumptions that underscore essentialist constructions of cultural difference. In this way the book aims to generate relational transnational feminist theory and politics premised not predominantly on the recognition that our experiences are essentially similar, or that we have suffered common ‘cultural wounds’, but rather on the basis of our fundamental discursive and social interdependence – that is, how we both depend on and affect one another across (as well as within) cultural and geopolitical contexts.

Theoretical frameworks: feminist, postcolonial and queer perspectives My rhetorical analysis is indebted to a range of crucial anti-essentialist, postcolonial and transnational feminist engagements with issues of gender, race, culture and representation. Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s (1991) critique of the essentialising production of ‘the average Third World woman’ in Western feminist scholarship, Uma Narayan’s (1997) analysis of how racialising ‘cultural explanations’ are employed by Western theorists to produce ‘Third World women’ as ‘victims of their culture’ and Leti Volpp’s (2000) examination of how problematic behaviour is more readily attributed to ‘culture’ when it is the behaviour of immigrant groups of colour, rather than that of mainstream white Americans, have all been crucial to my own analysis. It is also, in part, out of these kinds of critical literatures that the feminist comparisons of embodied practices I investigate have emerged. Indeed, Narayan and Volpp each draw explicit links between practices understood to


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be rooted in different cultural and geographic contexts as a means to critique racialised constructions of ‘difference’. However, I also employ the epistemological and theoretical terms set out by these texts to interrogate some of their own inconsistencies, as well as some of the potentially problematic directions in which they have been mobilised within wider feminist literatures. In this respect, my investigation draws specifically on postcolonial feminist analysis of the problems of comparativism and self-referentiality in Western critical thought. Following Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988), I am interested in how cross-cultural comparisons that emphasise overarching commonalities between ‘Western’ and ‘nonWestern’ practices can be ‘complicit in the persistent constitution of the Other as the Self ’s shadow’ (278). Comparisons may thus remain at what Rey Chow (1996) refers to as ‘the level of image identification’: ‘a process in which “our” own identity is measured in terms of the degrees to which we resemble her and to which she resembles us’ (127). My analysis also draws on critical feminist perspectives on embodiment to explore how, in assuming that it is predominately essentialist notions of ‘difference’ rather than ‘sameness’ that need to be tackled head on, cross-cultural approaches risk redirecting attention from the relationships of social antagonism which function continually to constitute bodies, subjects and practices as ‘different’ (Butler 1990/1999; Shildrick 1997; Ahmed 2000, 2004a). In addition to these literatures, my arguments build on a rich history of feminist and postcolonial analysis of comparative and/or analogical approaches made in other contexts. Anne Laura Stoler (2006) illustrates, for example, how cross-cultural comparison was central to European colonialism as a key technology through which racialised categories and boundaries were produced.29 Through the decrees of colonial bureaucracies, ‘acts of comparison perform[ed] important political work as “weapons of reason” in the tactics of rule’ and produced ‘truth claims about the attributes of race and the dispositions that [were] purported to signal true racial membership’ (56). In this vein, Black feminist scholars have analysed how neocolonial practices of cross-cultural comparison have informed (white) feminist anthropological and sociological research, mobilising problematic racialised narratives of ‘cultural progress’. As Valerie Amos and Prathiba Parmar (1984) argue, black women have often appeared in ‘cross-cultural studies which under the guise of feminist and progressive anthropology, renders us as “subjects” for “interesting” and “exotic” comparison’ (1984: 6). Through examining black and non-Western women’s cultural practices as ‘feudal residues’ or labelling them ‘traditional’, these theories portray them as ‘politically immature women who need to be versed and schooled in the ethos of Western feminism’ (6).30 While colonial and postcolonial practices of comparison have produced a range of highly problematic effects, they also ‘provide rich ethnographic evidence of historically shifting strategies in the management of social kinds’ (Stoler 2006: 56). From Stoler’s perspective, in exploring the implications of cross-cultural comparisons we should focus not on identifying ‘the similarities of particular

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(racialised) entities’ (56) but rather on unravelling the ‘commonalities they were made to share’ (56, italics in original). The rhetorical analysis this book offers focuses similarly on the constitutive nature and effects of cross-cultural comparisons and analogies, that is, ‘on the social categories that comparison demands and the explicit and tacit commensurabilities that acts of comparison require’ (5). Other feminist critiques of the politics of comparativism have focused specifically on historical analogies made between gender oppression and racial oppression. In her cogent analysis of the women’s suffrage movement and the Abolition of Slavery campaigns, Angela Davis (1981) interrogated the opportunistic and racist nature of comparisons made by some white women between the position of black men and white women in the nineteenth-century United States. As Elizabeth Spelman (1997) has argued, analogies between white women’s social position and the conditions of black slave women were also a key tool used by prominent (white) female suffragists, such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, ‘to bring attention to their economic, social and political plight’ (9).31 These feminist analogies were highly appropriative and functioned to silence black slave women and make their specific concerns ‘disappear from view’ (115). They also served ‘to reinforce racism’ to the extent that the claim of identification they expressed ‘obscured the real difference that race made to the situations of the two groups of women’32 as well as ‘the role of white women themselves in maintaining the institutions of white supremacy’ (127). Yet such comparisons could not be condemned as wholly opportunistic, given that ‘the use of the image of slavery to describe the situation of white women’ also highlighted ‘deep, significant and compelling similarities of the experiences of two groups of people whose differences it was the main business of the dominant racial ideology otherwise to insist upon’ (125). Like these theorists, I am interested in the ‘paradox of identification’ (127) such analogical strategies entail, as well as their implications for negotiating issues of power, privilege and accountability in transnational feminist theory and politics.33 Analysis of the problematic effects of analogising gender/sexuality and race within critical and/or liberationist discourses has perhaps been most influentially articulated through Black feminist theories of intersectionality. For example, in her landmark text ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics’ (1989) Kimberlé Crenshaw interrogates how gender and race are treated in both mainstream feminist theory and antiracist politics as parallel and hence ‘mutually exclusive categories of experience and analysis’ (139).34 As a result of these ‘single axis’ frameworks, she argues, black women’s particular experiences of oppression, produced through the interaction of race and gender (as well as other axes such as class), are elided. Complex intersectional frameworks have since been developed by a range of critical theorists35 and provide one of the main theoretical tools employed in this book. As I discuss in Chapter 2, intersectionality’s


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interrogation of linear analyses which privilege one single dimension of experience, its critique of additive and analogous approaches to evaluating discrimination and its advocacy of multi-axial accounts of simultaneous oppressions, all signal its promise as a conceptual tool for addressing feminist cross-cultural comparisons of embodied practices. Yet I also consider how feminist intersectional perspectives might be enhanced, and indeed transformed, through (further) taking on board some of the insights and methodologies of critical feminist, postcolonial and queer perspectives on relationality36 and embodiment. In turn, I examine how intersectional and postcolonial perspectives can be employed to interrogate the effects of an ontological privileging of relations of gender/sexuality which remains evident in some forms of both queer theory and feminist embodied theory. Finally, the book is particularly interested in how feminist cross-cultural comparisons (re)produce particular figures as metaphors for their cultures. Following Claudia Castañeda’s analysis in Figurations: Child, Bodies, Worlds (2002), I employ the concept of figuration to ‘describe in detail the processes by which a concept or entity is given particular form – how it is figured in ways that speak to the making of worlds’ (4). A ‘figure’, through this lens, is understood as ‘the effect of a specific configuration of knowledges, practices, and power’ (4).37 While Castañeda traces the appearance of the figure of ‘the child’ across a range of cultural sites, this book focuses on the production of a very different collection of figures, including ‘the victim of female genital cutting’, ‘the cosmetic surgery consumer’, ‘the veiled woman’ and ‘the anorexic’.38 I seek to unravel how fetishised figures such as ‘the victim of female genital mutilation’ have been produced relationally in and through other figures, such as ‘the cosmetic surgery consumer’, and to examine the significance of these processes ‘for the making of wider cultural claims’ (8). Considering why it might be that these specific practices/figures have become the objects of so many analogies and comparisons, the book situates their contemporary production within wider histories of transnational encounter, including specific formations of colonialism, imperialism, nationalism, patriarchy, racism, capitalism and neo-liberalism – as well as feminism.39 Beyond simply providing a critique of the comparative frameworks adopted by other feminist theorists, this relational analysis enables me to develop a deeper understanding of why and how these forms of comparison have emerged as theoretical and political practices. It also allows me to examine the implications of this for how particular groups and practices can be known, as well as for how specific forms of cultural essentialism and racism might be addressed within transnational and anti-essentialist feminist theory.

Outline of chapters In Chapter 1, I situate feminist cross-cultural comparisons of embodied practices within wider anti-cultural essentialist frameworks. I suggest that what links varied feminist comparisons and analogies is that they all frame

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their cross-cultural approaches with a desire to interrogate cultural essentialism, racism and ethnocentrism. However, such strategies risk a range of problematic effects which I argue are central, rather than peripheral, to ongoing feminist efforts to address essentialist articulations of cultural difference with respect to embodied practice. Drawing on ‘critical feminist perspectives on embodiment’, I argue that, in over-emphasising similarity or sameness, cross-cultural comparisons can flatten crucial particularities as well as the complex relations of power through which various practices are constituted as morally, politically and culturally ‘different’ from one another. I then consider how trends towards cross-cultural comparison in feminist theory may be linked to wider critical discourses regarding the possibilities of a ‘new humanism’. In Chapter 2, I outline and explore the key conceptual tools I draw on throughout the book. My analysis engages with feminist, postcolonial and queer frameworks for theorising intersectionality, relationality and embodiment. I consider how these various (overlapping) literatures complement one another in fruitful ways and also productively illustrate one another’s limitations. The chapter as a whole fleshes out a critical feminist framework for addressing the various techniques employed to compare or analogise embodied practices and their imagined subjects within feminist and other critical literatures. This framework also provides critical grounding for the book’s wider examination of how it may be possible to theorise the contingent particularity of embodied practices – as well as the constitutive links between them – without falling into the traps of cultural essentialism or disembodied, ahistorical sameness. In Chapter 3, I provide an in-depth mapping of comparisons made between ‘African’ FGC and ‘Western’ practices such as cosmetic surgery, intersex operations and nineteenth-century American clitoridectomies. Through the rhetorical positioning of these embodied practices as ‘continuous’ or ‘analogical’, feminist theorists seek to break down essentialist and racialised binaries which constitute them as fundamentally different. Contra culturally essentialist constructions, they illustrate how FGC and other body modifications involve similar gendered norms, motivations and experiences. Two key critiques of the continuum and analogue approaches are presented. First, because these models privilege gender and sexuality ontologically, they tend to efface the operation of other axes of embodied differentiation, namely race, cultural difference and nation. As such, the continuum and analogue approaches often reproduce problematic relationships between race and gender whilst failing to address the implicit and problematic role that race, cultural difference and nation continue to play in such models. This erasure of these axes, I contend, is linked to the construction of a ‘Western’ empathetic gaze. This is my second key critique. The desire on the part of theorists working in the West to establish cross-cultural ‘empathy’ through models which stress similarity and solidarity often conceals the continuing operation of geopolitical relations of power and privilege.


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In Chapter 4, I examine some of the similarities between attempts to link Muslim veiling with anorexia and/or ‘Western’ fashion and beauty practices and those comparisons between embodied practices examined in the previous chapter. Feminist theorists employ cross-cultural analogies, in part, to deconstruct the ubiquitous binary of the ‘liberated, skin-showing Western woman’ and the ‘oppressed, veiled Muslim woman’. They highlight the common gendered dilemmas and inequalities that girls and women encounter across cultural and geopolitical contexts and the ways in which these struggles for agency are frequently played out through forms of bodily management and control. I argue, however, that despite their productive possibilities, these cross-cultural comparisons can prevent analysis of the intersectional complexities of the embodied practices they draw together in ways that shore up, rather than critically unravel, essentialist understandings of cultural difference. This chapter also develops the argument that cross-cultural comparisons and analogies are both constitutive and performative. That is, through the repeated acts of translation involved in constructing gendered commensurability among embodied practices, cross-cultural linkings enable particular ways of reading these practices, their imagined subjects and the relations of power in which they are embedded, while disallowing others. Examining how ‘the veiled woman’ and ‘the anorexic’ are made to stand as metaphors for their cultures in cross-cultural comparisons, I explore the implications these iterative processes of figuration have for analyses of gender, embodiment and agency in feminist theory. In Chapter 5, I explore what difference it might make to address culturally essentialist constructions of embodied practice with a focus on relationality rather than commonality. Reorienting feminist analogue and continuum approaches that depend on overarching articulations of cross-cultural similarity or sameness, the chapter develops the contours of a relational web approach that focuses on unravelling the binary threads linking various embodied practices and figures within a wider representational economy. Employing the ubiquitous Euro-American ‘African’ FGC and ‘Western’ cosmetic surgery binary as an example, I aim to show that a relational web approach provides a productive analytical framework for teasing out constitutive connections among practices/figures in ways that avoid flattening significant particularities. Unlike commonality, the concept of constitutive connection does not imply the ‘similarity’ or ‘equivalence’ of experiences, practices or subjects. Instead, it underscores the ways in which processes of social and cultural differentiation and the production social particularities are always relational and contingent, rather than bounded or discrete. The chapter also illustrates how a relational web approach provides a pedagogical tool through which to reflect critically on the links among location, embodiment, power, knowledge, empathy and ethics within cross-cultural and transnational feminist theory projects.

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Comparing cultures Feminist theory, anti-essentialism and new humanisms

As the ‘Others’ of modernity’s ideal humans – such as women, and peoples of non-European races and cultures – increasingly are recognised as fully human, we should expect transformations in the fundamental landscapes of Western metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy and even philosophies of science. (Uma Narayan and Sandra Harding 2000: ix)

This chapter situates feminist cross-cultural comparisons of embodied practices in relation to broader critical analyses of gender, cultural difference and ‘the body’. I begin by exploring how we might understand comparative feminist approaches as linked to wider anti-cultural essentialist frameworks developed within multicultural, transnational and postcolonial feminist literatures. Indeed, feminist parallels drawn between embodied practices understood to be rooted in different cultural contexts, such as ‘African’ female genital cutting (FGC) and ‘Western’ body modifications, are frequently framed by a desire to counter cultural essentialism. In teasing out ‘hidden’ or disavowed similarities between practices, theorists seek to break down and resignify essentialist binaries which reproduce neocolonial assumptions of modernity, cultural progress and gendered agency. I argue, however, that, despite their productive possibilities, these rhetorical strategies often do not move sufficiently beyond the culturally essentialist binaries they seek to contest. Drawing on critical feminist perspectives on embodiment, I suggest that, in their rhetorical recourse to similarity or sameness, cross-cultural comparisons often elide historical, social and embodied particularities. They can also redirect attention away from the complex relations of power through which groups, practices and bodies are constituted as culturally, politically, and indeed morally, different from one another. The chapter also considers how feminist motivations for deconstructing culturally essentialist representations may be linked to the idea of an ‘unfinished’ humanist project. Through highlighting discursive, motivational and experiential similarities between embodied practices, comparative feminist approaches seek to disrupt racialised depictions of particular groups or

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subjects (such as ‘Africans’) as ‘barbaric’, ‘depraved’ and ‘non-human’. In place of such ‘othering’ discourses they construct a notion of underlying, cross-cultural human commonality. Yet, from (at least one strand) of a critical feminist perspective on embodiment, this prospect of a ‘new’ humanism may be inherently problematic. That is, no matter how much resignification of essentialising frameworks and categories takes place, constitutive social and psychic hierarchies will always function to exclude some bodies in delimiting what qualifies as ‘human’. The chapter examines how theorising the links among gender, cultural difference and embodied practice via the notion of a ‘relational economy’ may help to negotiate these counterposed anti-/new humanist perspectives while also enabling a move away from the sameness/ difference dualism which these positions sometimes slip into.

Situating comparative feminist approaches As discussed in the Introduction, the cross-cultural comparison most commonly made by feminist theorists in the service of anti-cultural essentialism is that between so-called ‘African’ FGC and ‘Western’ body modification practices, such as cosmetic surgery. FGC has been widely represented within Western discourses as wholly patriarchal and primitive – the result of complicity, oppression and false consciousness.1 Yet cosmetic surgery procedures, several theorists argue, can cause comparable levels of pain and suffering and may appear equally horrific (and condemnable) to ‘Third World women’ as FGC may appear to many Western women. As Isabelle Gunning (1991) asserts of breast augmentation surgery, ‘how bizarre and barbaric must a practice like implanting polyurethane-covered silicone into one’s breast be perceived by one not accustomed to the practice’ (213). In a similar vein, Sheila Jeffreys (2005) suggests that both ‘female genital mutilation’ and ‘cosmetic surgery practices such as breast implant surgery’ are associated with ‘damaging health consequences’ (30–1). The psychologically harmful effects of beauty practices are downplayed or undocumented, she suggests, ‘because such practices have not been considered problematic’ (31). She thus maintains that both cosmetic surgery and FGC (along with a host of other so-called ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ practices, such as veiling, transsexual surgery and make-up) should be considered as ‘harmful cultural practices’ within the UN conceptual framework.2 It has also been argued that FGC and other body modifications are often underscored by similar motivations and rationales. Simone Weil Davis (2002) points out, for instance, that many of the reasons African women give for undergoing FGC are analogous to those articulated by Western women who undergo cosmetic labiaplasty, including ‘beautification, transcendence of shame and desire to conform’ (23). Euro-American and African genital reshaping procedures, she argues, should thus be conceptualised on a continuum rather than measured by different yardsticks. While each of these theorists claims similarities between practices of FGC and ‘Western’ body modifications, their political perspectives and theoretical

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approaches reveal some significant differences. For example, Jeffreys works from a radical feminist position to link FGC and cosmetic surgery through a notion of universal gender oppression. For her, the label of ‘harmful cultural practices’ usefully emphasises ‘that culture can enforce and that women and girls are not free agents able to pick up and choose’ (2005: 34). By contrast, Weil Davis applies a critical feminist framework to resist representing women as ‘undifferentiated victims’ (2002: 27). She is interested in investigating the complex issues of agency and consent surrounding both sets of practices. As I discuss in Chapters 3–4, these theorists also employ different rhetorical models to link FGC and other body modifications. Notwithstanding these differences, all three thinkers frame their cross-cultural approaches with a desire to interrogate cultural essentialism. They each express concern with the theoretical inadequacy and underlying racism and cultural imperialism of dichotomising discourses which set ‘Western cultures’ in sharp relief against ‘non-Western cultures’, ‘First World women’ against ‘Third World women’, ‘non-Muslim women’ against ‘Muslim women’ and so on. We can therefore see these cross-cultural comparisons as linked, though in different ways and to different extents, to a wider anti-cultural essentialist feminist project. Feminist comparisons and anti-essentialism While it would be misleading to identify a cohesive and unified anti-cultural essentialist feminist project, there are number of theorists, including Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Rey Chow, Uma Narayan, Leti Volpp, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Sherene Razack and Avtar Brah, who may be seen as linked through their critical analysis of cultural essentialism and its relationship to gender and racial essentialisms. These authors have paid careful attention to the ways in which cultural and other essentialisms are (re)produced through cultural binaries.3 As feminist and postcolonial thinkers have long argued, the logic and effect of culture-based (and indeed all) binary structures is to overvalue one pole (usually ‘the West’) while disparaging the other (usually the ‘non-West’). Such dualisms consistently function to exaggerate differences between groups while effacing differences within groups and to emphasise separation and opposition while suppressing similarity and overlap. Essentialist binaries which construct ‘Third World women’ (or ‘African women’ or ‘Muslim women’) as a homogeneous group promote ethnocentrism which reinforces dominant Western or Eurocentric values and modes of representation. As Chandra Talpade Mohanty (1991) has most influentially illustrated, the construction of the poor, victimised, oppressed ‘average Third World woman’ presumes and promotes the contrasting implicit self-representation of ‘Western women’ as educated, modern and having control over their bodies (56). Similarly, we can see how the portrayal of the helpless African ‘victim of female genital mutilation’ constructs the reciprocal image of the empowered Western ‘woman/saviour’, or how the representation of the covered and oppressed ‘veiled woman’ implies the image of the skin-showing and liberated

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‘Western woman’. As Sherene Razack argues, through such essentialist representations ‘gender operates as a kind of technology of empire enabling the West to make the case for its own modernity and for civilizational projects around the globe’ (2008: 18). As a result of such ‘discursive colonisation’ all ‘marginal and resistant modes and experiences’ are erased (Mohanty 1991: 73) and those positioned as ‘other’ to the predominant ‘Western self ’ are characterised as having no ability to shape the social relations in which they operate. From this perspective, it becomes hard to analyse specific historical and contextual differences between ‘non-Western’ or ‘Third World’ women and thus difficult to theorise legitimate strategies for positive social transformation. As culturally essentialist binaries often position a bounded, ahistorical notion of ‘cultural difference’ as the fundamental axis of differentiation between groups, they ignore the fluidity, contradiction and change within cultural groups. Culturally essentialist dualisms also efface the role of other forces that are not exclusively ‘cultural’ (i.e. economic, political, religious, legacies of colonisation, transnational capital, etc.) in structuring conflict and oppression, as well as resistance. As Anne Phillips (2004) argues, there is a tendency to employ the term ‘culture’ when ‘faced with something we cannot otherwise understand’ (11). She suggests that reference to culture can be unhelpful in addressing the current politics of both FGC and veiling, as ‘culture’ (however defined) may not be primary to the ways in which such practices are constructed and maintained in particular contexts. Furthermore, when sharp, all encompassing contrasts are made between ‘Western cultures’ and ‘other cultures’, possible (Western-based) responses become polarised between the imperialising condemnation/salvation position, and the cultural relativist stance (which fails to make political and ethical judgements to curtail harm).4 Essentialist constructions of ‘Third World cultures’ also pose particular problems for feminist agendas in developing countries. As Uma Narayan (1998) points out, political movements that are hostile to women’s interests in various parts of the ‘Third World’ often depict culturally dominant norms of femininity and practices that adversely affect women as central components of cultural identity, so that women’s conformity with the status quo is equated with the ‘preservation of culture’ and their challenges to such norms and practices as ‘cultural betrayals’ (91). In this sense, we can see how cultural essentialism is often intimately related to gender essentialism.5 The way that culture is conceptualised and linked with race within culturally essentialist discourses has also been analysed and critiqued by postcolonial and anti-cultural essentialist feminist theorists. Leti Volpp (2000) argues that problematic behaviour, such as under-age marriage, is more readily attributed to ‘culture’ when it is the behaviour of immigrant groups of colour rather than that of mainstream white Americans. A tendency to perceive white Americans as devoid of culture, she claims, leads to attempts to construct other, ‘non-cultural’ explanations for white people’s behaviour. Under this schema, white people are seen as individual actors (with agency) while people of color are perceived as members of groups (devoid of agency).

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Similarly, Narayan (1997) argues that a certain racialising of culture is in operation when ‘cultural explanations’ are produced to explain fatal forms of violence against ‘Third World women’, while such forms of violence against mainstream Western women appear to be resistant to such ‘cultural explanations’ (84). This inconsistency, she claims, results in essentialising portrayals of ‘Third World women’ as ‘victims of their culture’. Both Volpp and Narayan are concerned with how such racialised cultural binaries reify notions of fundamental moral differences between Western cultures and their so-called ‘others’.6 By illustrating the ways in which particular embodied practices or behaviours are inherently similar, they, like Gunning, Weil Davis, and to some extent Jeffreys, aim to interrogate the racialising discourses which construct various cultural practices and groups as essentially different. It should be acknowledged, however, that within feminist frameworks ‘essentialism’ is not conceived as something which can be disrupted and dispensed with once and for all. As Sara Ahmed (1998) emphasises, ‘we need to qualify our arguments by a recognition that essentialism is not a conceptual horizon that can be simply transcended’ (91). Moreover, ‘essentialism’ and ‘non-essentialism’ are not cast straightforwardly as opposites. Rather, a more complex relationship between the two forms of representation is theorised. Diana Fuss (1989) has persuasively argued, for instance, that constructionism (the position that differences are constructed and not innate) actually operates as a more sophisticated form of essentialism, and hence ‘the bar between essentialism and constructionism is by no means as solid and unassailable as advocates of both sides assume it to be’ (xii). Rather than identifying clearcut, universalising categories of ‘essentialism’ and ‘non-essentialism’ which retain the same meaning across different contexts, feminist anti-cultural essentialist analyses seek to examine the operation of particular discourses which function in essentialist ways within specific historical, social and political contexts. What is problematically essentialist for some subjects in one place or time may not be in another, and constructions of essentialism can shift and be transformed. Feminist debates relating to essentialism have also discussed whether ‘strategic’ mobilisations of essentialism may sometimes be necessary within feminist praxis.7 Political action, it has been argued, may require some provisional forms of essentialism as one phase within larger deconstructive projects (Spivak 1987; Fuss 1989; Shildrick 1997).8 Furthermore, theorists have acknowledged that an anti-essentialist imperative within feminist theory can be counterproductive when it contributes to the generation of overstated and/or uncritical preoccupation with the ‘dangers’ of essentialism (Fuss 1989; Hemmings 2011). Nonetheless, anti-essentialist analysis, including cross-cultural analysis, remains a crucial strand of critical and transnational feminist theory and politics. Drawing cross-cultural parallels between gendered practices which have generally not been associated, or have been routinely posed as oppositional, can be an important technique to interrogate essentialist deployments of cultural difference, race and nation. Utilised alongside careful analysis that

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illustrates the heterogeneity and changes in practices within all cultural groups, such comparisons can disrupt rigid, culturally imperialist dualisms. Essentialist boundaries separating cultures can be shown to be human constructs, developed and deployed for political ends and the notion that ‘“actual cultural differences” correspond very neatly to the “packages” that are currently individuated as “separate cultures” or manifest themselves as evenly distributed across particular “cultures”’ can be problematised (Narayan 1998: 102). Careful, theoretically well-informed cross-cultural feminist work can also play an important role in constructing bases for cross-cultural or transnational political alliances and activism. Jacqui Alexander and Mohanty (1997) argue, for instance, that cross-cultural feminist endeavours can produce a shared sense of ‘engagement based on empathy and on a vision of justice for everyone’ (xlii). They suggest that in our current world order, which is structured by the operation of transnational capital, ‘comparative, relational feminist praxis’ is required in order to understand and respond to the ways in which various global communities are connected and interdependent (xx). Making cross-cultural comparisons between embodied practices can therefore be an important feminist technique grounding political interventions at both local and transnational levels.

Interrogating comparative feminist approaches In what follows, I want to examine more carefully how feminist cross-cultural comparisons of embodied practices work as a means of interrogating cultural essentialism. What specific deconstructive techniques and processes do these approaches employ to disrupt racialised and culturally essentialist binaries and what kinds of logics underscore these strategies? How, in turn, do crosscultural comparisons affect and shape how we can ‘know’ FGC, cosmetic surgery, or domestic violence, as well as how we can understand and address the cultural essentialism, ethnocentrism and racism structuring the dominant ways in which these practices are represented and reproduced? In order to begin addressing these questions, I draw on the work of critical feminist perspectives on embodiment. I use the term ‘critical theorists of embodiment’ to describe such feminist thinkers as Margrit Shildrick, Raia Prokhovnik, Elizabeth Grosz, Moira Gatens, Judith Butler, Sara Ahmed and Rosi Braidotti. These theorists employ diverse (and sometimes conflicting) theoretical approaches, which I discuss in further depth later on in this chapter, as well as in Chapter 2. For now, I want to suggest simply that they may be linked by the view that bodies are not simply ‘pre-given’ in biology, nature, or culture but are continually produced and differentiated through complex social relations of power. For these theorists, embodied subjects are constituted (as ‘sexed’, ‘gendered’ and ‘racialised’) through contextually specific configurations of power that rely on and reproduce a range of limiting and oppressive binaries (such as male/female, masculine/feminine, heterosexual/ homosexual, white/black). For example, Grosz (1994), Shildrick (1997),

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Gatens (1996), Braidotti (2002) and Prokhovnik (2002) each explore how ‘female bodies’ have been produced as both fundamentally different from and inferior to ‘male bodies’ through deeply ingrained psychic, linguistic, cultural and social processes which transpose the male/female dichotomy onto a range of other self/other binaries, such as nature/culture, mind/body, reason/emotion, active/passive. As I discuss in Chapter 2, critical feminist theorists of embodiment are also concerned with how bodies are constituted differentially through the ‘heterosexual matrix of power’ (Butler 1999/1990) and through processes of racial and cultural ‘othering’ (Ahmed 2000). For these thinkers, disrupting binary frameworks provides one crucial route towards transforming the oppressive ways in which embodied possibilities, capacities and roles are imagined and constituted, without assuming that ‘difference’ is purely linguistic or that embodied particularities can be simply ‘done away with’. Indeed, these theorists stress that any process designed to resignify oppressive dualisms must account for embodied difference (through understanding that bodies have been constituted and shaped as, for example, ‘sexed’ or ‘gendered’ through power-imbued grids of intelligibility and thus cannot be treated as sex/gender-neutral) and yet also acknowledge that the relations of power structuring the production of embodied differentiation are open to change. Given that both critical theorists of embodiment and anti-cultural essentialists are concerned with interrogating the pernicious effects of dualistic thinking on how social groups and relations are conceptualised and constituted, I want to assess the extent to which their approaches to disrupting essentialist binaries converge or differ. My analysis will begin by examining the deconstructive techniques advocated by Margrit Shildrick (1997) and Raia Prokhovnik (2002). Shildrick and Prokhovnik advocate similar processes designed to enable a move away from conceptualising issues in terms of essentialising binaries (such as mind/body, reason/emotion, man/woman, sex/ gender, etc.). Shildrick sees this strategy as involving three theoretical steps: 1 Expose the binary not just as a simple difference between equal terms but a hierarchy between margin and centre. 2 Provisionally reverse the equation so that the marginal term is privileged or at least re-valued. 3 Displace the very structure of the binary model with the irruptive emergence of a new concept which cannot be understood in terms of the preceding binary.9 (Shildrick 1997: 110, italics mine) The first step involves acknowledging, as many feminist and postcolonial theorists have, that dichotomies always imply a relation of power. As opposed to indicating an ‘A or B’ relationship, binaries more specifically designate a hierarchical ‘A or not-A’ association. The second step is conceived as a critical, yet short-term or provisional, phase in which the typically undervalued ‘not A’ term is reclaimed and made

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visible as a means to expose the oppressive operation of the binary pair. This approach is evident in feminist strategies to reclaim a concept of embodiment as a means to highlight the oppressive operation of the mind/body dualism, or similarly, to make ‘gender’ or ‘sexual difference’ visible as a means to illustrate the patriarchal basis of ‘gender neutrality’. As Shildrick acknowledges, the act of revaluing which takes place in the second step may involve a broader range of deconstructive options beyond the technique of ‘reversing’ the two binary poles, for example, through establishing similarity or equivalence between the ‘A’ and ‘not A’ terms. In this way, this second-step deconstructive technique can be discerned in many cross-cultural comparisons of embodied practices. When theorists link ‘African’ FGC with ‘Western’ cosmetic surgery on the basis that both sets of practices may be interpreted as ‘bizarre and barbaric’ by those not accustomed to them (Gunning 1991: 213), should be understood as ‘harmful cultural practices’ with ‘damaging health consequences’ (Jeffreys 2005: 30–1), or may be compelled by similar ideals of beauty and norms of shame and conformity (Weil Davis 2002: 23), they expose and revalue the culturally essentialist binaries that constitute these practices as fundamentally different and distinct. Both Shildrick and Prokhovnic emphasise, however, that this second step of deconstruction will not be effective in the long run unless it is followed by a critical final step which seeks to move beyond the binary structure. To simply reverse the dualism (or to revalue one of its poles to establish ‘equivalence’) would leave the underlying binary structure intact, leaving open the possibility that the dualism will once again be reversed/revalued. It is thus necessary to follow the provisional second step with a third step which entails the creation of a new concept that can no longer be understood within the dichotomous terms of the original binary. For Shildrick, a celebration of ‘radical sexual difference’ can ultimately displace the interconnected mind/ body, sex/gender, male/female binaries. By theorising difference beyond the dichotomous pairings of male/female, the concept of ‘radical sexual difference’ speaks to ‘a multiplicity of differences in which all women might find a place’ (1997: 216). Similarly, Prokhovnik argues that the construction of a relational mind/body connection expressed in the recognition of ‘corporeal subjectivity’ can ultimately trigger movement beyond these restrictive dichotomies (2002: 11). As she asserts, ‘the concept of corporeal subjectivity takes into account that it is not enough to demonstrate the poverty of the dualism; we cannot simply dissolve oppositions and ignore them, but must construct something on the basis of them’ (165). As I discuss later, because of its privileging of sexual difference over other axes of embodied differentiation, Shildrick’s concept of ‘radical sexual difference’ may represent a limited or problematic approach to step three. I thus want to emphasise that the resignificatory phase may take a broader range of forms (beyond the paradigm of sexual difference). What is characteristic of step three is that it radically reconceptualises the dualistic relation of the A and not-A terms.

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Drawing on this framework, I want to argue that the difficulties feminist theorists encounter in employing cross-cultural comparison of embodied practices as a rhetorical strategy to contest cultural essentialism may be located in their transition from the second to the third step of this (or a similar) deconstructive strategy. To illustrate, I will provide a few brief examples in relation to Uma Narayan’s and Leti Volpp’s anti-essentialist approaches. I share significant political ground with both these theorists – indeed, my own project has sprung in part from their incisive critiques of cultural essentialism. However, I suggest that their shared rhetorical investment in the establishment of cross-cultural commonality as the primary means of interrogating essentialism, ethnocentrism and racism may leave them stuck in the ‘step two’ phase of reversal or revaluing.10 Anti-cultural essentialism and recourse to ‘sameness’ In disrupting dichotomous pairings, both Shildrick and Prokhovnik take as a starting point the need to recognise the significance of (non-essential) embodied differences, as opposed to effacing such differences through claiming ‘sameness’ or collapsing into relativism. As Shildrick (1997) emphasises, in such a deconstructive approach ‘the embodiment of differences, rather than their abstraction, will be taken as a determining feature’ (5). By contrast, anticultural essentialists such as Narayan and Volpp start from the contention that it is the imposition of ‘difference’ upon homogeneously characterised cultural groups that fundamentally underscores cultural essentialism and imperialism. For both theorists, it is thus predominantly essentialist notions of ‘difference’, rather than ‘sameness’, that need to be tackled head on. Indeed, Narayan (1997) emphasises the importance of acknowledging how cultural imperialism as it functioned in colonial contexts denied rather than affirmed that one’s others were ‘just like one’s self ’. Even when ‘sameness’ was implied, she argues, ‘the other’ was only seen as a deficient example of the Western, colonial self. She is particularly concerned with the ways in which references to ‘culture’ can ‘combine with ideas of “Third World backwardness” and the tendency to think of Third World contexts as realms of “Very Other Cultures” to make “foreign phenomena” seem comfortingly intelligible while preserving their “foreignness”’ (104). In order to deconstruct essentialist thinking which associates ‘culture’ with practices of ‘dowry murder’ in India but not with domestic violence murder in the United States, Narayan shows how the two practices represent similar systemic problems of violence that affect roughly the same proportion of women in each nation. Similarly, Volpp (2000) is concerned that, through the projection of racialised ‘cultural differences’, immigrant groups of colour are perceived as fundamentally different (on a moral scale) from the white mainstream in America. She wants to disrupt essentialist discourses which associate culture with the practice of under-age marriage when such acts involve people of color, yet not when they involve mainstream white Americans. Volpp thus stresses the parallels

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between a case of under-age marriage involving a Mormon girl and man in Utah (which has been seen as aberrant, individualised behaviour) and a case involving a Mexican girl and man in Texas (which has been seen as cultureinfluenced group-oriented behaviour) to show their overarching commonality: ‘Juxtaposing these narratives of similar stories differently perceived,’ she asserts, ‘illustrates how distinctive interpretive lenses are applied to virtually identical behaviour according to the actor’s identity’ (113, italics mine). In drawing out disavowed links between cultural practices perceived as fundamentally different, Narayan and Volpp each do important work in exposing the racialising hierarchies which so often underscore culturally essentialist representations of social groups. Yet their emphasis on revealing ‘hidden’ cross-cultural similarities raises critical questions regarding the extent to which their anti-essentialist frameworks enable in depth understanding and interrogation of the antagonistic relations of power through which embodied cultural ‘differences’ are constituted. That is, if ‘Westerners’ are encouraged to make connections that would allow them to conceive of ‘dowry murder’ in India as similar or equivalent to domestic violence in the United States, might they be tempted to avoid dealing with the historical and political processes through which, as Sara Ahmed puts it, ‘some others are designated as stranger than other others’ (2000: 6)? Moreover, if ‘Americans’ are made to see under-age marriages within Utah-based Mormon communities and Texas-based Mexican communities as ‘virtually identical behaviour’, might attention be redirected from the ways in which relationships of social antagonism continually function to constitute bodies, subjects and practices differently? This is not to suggest that Narayan and Volpp advocate some sort of naive or grossly universalising return to cross-cultural ‘sameness’. Both theorists are careful to acknowledge the significance of the differences constructed between particular bodies in the course of their texts. Indeed, they argue that it is precisely because of perceived embodied ‘differences’ (i.e. visual markers like skin colour, ‘traditional’ dress, etc.) that some groups are picked out as being culturally and indeed morally different from the white mainstream. They trace the historical differences that race and culture have made in the ways in which various groups have been (and continue to be) perceived and treated. Yet my point is that the advances Narayan’s and Volpp’s cross-cultural approaches achieve may remain locked within ‘step two’ of Shildrick and Prokhovnik’s deconstructive strategy. In illustrating how the practices they are concerned with are in fact alike (contra essentialising binaries), they seem to position this recognition of commonality as an appropriate end point to the process of disrupting culturally (and racially) essentialist binaries in ways that ultimately forestall the ‘irruptive emergence’ of a ‘new understanding’ which would be required to move from ‘step two’ revaluing to ‘step three’ resignification. Narayan’s and Volpp’s apparent willingness to ‘rest’ on making crosscultural commonality visible as a means to interrogate cultural essentialism has some key implications both for how the embodied practices they address

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can be ‘known’ and for how the patterns of racism and cultural essentialism they identify can be grappled with. Narayan, for example, gives careful consideration to the divergent national and cultural contexts through which Indian ‘dowry deaths’ and American domestic violence murders are constructed as ‘different’. However, because she is so concerned to make a ‘visible connection’ between the two forms of gendered violence (1997: 84, 89, 96) as a means to overcome the ‘asymmetry that exists between explanations of violence against women’ in the Indian and American geopolitical contexts (104), the thrust of (and conclusion to) her argument seems to be that beneath these distorting constructions the two practices are fundamentally similar.11 Narayan thus implies a problematic distinction between the discursive representation of particular practices and material reality. This prevents her from addressing effectively how the cultural context in which specific practices of violence are discursively produced in fact conditions the ways in which such violence will be experienced (and how particular bodies will be shaped as a result) – in other words, how ‘the discursive’ and ‘the material’ are fundamentally interwoven. From a critical feminist perspective on embodiment, one’s understanding of one’s own embodiment is always closely tied to historical, geographical and cultural specificities, and hence bodies cannot be separated from their cultural contexts. In this sense, I concur with Elizabeth Grosz’s (1994) insistence that ‘Bodies cannot adequately be understood as ahistorical, precultural, or natural objects in any simple way; they are not only inscribed, marked, engraved by social pressures external to them but are the products, the direct effects, of the very social constitution of nature itself ’ (x). In concluding via recourse to ‘sameness,’ Narayan’s otherwise incisive analysis arguably slips into a rather disembodied and acultural mode. Furthermore, throughout her text Volpp insists that one of the most important outcomes of cross-cultural comparisons is to promote critical introspection on the part of the privileged white and/or Western subject. In underscoring fundamental similarities across practices of under-age marriage, she wants to force ‘us’ to recognise and examine the problematic practices within ‘our own culture’. ‘When we gaze with condemnation at other cultures,’ Volpp suggests, ‘we can miss the fact that “our” culture is also characterised by problematic, sex-subordinating behaviour’ (2000: 113). This is clearly an important point, and one that has been made by many feminist and postcolonial theorists.12 Cultural essentialism is indeed partly perpetuated by the failure of those in positions of privilege to interrogate their notions of ethical and moral superiority by acknowledging the specific systems of oppression operating within their own culture. Yet how far does this logic of recognition (i.e. acknowledging that ‘our culture is oppressive/patriarchal/ problematic too’) take us? And what are the risks of positioning this act of recognition on the part of privileged subjects as primary to the process of addressing racism and cultural essentialism? While identifying similar or ‘identical’ (113) practices of oppression across cultural contexts may

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encourage privileged (white and/or Western) subjects to interrogate their misguided sense of moral authority, it does not necessarily work to displace problematic understandings of ‘other’ (minority and/or immigrant and/or ‘nonWestern’) groups as bounded, homogeneous, wholly patriarchal, backwards or barbaric. As such, the logic of recognition suggested by cross-cultural comparison does not guarantee any radical disruption of the structure of essentialist assumptions and practices via which groups are interpreted and (re)produced as essentially ‘different’ and ‘distinct’, and may in fact function to keep the hierarchies which condition those assumptions in place. Furthermore, a strategy which repeatedly instructs those in positions of power to focus on themselves also risks maintaining attention predominantly (if not exclusively) on the privileged ‘white’, ‘Western’ or ‘First World’ subject, and perpetuating a situation where the ‘other’ is used for the purpose of self-discovery, to define the ‘I’ (Ahmed 2000). While such a move may function initially to ‘reverse’ the imperialising gaze, it might also reinscribe this privileged subject ‘as the implicit referent, the yardstick by which to encode and represent cultural others’ (Mohanty 1991: 52).13 In this vein, I want to suggest that there is an important distinction to be made between the act of employing ‘the other’ as a mirror for ‘Western consciousness’ and adopting a critical feminist practice of reflexivity. A critical approach to reflexivity emphasises that we must ‘interrogate the bearing of our location and context on what we are saying, and this should be an explicit part of every serious discursive practice in which we engage’ (Alcoff 1995: 112).14 From Spivak’s (1988) perspective, when the privileged theorist assumes her/his own ‘transparency’ (while arguing that ‘the other’ can speak for her/himself), the structural relations of power which condition ‘who can speak’ (and be heard) are effaced. Reflexivity is thus a crucial starting point in discursive analysis of ‘others’ on the part of privileged speakers. In order to displace ‘rather than only reversing oppositions’, analyses ‘must take the investigator’s own complicity into account’ (Spivak 1999: 244), while acknowledging that ‘speaking’ itself ‘belongs to an already well-defined structure and history of domination’ (Chow 1996: 128). Gaining awareness of (or altering) one’s own consciousness is not, however, the exclusive or final aim of reflexivity, though it will surely be a key element in a larger reflexive process. Linked to this, reflexivity also works towards producing more ‘generous’ discursive encounters with one’s ‘subjects’. From Ahmed’s point of view, ‘a generous encounter may be one which would recognise how the encounter itself is implicated in broader relations and circuits of production and exchange’ (2000: 152). There must also, however, be room within a generous encounter for ‘the one who is already assimilated’ to ‘move beyond the encounter which names her and holds her in place’ (152). Not all cross-cultural analyses of embodied practices focus on revealing overarching commonalities, nor do they all collapse into disembodied ‘sameness’. For example, while Waririmu Ngaruiya Njambi (2004) draws links between ‘female circumcision’ and ‘cosmetic surgery’ (291), she interrogates

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the notion that ‘bodies can be separated from their cultural contexts’ and criticises the act of ‘universalizing a particular Western image of a “normal body” and sexuality’ (281). She advocates a critical feminist framework ‘that is accountable to local specificities and variations, rather than replicating the Western view of a “natural body”’ (293). Moreover, instead of making comparisons between various forms of genital modification premised on assumptions of cross-cultural commonality, a special issue of Australian Feminist Studies edited by Njambi, Samantha Murray and Nikki Sullivan seeks to ‘collect and connect perspectives around these issues together into a meaningful dialogue about the complexities, inconsistencies and questions these practices present’ (2009: 147).15 My argument, however, is that those comparisons that over-privilege crosscultural commonality and/or invest in it as an analytical end point risk redirecting critical attention away from the relationships of social antagonism which function to constitute bodies, groups and practices differently. Crosscultural analogies and continuums can therefore defer or close off in-depth analysis of the specific processes through which cultural essentialism and racism are perpetuated with respect to embodied practices and may in fact reify, rather than disrupt, the racialised hierarchies that anti-essentialist theorists set out to address. They may also flatten the ways in which practices are understood, experienced and mobilised differently across cultural and geopolitical contexts. As such, commonality-based cross-cultural comparisons may actually be counterproductive to ongoing feminist efforts to interrogate and work through cultural essentialism and racism. We might also consider, however, if the tendency of various feminist crosscultural approaches to become permanently delayed in ‘step two’ may be related to the problematic structuring of the three-step deconstructive strategy itself in its inclusion of a binary ‘reversal’ phase. As these examples would seem to indicate, strategic reversals or revaluings premised on the establishment of cross-cultural commonality may actually thwart and circumscribe the possibilities for the disruption and radical rearticulation of oppressive binary structures. In the next section, I examine whether focusing on unravelling the relational construction of binary terms may provide a means of interrogating essentialist dualisms that avoids problematic second-stage reversals. I begin this discussion by considering how various feminist cross-cultural approaches may be linked to the notion of an ‘unfinished’ humanist project (Simpson 2001).

Cultural commonality and the ‘unfinished’ humanist project In Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line (2000) Paul Gilroy claims that ‘new hatreds’ are being created not through the essentialist enforcement of stable racial categories, but through a troubling inability to maintain them. He argues that the only response appropriate to this uncertainty is to demand liberation from all racialising and racialogical thought through the development of an ‘emphatic post-racial humanism’ (37).

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I begin this section with Gilroy’s utopian vision of a ‘new humanism’ because his argument coalesces with the feminist strategy of drawing cross-cultural similarities between embodied practices in several key ways. It also links with Shildrick and Prokhovnik’s deconstructive approach, which I have used as a critical model to evaluate these cross-cultural methodologies. In this section, I want to suggest that the feminist cross-cultural approaches I have discussed represent a humanist move which posits an underlying (essential) commonality among human lives. Many feminist and anti-cultural essentialist theorists who seek to draw similarities between embodied practices, such as FGC and body modification, veiling and anorexia or domestic violence murders and dowry death, may thus support (either implicitly or explicitly) a ‘new’ humanistic ideology. From (at least one strand of) a critical feminist perspective on embodiment, however, such new humanist frameworks may problematically efface the exclusionary processes through which ‘human’ subjects are constituted. Gilroy contends that the contemporary sociopolitical climate is characterised by a ‘crisis of raciology’ (2000: 28). Race has ‘lost much of its commonsense credibility’, he argues, because we have become more aware of the ‘elaborate cultural and ideological work’ that goes into (re)producing race as a category and, as such, it has been ‘stripped of its moral and intellectual integrity’ (28). Moreover, the global market’s flattening of substantial linguistic and cultural differences, alongside the impact of the DNA revolution and subsequent human genome research, has further destabilised the ‘meaning and status of racial categories’ (24). This crisis of race, he stresses, offers us an opportunity to ‘free ourselves from the bonds of all raciology’ (15) through recognising the ‘anachronistic condition of the idea of “race” as a basis upon which human beings are distinguished and ranked’ (37). As an alternative to racialised notions of subjecthood Gilroy advocates a conception of a fundamental human identity premised on ‘basic, anti-anthropological sameness’ (98). This specifically post-racial notion of humanity signals for him a decisive move away from problematic and exclusionary humanist discourses of the past and constitutes a ‘new’ (inclusive) humanist endeavour. Thus, from Gilroy’s perspective, humanism’s potential as an ‘unfinished project’ may be within our power to direct. The desire to deconstruct culturally essentialist binaries on the part of feminist theorists may be similarly related to larger commitments to an ‘unfinished’ humanist project. For example, Mohanty (1991) calls for ‘a reconsideration of the question of “human” in a posthumanist context’ (74) and, in a pertinent footnote, appears to indicate her hope of a ‘new humanism’.16 It seems relevant in this respect that in ‘“Under Western Eyes” Revisited’ (2002) Mohanty places more emphasis than she did in her earlier publication on feminist ‘solidarity and shared values’ (502), ‘commonalities’ across cultural contexts (504) and how ‘specifying difference allows us to theorise universal concerns more fully’ (505). Similarly, from Narayan’s perspective, fundamental transformations in the political, social and

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philosophical landscapes of our world will occur ‘as the “Others” of modernity’s ideal for humans – such as women, and peoples from non-European races and cultures – increasingly are recognised as fully human’ (Narayan and Harding 2000: ix, italics mine). These views resonate with Gilroy’s vision of an ‘emphatic post-racial humanism’ in which race is no longer a ‘basis upon which human beings are distinguished and ranked’ (37). From this perspective, it may be possible to extend drastically and transform humanism so that all human subjects might find an equal place within its parameters of representation. Several of the feminist comparisons made between ‘African’ FGC and ‘Western’ body modifications might also be interpreted within this ‘new humanist’ framework. Through illustrating fundamental similarities between embodied practices, these cross-cultural approaches seek to disrupt culturally essentialist and racist depictions of particular groups or subjects as ‘barbaric’, ‘depraved’ and ‘non-human’. In place of such ‘othering’ discourses, they construct a notion of underlying cross-cultural human commonality. This theoretical move is illustrated particularly, I would suggest, through the calls for cross-cultural or transnational empathy in some of these texts. As I discuss in Chapter 3, in several of these comparative analyses the development of empathy is premised on the recognition of fundamental similarities in women’s lives, experiences and practices across cultural contexts. For example, in linking ‘African’ FGC and nineteenth-century American clitoridectomies, Gunning seeks to compel Western feminists to empathise with African women through recognising that they ‘have confronted the same problem of female genital surgeries that African women face today’ (1991: 226, italics mine). Describing these differently located traditions of genital cutting as ‘the same problem’, she constructs African and American women as bearers of common ‘cultural wounds’.17 Jeffreys’ (2005) argument that ‘African’ FGC and ‘Western’ body modifications must be understood as analogous ‘harmful cultural practices’ may be read as similarly producing shared cultural experiences of gendered violence or oppression. It is on the basis of these shared cultural wounds that a common human conception of embodiment and a common human capacity for empathy are implied. In this sense we might read some of these comparisons as articulating not only an anti-cultural essentialist agenda but also envisioning a new humanist horizon.18 How would a critical feminist perspective on embodiment address these new humanist claims? Some thinkers I have grouped within this category, namely Prokhovnik, Gatens and Shildrick, would appear to share the hope for the construction of a ‘new humanism’. While Prokhovnik (2002) argues for the need to make ‘sexual difference’ visible as a ‘short-term’ or provisional approach, she emphasises that in the long run, the sex/gender distinction must be decisively resignified through the emergence of a new concept grounded in a non-dichotomous notion of ‘human’ corporeality. For Gatens (1996), the challenge of feminist theory is to ‘theorize human embodiment without losing the sexual, political, or ethical particularity of different bodies’ (viii, italics mine). Prokhovnik also emphasises that ‘the recognition that we all have

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bodies, which follows from overcoming the mind/body split, is more important that the sex (that is, the biological “natural” sexual difference) of those bodies’ (13, italics mine). From this perspective, like that of Gilroy and anticultural essentialists such as Mohanty and Narayan, it may be possible to rework humanism so that it is inclusive of all human subjects. As Shildrick (1997) argues, ‘the recognition that the humanist subject is discursively constructed, but never fully determined, by a nexus of exclusionary practices, should allow us to resignify the parameters of agency’ (135). For other critical feminist theorists of embodiment, however, the prospect of a new humanism is seen as inherently problematic. Elizabeth Grosz, Judith Butler and Sara Ahmed each seem to decisively reject the possibility of new humanism on the basis that, no matter how much resignification of essentialising frameworks and categories takes place, constitutive social and psychic relations of power will always function to exclude some bodies in delimiting what qualifies as ‘human’. While there are clear differences between Grosz and Butler’s approaches to gender resignification,19 their perspectives may be seen to coalesce on the insistence that ‘bodies are never simply human bodies’ (Grosz 1995: 83), that ‘sex’ is one of the norms through which bodies become viable as human at all. As Butler (1993) asserts, ‘the matrix of gender relations is prior to the emergence of the “human”’ (7). This claim that bodies will always be differentiated bodies before (if ever) becoming human bodies, and that cultural grids of intelligibility produce only some bodies as ‘human’, relegating others to the non-human or sub-human domain, relates closely to Ahmed’s (2000) argument that bodies are produced asymmetrically through relations of antagonism and violence. She contends that bodies come to be ‘lived’ only through being continually differentiated from ‘other’ bodies conceptualised and constituted as ‘strange’ or ‘alien’. ‘In such an approach,’ she claims, ‘“my body” and “the other’s” body would not be structurally equivalent (even as impossible bodies), but in a relation of asymmetry and potential violence’ (48). If bodies are actually constituted differently, to the point where they cannot be compared within the same structural field, ‘new humanist’ attempts to deconstruct cultural essentialism by emphasising cross-cultural parallels between particular embodied practices may be fundamentally misguided. This anti-/new humanist divide20 leaves us at a critical impasse. On the one hand, the ‘new humanist’ position threatens to fall back on a vision of fundamental human commonality which precludes analysis of the exclusionary processes through which human subjects are constituted. On the other hand, the ‘anti-(or non-)humanist’ perspective risks reifying an essentialist notion of difference which could thwart analysis of cross-cultural links and the development of transnational solidarities. Yet is the divide between these ‘anti-/new humanist’ perspectives as stark as I have suggested? Is there a way to move beyond this impasse by reorienting the ways in which we theorise the relationships between ‘self ’ and ‘other’? Like Gilroy, Butler and Ahmed both indicate the need to strike a balance between the poles of ‘fundamental sameness’ and ‘radical alterity’. Butler contends that ‘at the level of political

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community, what is called for is the difficult work of cultural translation in which difference is honoured without (a) assimilating difference into identity or (b) making difference an unthinking fetish of alterity’ (1995: 140). Similarly, Ahmed points to the need to move beyond ‘an opposition between narratives which totalise, which refuse the “otherness” of the other (human and modern) or narratives which resist that totalisation by respecting the other as radically other (anti-humanist and postmodern)’ (1996: 88–9). She argues that what we require instead ‘is an economy’, which does ‘not exclude the possibility that discourses may be incommensurable’ but ‘suggests that incommensurability may not be radical, as the very fact that discourses are conflicting or competing means that they exist in some form of relationship to each other’ (89).21 Taking these visions of a relational ‘economy’ which enables (some) cultural translations across different discourses as a point of departure, I suggest that employing a relational perspective which draws out the constitutive connections (rather than commonalities) between bodies, practices and subjectivities may help us negotiate these counterposed anti-/new humanist positions. It may also enable us to move beyond the sameness/difference binary which these positions sometimes fall into. A focus on relationality and the mutual constitution of identity categories and embodied subjects is in fact shared by theorists across the anti-/new humanist divide. Gilroy, for example, emphasises the importance of examining the relational ‘interdependency’ of dualistic pairings such as ‘black/white, settler/native, coloniser/colonised’ in the process of repudiating them (2004: 45). A notion of interdependence also structures his perspective on the processes through which subjects and identities are constituted: ‘The Other, against whose resistance the integrity of an identity is to be established,’ he argues, ‘can be recognized as part of the self that is no longer plausibly understood as a unified entity but appears instead as one fragile moment in the dialogic circuits … called a “representation economy”’ (2000: 109–10). Similarly, both Butler and Ahmed understand subject formation as an ongoing relational process. For Butler, ‘One comes to “exist” by virtue of this fundamental dependency on the address of the other’ (1997a: 5). As ‘interpellated beings’ with a ‘prior vulnerability to language’ we are ‘dependent on the address of the Other in order to be’ (5). From Ahmed’s perspective, ‘given that the subject comes into existence as an entity only through encounters with others, then the subject’s existence cannot be separated from the others who are encountered’ (2000: 7). As noted above, such processes of subject constitution and identity formation are often exclusionary. However, the mutuality on which they depend also holds the possibility for imagining more transformative embodied and social connections. Such possibilities are illustrated through the examples of empathy and grief. On the one hand, we can examine how empathy may function as a discourse of embodied exclusion which reifies the hierarchical categories of ‘human’ and ‘nonhuman’ or ‘less human’. Butler’s analysis of the ways in which the deaths of some subjects (i.e. the heterosexual victims of the 9/11 attacks) are

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grieved for within American society as ‘our loss’, whilst other deaths (e.g. gay people who have died of AIDS and Palestinians who have died at the hands of the Israeli military with the United States’ support) are not, seems pertinent in this respect (2004b: 32). The racialised cultural politics of which bodies are deemed ‘grievable’ function to reify some bodies as ‘more human’ than others. Butler insists therefore that ‘we have to ask about the conditions under which a grievable life is established and maintained, and through what logic of exclusions, what practice of effacement and denominalization’ (2004b: 38).22 On the other hand, grief and empathy may enable connections to be forged between subjects based on the recognition of mutuality. As Butler points out, grief illustrates how ‘we are in the thrall of relations with others that we cannot recount or explain’ and this recognition ‘often interrupts the self-conscious account of ourselves we might try to provide in ways that challenge the very notion of ourselves as autonomous and in control’ (2004a: 19). Suggesting ‘a sense of political community of a complex order’, grief brings to the ‘fore the relational ties that have implications for theorising fundamental dependency and ethical responsibility’ (2004b: 22). The recognition of mutuality which empathy and grief can produce may thus suggest the possibility of acknowledging ‘a responsibility toward the trace of the other’ (Spivak 1999: 199).23 Importantly, in emphasising constitutive connections, a relational approach does not depend on identifying some shared core or substratum that makes us all human. Recognising mutuality does not require claims of sameness or equivalence between bodies, lives or experiences. Indeed, if empathy is developed through the assumption of equivalence between various ‘forms of injury’, as in Gunning’s and Jeffreys’ texts, it can problematically cut off particular injuries from ‘a history of “getting hurt” or injured’ (Ahmed 2004a: 32). It ‘turns the wound into something that simply “is” rather than something that happened in time and space’ – and thus risks wounding all over again (32).24 In understanding ‘self ’ and ‘other’ as always constructed in and through one another, this kind of relational approach may be able to recognise (contingent) particularities and address exclusions without disavowing the possibility of common ground. In this vein, constitutive connection may provide a fruitful perspective from which to trace the links among embodied practices and their imagined subjects in ways that avoid flattening historical, social and embodied complexities. Throughout the following chapters I seek to extend this understanding of relationality as part of the interpretive framework the book develops. I discuss the politics of empathy further in relation to practices of FGC and cosmetic surgery in Chapter 3 and return to consider the relationships between anti-, new and post-humanist perspectives in Chapter 6.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have set out my argument that, while potentially effective in highlighting the instability of imperialising binaries, the feminist rhetorical

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technique of drawing links across different cultural practices does not move the analysis sufficiently beyond the problems that these binaries entail. Instead, through constructing fundamental similarities between embodied practices, such comparative approaches can cover over social, historical and embodied particularities and defer in depth analysis of the ongoing (and violent) processes through which some bodies are constituted as more (or less) ‘human’ than other bodies. Comparisons which focus on identifying crosscultural commonalities can also position the ‘Third World’, ‘Muslim’ or ‘immigrant’ ‘other’ as a mirror for ‘Western’ or ‘Euro-American’ consciousness in ways that reinscribe dominant Western-centric hierarchies of knowledge making. This suggests that commonality-based cross-cultural approaches should not be the end point or overarching focus of feminist efforts to interrogate gendered processes of cultural essentialism and racism with respect to embodied practices. I have argued that reorienting anti-cultural essentialist feminist analysis towards a more relational perspective, which focuses on teasing out constitutive connections (rather than commonalities or equivalences) among embodied practices, may avoid some of the problems associated with cross-cultural comparisons. In the next chapter I develop this relational perspective through examining how feminist, postcolonial and queer perspectives on relationality, intersectionality and embodiment might be critically integrated.

2

Critical frameworks Theorising intersectionality, relationality and embodiment

It makes no sense to hint at the superimposing and intersecting aspects of class, race and gender in the world of individual experience without being able to specify how and by what means class, race, and gender are constituted as social categories.

(Corelina Klinger 2003: 25, cited in Knapp 2005: 259)

This chapter introduces and examines the key conceptual tools I employ throughout the book. In Chapter 1, I argued that feminist rhetorical strategies that link embodied practices across cultures are problematic when they fail to take into account historical, social and discursive differences which affect how practices have been constituted, experienced and mobilised. When these comparative approaches collapse into sameness they can prevent in depth analysis of the specific processes through which cultural essentialism and racism are perpetuated with respect to embodied practices such as FGC, cosmetic surgery, veiling and anorexia. They may also paradoxically reify the racialised hierarchies that anti-essentialist theorists claim to want to disrupt. Thus the key question guiding this chapter is, what critical frameworks can we draw on to theorise the contingent particularity of embodied practices – as well as the constitutive links between them – without falling into the traps of cultural essentialism or disembodied, ahistorical sameness? My analysis engages with feminist, postcolonial and queer approaches to intersectionality, relationality and embodiment. Drawing on a selection of key texts, I examine the critical tools each set of literature offers my own project while also exploring their limitations. My focus throughout is on mapping the fruitful ways in which intersectionality, relationality and embodiment overlap with, complement and critique one another. The overlaps are illustrated by my selection of texts for discussion, such as those of Chandra Talpade Mohanty (1991, 2002), Judith Butler (1999/1990, 1993, 2004a) and Sara Ahmed (2000, 2004a, 2006), which straddle and productively integrate insights from two or more of these areas of analysis. Through probing both the differences between such literatures and the ways in which they merge and intersect, I aim to flesh out a critical, feminist framework for addressing how particular embodied

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practices and/or their imagined subjects have been compared or analogised within feminist literatures, and the potential theoretical, social and political effects of these rhetorical strategies. This interpretive framework will inform my critical analysis of feminist cross-cultural strategies in Chapters 3 and 4, as well the alternative relational approach I develop in Chapter 5.

Intersectionality: Black feminist thought Intersectionality was initiated through Black feminists’1 potent critiques of white middle-class bias within mainstream feminist theory and practice in North America and Western Europe in the 1970s and 1980s.2 In the United States, it finds its roots in political projects such as that of the Combahee River Collective, a Black lesbian feminist organisation from Boston which emphasised the problems with privileging one dimension of experience of oppression (gender) above and beyond other axes (such as race and sexuality). In their ‘Black Feminist Statement’ the group discussed the combined racial, sexual, heterosexual and class oppressions facing black women and stressed the importance of ‘the development of integrated analysis based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking’ (Combahee River Collective 1997/1977: 272). The collective’s criticism of mainstream feminism’s narrow (and unacknowledged) focus on white middle-class experience was developed by numerous other Black feminists in the 1980s and onwards. Hazel Carby’s ‘White Woman Listen! Black Feminism and the Boundaries of Sisterhood’ (1982) provided a critique of key feminist analytical concepts such as ‘patriarchy’, ‘the family’ and ‘reproduction’, illustrating how each privileged gender over other social divisions, such as race, in a permanent hierarchy of social divisions. Other landmark texts such as Angela Davis’s Women, Race and Class (1981), Gayatri Spivak’s ‘French Feminism in an International Frame’ (1981), bell hooks’s Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1982), Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa’s This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981), Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider (1984) and Patricia Hill Collins’s Black Feminist Thought (1990) contributed to a fundamental ‘decentring’ of mainstream feminism’s ‘normative subject’ and underscored the need for analyses of women’s particularities to address interlocking structures of oppression.3 In the United Kingdom, Black feminists were also interrogating mainstream feminist theory’s failure to speak meaningfully to experiences of black women. Such issues came to the fore, for example, when, in 1984, the London-based journal Feminist Review (which then had a predominantly white readership) handed over editorial control of a special issue on ‘Black Women in Britain’ to a group of Black feminist theorists.4 In their editorial statement, Valerie Amos, Gail Lewis, Amina Mama and Pratibha Parmar (1984: 1) emphasised the need for ‘an analysis of Black women’s experiences through a consideration of the simultaneous effects of race, gender, sexuality and class’ (1). Given black women’s ‘location within diasporas formed by the

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histories of slavery, colonialism and imperialism’ (Brah 1996a: 108), they also stressed the importance of a feminist perspective that engaged international social relations of power. Amos and Parmar’s feature article ‘Challenging Imperial Feminism’ (1984) examined three critical areas (the family, sexuality and the Women’s Peace Movement) in which ‘Black women’s experience is very different from that of white women’s’ in Britain (8). With respect to the family, the authors argued that ‘a definition of patriarchal relations which looks only at the power of men over women without placing that in a wider political and economic framework has serious consequences for the way in which relationships within the Black community are viewed’ (9). White feminists’ focus on the family as a source of women’s oppression, for instance, ignored the fact that British state immigration legislation ‘has done all it can do destroy the Asian family by separating husbands from wives, wives from husbands and parents from children’ (15). Patriarchy, they argued, must therefore be theorised in its constitutive relationship to racism and imperialism. Black feminist analyses of the synthesis of class, race, nation, gender and sexuality structuring black women’s lives in Britain were developed in subsequent years though a range of key texts, including Razia Aziz’s ‘Feminism and the Challenge of Racism’ (1992), Amina Mama’s Beyond the Masks: Race, Gender and Subjectivity (1995), Avtar Brah’s Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (1996a) and Heidi Safia Mizra’s Black British Feminism: A Reader (1997).5 The coining of the term ‘intersectionality’, however, is most often attributed to the African American feminist legal theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw. In two widely cited articles, ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Class’ (1989) and ‘Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Women of Color’ (1991), Crenshaw drew on and developed earlier Black feminist analyses to craft a potent critique of the treatment of race and gender as ‘mutually exclusive categories of experience and analysis’ within both feminist theory and antiracist politics (1989: 139). While Crenshaw’s articles were published nearly twenty years ago and several other feminist theorists have developed intersectional approaches in recent years, I focus on her texts because of the enormous influence they have had, and continue to have, in the field of intersectionality and feminist studies more broadly.6 Employing American anti-discrimination law as a case study, Crenshaw (1989) illustrates how dominant conceptions of discrimination problematically frame subordination within ‘single-axis frameworks’ (139): ‘In other words, in race discrimination cases, discrimination tends to be viewed in terms of sexor class-privileged Blacks; in sex discrimination cases, the focus is on raceand class-privileged women’ (140). Such single-axis approaches, she argues, are also perpetuated in both feminist and anti-racist politics, which organise under the vectors of ‘gender’ and ‘race’ respectively. Through these frameworks black women’s specific experiences of oppression, produced through the interaction of race and gender (as well as other axes such as class), are elided. Stressing that ‘intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and

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sexism’, Crenshaw underlines the difficulty with simply adding (or subtracting) the multiple oppressions black women face through the analogy of a traffic intersection: Discrimination, like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction, and it may flow in another … if a Black woman is harmed because she is in an intersection, her injury could result from sex discrimination or race discrimination. But it is not always easy to reconstruct an accident: Sometimes the skid marks and the injuries simply indicate that they occurred simultaneously, frustrating efforts to determine which driver caused the harm. (149). While black women experience the complex co-imbrication of race and gender in their daily lives, she argues, neither feminist theory nor anti-racist politics seem equipped to address such intersectionality in a rigorous and sustained manner. Crenshaw offers several compelling examples of why the failure to address intersectionality within feminist theory matters to the types of analyses it produces. For instance, feminist discourses on rape, she argues, have routinely applied a single-axis framework of gender, taking white women’s experience as the norm and failing to consider how complex histories of racism make black women’s experience of sexual violence qualitatively different. While feminists rightly criticise the role that law has played in establishing the bounds of normative sexuality and in regulating female sexual behaviour, they often do not acknowledge that rape statutes do not merely reflect ‘male control of female sexuality’ but specifically ‘white male regulation of white female sexuality’ (157, italics in original). A feminist account of rape which is sensitive to black women’s experience, she suggests, needs to account for the fact that, in contrast to white women, there has been no institutional effort to regulate black female chastity and that, in fact, ‘courts in some states have gone as far to instruct juries that, unlike white women, Black women were not presumed to be chaste’ (157). While attempts to regulate women’s sexuality put ‘unchaste’ (white) women outside the law’s protection, black women were always already constructed as ‘unrapable’: ‘When Black women were raped by white males, they were being raped not as women generally, but as Black women specifically: Their femaleness made them sexually vulnerable to racist domination, while their Blackness effectively denied them any protection’ (161). Therefore, feminism’s ‘singular focus on rape as a manifestation of male power over female sexuality’, Crenshaw argues, ‘tends to eclipse the use of rape as a weapon of racial terror’ (161). Bringing the specificities of sexual violence into focus, she maintains, necessitates an intersectional analysis which foregrounds histories of gendered racial prejudice.7 Since the publication of Crenshaw’s texts, many other feminist theorists have developed sophisticated intersectional critiques and frameworks, which I

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discuss later in this chapter.8 Indeed, intersectionality has today become a central category of analysis within feminist theory.9 As Leslie McCall (2005) comments, ‘One could even say that intersectionality is the most important theoretical contribution that women’s studies, in conjunction with other fields, has made so far’ (1771). Yet, despite (or perhaps because of) intersectionality’s pervasiveness, some have argued that the era of intersectionality is now over – that concerns regarding mainstream (white) feminism’s problematic privileging of gender have been taken on board within feminist theory and practice and hence are now outmoded. As Malini Johar Schueller (2005) observes, ‘The consensus seems to be that the kinds of challenges posed by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in her landmark 1981 essay “French Feminism in an International Frame” or even later by bell hooks in her book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Centre (1984) have now been met’ (63): ‘It seems anachronistic, therefore, to name a project of universalism within white feminist theory today’ (64). For example, in Inclusive Feminism: A Third Wave Theory of Women’s Commonality (2005), Naomi Zack argues that feminist theory needs to move beyond a focus on intersectionality, which she claims has resulted in fragmentation that has prevented the establishment of common goals and basic empathy. Implying that critiques of mainstream feminism’s universalising frameworks signalled by intersectionality have been overstated (and presumably have now been addressed), she insists that an unapologetic reclaiming of women’s commonality must drive forward feminism’s third wave.10 Like Schueller and others, however, I believe that many of the intersectional critiques raised by Black and other critical feminists from the 1970s onward are cogent today, and that the complex analytical approaches these theorists developed remain valuable to feminist theory and practice. In response to Black feminist critique (as well as criticisms on the part of feminists speaking from ‘lesbian’, ‘working-class’ and other ‘marginal’ locations), mainstream feminism has clearly made significant progress in its efforts to interrogate white heterosexual middle-class privilege. Postmodernist and post-structuralist feminist critiques have also contributed to feminism’s thoroughgoing deconstruction of the category ‘woman’.11 Yet, as I seek to illustrate later in this chapter, and in relation to the feminist cross-cultural comparisons I address in the chapters to follow, many feminist analyses continue to assume (in advance) that gender is privileged over and above other axes of social differentiation and/or treat gender and other axes, such as race, analogically.12 In this vein, I want to argue that it is perhaps precisely because (the notion of) ‘intersectionality’ has become so central to mainstream feminist theory that it has now come to function, in many texts, as merely a theoretical shorthand for the importance of acknowledging ‘difference’ – a shorthand which actually precludes sustained critique of frameworks which problematically privilege one axis of differentiation and rigorous, historical analysis of mutually constitutive processes of social differentiation and oppression. As Gudrun-Axeli Knapp (2005) asserts, the reification of ‘race– class–gender’ into a formula to be signposted in any feminist criticism, ‘being

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largely stripped of the baggage of concretion, of context and history, has been a condition of possibility of its acceleration’ (254–5). The dual message this formula signals ‘is “I’m well informed” and “I’m politically correct”. By just mentioning other “differences” besides “gender”, the work to be done continues to be delegated to the respective “others”’ (255). As such, it is not the case that the concerns raised by intersectionality are now anachronistic but, rather, that they remain pressing and yet are often still suppressed. Indeed, Brah and Ann Phoenix (2004) insist that ‘understanding complexities posed by intersections of different axes of differentiation is as pressing today as it has always been’ (75). I want to suggest, therefore, that, on the one hand, the brand of intersectionality that simply announces its ‘position’ or pays lip service to the race– class–gender triad is counterproductive for feminist studies as its engagement with ‘difference’ remains much too superficial and simplistic. On the other hand, we need to examine how the most valuable insights of intersectionality theory can be integrated more substantively within feminist analysis. Intersectionality’s interrogation of linear analyses which privilege one single dimension of experience, its critique of additive and analogous approaches to evaluating discrimination and oppression, its disruption of ‘women’ (and other founding categories) as universalist constructions, and its advocacy of multiaxial analyses of simultaneous oppressions which foreground the importance of historical context all signal its usefulness as a conceptual tool for theorising (contingent) particularity with respect to cultural groups, subjects and practices. Feminist approaches to intersectionality do, however, encounter some critical limitations. As a number of feminist scholars have noted,13 in suggesting that analysis of the intersection of multiple axes of differentiation is necessary to avoid excluding particular subjectivities and experiences, intersectional approaches can become susceptible to their own critiques. In short, they become vulnerable to being accused of leaving out a crucial variable and thus ‘not being intersectional enough’. As it is impossible to ever produce an analysis which is fully comprehensive or inclusive of every axis of differentiation, critiques can always be made on the basis of ‘absence’. Judith Butler (1999/ 1990) refers to this problem as the dilemma of the ‘embarrassed “etc.”’: Theories of feminist identity that elaborate predicates of color, sexuality, ethnicity, class and able-bodiedness invariably close with an embarrassed “etc.” at the end of the list. Through this horizontal trajectory of adjectives, these positions strive to encompass a situated subject, but invariably fail to be complete (182). Critiquing any single text simply on the basis of what it leaves out, therefore, does not provide a particularly cogent or useful strategy on its own. What is valuable and crucial, I want to argue, is examining the constitutive effects of repeated elisions and/or privilegings of particular axes of social differentiation across a range of discursive sites. In other words, it is important to investigate

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what kinds of knowledges, histories, practices and relations of power are legitimated or reified, and which are marginalised or occluded when, for example, ‘sexuality’ is repeatedly ‘left out’ of the intersectional race–gender–class triad or, in turn, when ‘gender’ is privileged ontologically in cross-cultural comparisons of embodied practices. Indeed, one of the key arguments I make in my analysis of feminist cross-cultural linkings of ‘African’ FGC and ‘Western’ body modifications (Chapter 3) is that they (repeatedly) establish similarities on the basis of gender (in part) through an erasure of embodied, social and political particularities relating to race, cultural difference and nation. As a result, these comparisons can close off analysis of important historical differences between practices and the contemporary implications of such differences. They can also reproduce linear understandings of race and gender as mutually exclusive (rather than mutually constituted) categories and may in turn fail to address the implicit (and often damaging) role that race, cultural difference and nation continue to play in the modes of theorising they enact. This is especially problematic, I suggest, given that it was the racialised hierarchies underscoring representations of FGC and other body modifications as essentially different that theorists cited as a primary reason for pursing crosscultural analysis in the first place. Beyond these issues, I want to discuss in further depth two other general limitations that intersectional frameworks encounter which are relevant to my rhetorical analysis of feminist cross-cultural approaches. Firstly, dominant intersectional perspectives provide in depth examinations of the intertwinement of different axes of social differentiation in the production of particular subjects and/or groups (e.g. ‘black women’) and their experience of oppression. Yet they do not always provide the same close investigation of how these subjects and/or groups are constituted through relations with other subjects and groups, or in other words, how categories of ‘self ’ and ‘other’ are constituted relationally through intersectional processes in which multiple axes of social differentiation articulate.14 Intersectionality may therefore not always be attuned towards theorising the discursive-material connections between specific subjects, groups and practices in conjunction with their individual particularities. Second, some intersectional approaches do not provide rigorous analysis of the fluidity of embodied identity categories, and in turn how essentialist identity binaries might be productively disrupted and resignified, and instead tend towards maintaining such categories and relations. Without the possibilities of fluidity and disruption, it becomes difficult to contemplate how the violence and oppression (re)produced through the exclusionary and hierarchical constitution of categories of embodied differentiation might be resisted. Linked to this concern, it has also been argued that ‘the study of intersectional identities often involves taking imbricated identities apart one by one to see how they influence each other, a process that betrays the founding impulse of intersectionality as a hermeneutic of positionality that seeks to account for locality, specificity, placements and junctions’ (Puar 2008: 212). For my analysis, the question therefore remains of

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how intersectional frameworks might avoid ‘the gridlock model presumed by structural analysis in which the axes of class, race, sex are concerned as autonomous structures which then require external connections with other structures’ (Grosz 1994: 19–20), and instead focus on analysing the coconstitution of contingent gendered, sexualised, racialialised and classed processes and particularities in a transnational frame.15 In the sections to follow I explore how feminist approaches to intersectionality might be enhanced, and indeed transformed, through (further) taking on board some of the insights and methodologies of critical feminist, postcolonial and queer perspectives on relationality and embodiment. To be clear, my intention is not to construct a linear ‘narrative of relentless progress’ in which feminist thought moves from the radical Black feminist critiques of the 1980s towards the more ‘sophisticated’ and ‘complex’ poststructuralist critiques of the 1990s and beyond (Hemmings 2005: 115–16). Within this dominant narrative, ‘feminist poststructuralist theorists are repeatedly positioned as the first to deconstruct “woman”, and often as ‘heroic in surpassing past mistakes’ (116) whilst Black feminist critique (like radical and lesbian feminist discourses) is implicitly posed as overly simplistic and/or redundant.16 In fact, I position Black feminism as pioneering complex critiques of mainstream feminisms’ universalist normative subject which remain germane today. I illustrate, in turn, how queer and feminist perspectives on relationality and embodiment that privilege relations of gender/sexuality ontologically have been interrogated from intersectional perspectives – and how these approaches can be enriched through further integrating insights of intersectionality theory. In this next section I stage a critical encounter between intersectionality and relationality.

Relationality: postcolonial and queer perspectives Crenshaw’s analogy of a traffic intersection with two lines of traffic (race and gender) colliding and becoming enmeshed enables us to envision the structural articulation of race and gender oppression experienced by black women. In her later text, Crenshaw employs a similar analogy of ‘two tracks’ intersecting to represent black women’s experience of the co-imbrication of racism and sexism (1991: 1278). Yet what these models are less able to offer is an incorporated way of theorising how particular intersections might be linked or connected to other intersections. While ‘black women’s’ experiences, subjectivities and identities are constructed through the coimbrication of race and gender (among other variables), they are also constituted through ongoing social and discursive relations with other groups of women, such as ‘white women’, ‘Hispanic women’ or ‘Arabic women’, whose experiences are also produced through intersections of race and gender. How can we theorise the particularities of each group (and the diversity within each group) as well as their constitutive relationship to one another?

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It should be acknowledged that Crenshaw concentrates on black women ‘as the starting point’ for her analysis of intersectionality as a means to show how the use of single-axis frameworks in both feminist and anti-racist politics function to ‘erase Black women’ (1989: 140). She seeks to ‘contrast the multidimensionality of Black women’s experience with the single-axis analysis that distorts these experiences’ (139). The problem, however, is that in focusing almost exclusively on how racism intersects with sexism in black women’s experiences of oppression, and leaving largely unexplored the ways in which black women’s intersectional experiences are materially and discursively contingent with those of other groups of women, she risks (unintentionally) reifying the notion that race has ‘something to do with the presence of Black people’ (Brah 1996b: 8–9). Furthermore, what is notable about Crenshaw’s traffic intersection analogy and her image of ‘two tracks intersecting’ is that both models leave the roadway or ‘tracks’ intact – they are fixed at the beginning and remain untransformed throughout. It could therefore be argued that her analysis promotes an approach to theorising social differentiation which ‘demands the knowing, naming and thus stabalising of identity across time and space’ (Puar 2008: 212). Within this framework, ‘black women’, it would seem, are always oppressed through the imbrication of race and gender and are produced as a coherent category as such.17 From this perspective, we need not simply a critique of how ‘woman’ is universalised within mainstream feminism through the exclusion or effacement of black (and other minority) women’s experiences, but also an in depth account of how a construction of ‘woman’ which narrowly reflects white middle-class women’s experiences requires black femininity as its constitutive ‘other’. Or, in relation to the FGC/cosmetic surgery binary, we need an account of how ‘the victim of female genital mutilation’ represents ‘the cosmetic surgery’s consumer’s’ founding surrogate self, even while the two practices are posed as fundamentally separate and discrete. As Meyda Yeg˘ enog˘ lo (1998) puts it, ‘what is at stake is not merely an unveiling of the subject’s abstract universal pretensions, but also a demonstration of the fact that its illusory self-production is a denial of relationality, complexity and dependence on the other’ (7–8).18 It is in these senses that encounters between feminist theories of intersectionality and postcolonial and queer approaches to relationality have been (and could be increasingly) productive.19 As discussed in Chapter 1, I use the term ‘relationality’ to signify the ongoing, contextually specific processes through which cultures, bodies, practices and subjectivities are (re)constituted and gain meaning through discursive-material encounters with other cultures, bodies, practices and subjectivities. A relational perspective highlights the ways in which processes of social and cultural differentiation and the production of embodied particularities are always interdependent and contingent, rather than bounded or discrete. In this vein, postcolonial and queer approaches have theorised how embodied ‘differences’ are constituted, in part, through the production of shifting self/ other binaries.

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Postcolonial relationality One of the first, and certainly the most prominent and widely cited, texts to develop a postcolonial perspective on relationality was Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978). Said argued that ‘the Orient’ was essentially a ‘constituted entity’ (322), produced ‘politically, socially, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively’ through Western (and non-Western) practices of Orientalist scholarship and cultural production (3). ‘The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe,’ he claimed, ‘it is also … one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other’ (1). This binary relationship between ‘the West’ and ‘the Orient’ represented a ‘relationship of power’ (5) through which ‘European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self ’ (3). Said’s analysis of Orientalism has since been expanded, developed and criticised by feminist theorists working from a postcolonial perspective. Drawing on the analytical tools of Black feminist critique, critics have focused on the ways in which Orientalist and imperial discourses were (re)produced intersectionally through the articulation of sex and gender with race, nation, and cultural difference (among other axes).20 Yeg˘ enog˘ lo, for example, argues that in order to understand the complex patterns of signification that constitute Orientalism we need to examine ‘how the discursive constitution of Otherness is achieved simultaneously through sexual as well as cultural modes of differentiation’ (1998: 1–2). She suggests that because Orientalism produces and depends on a metonymic association between the Orient and its women, ‘the process of Orientalisation of the Orient is one that intermingles with its feminisation. The interlocking of the representation of cultural and sexual difference is secured through mapping the discourse of Orientalism on to the phallocentric discourse of femininity’ (73, italics mine). Among the most influential feminist texts offering a productive amalgamation of intersectionality and a postcolonial approach to relationality is Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s article ‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses’ (1991).21 Mohanty’s focus on the discursivematerial construction of embodied practices and her critique of cultural essentialism within cross-cultural comparisons make her text particularly relevant to my own project. Mohanty interrogates the ‘discursive colonisation’ which is achieved through ‘the production of the “third world woman” as a singular monolithic subject’ in Western feminist texts (51). She argues that discursive colonisation is produced in these texts through the imposition of cross-cultural frameworks which problematically privilege ‘sexual difference’ in the form of a ‘singular, monolithic notion of patriarchy or male dominance’ (53). For example, Fran Hosken’s (1981) analysis of ‘female genital mutilation’ in Africa, Mohanty argues, employs an essentialist concept of patriarchal oppression to define ‘African women’ as ‘archetypal victims’ (56). The problem with these types of analysis, she maintains, is that it is assumed that women ‘are already constituted as sexual-political subjects prior to their

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entry into the arena of social relations’ (59). Yet, in fact, women are also ‘produced through these very relations’ (59). Concepts such as ‘gendered violence’ and ‘the sexual division of labour’ are helpful, Mohanty argues, only ‘if they are generated through local contextual analyses’ (68). If such concepts are treated as if they are universally relevant, she stresses, ‘the resultant homogenization of class, race, religious and daily material practices of women in the third world can create a false sense of the commonality of oppressions, interests and struggles between and among women globally’ (68). While Mohanty’s analysis is intersectional, it also utilises a relational postcolonial framework of critique. Situating the texts she examines within ‘the context of the global hegemony of Western feminist scholarship’ (55), she seeks to ‘draw attention to the similar effects of various textual strategies used by writers which codify Others as non-Western and hence themselves as (implicitly) Western’ (52). What is shared by the texts Mohanty critiques is that they each ‘take as their referent feminist interests as they have been articulated in the US and Western Europe’ (51). They all set up their ‘own authorial subjects as the implicit referent, i.e. the yardstick by which to encode and represent cultural Others’ (55). As in other ‘Orientalist’ discourses, representations of ‘the other’ thus function in these texts to define a privileged image of ‘the self ’. As Mohanty explains, A homogenous notion of the oppression of third world women as a group is assumed which ‘produces the image of an “average third world women”’ who ‘leads an essentially truncated life based on her feminine gender’ (read: sexually constrained) ‘and her being “third-world”’ (read: ignorant, poor, uneducated4, tradition-bound, domestic, family oriented, victimised, etc.). This … is in contrast to the (implicit) self-presentation of Western women as educated, as modern, as having control over their own bodies and sexualities, and the freedom to make their own decisions (56). ‘Without the “third world woman”,’ Mohanty stresses, the particular selfpresentation of Western women as privileged and liberated ‘would be problematical … the one enables and sustains the other’ (74). Focusing on the discursive production of ‘the Asian woman’ in Britain, Avtar Brah’s Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (1996a) also provides an incisive intersectional analysis of the relational constitution of gendered and raced categories of ‘self ’ and ‘other’ in a transnational frame. Moving beyond dominant binary frameworks for understanding ‘difference’, her analysis develops the concept of ‘differential racialisation’ to explore how various racialised groups of women living Britain ‘are positioned differently vis-à-vis one another’ (15). As Brah suggests, assumptions ‘that there is a single dominant Other whose overarching omnipresence circumscribes construction of the “we”’ have led to an emphasis on bipolar oppositions such as black/white, East/West and so forth’ (184). While such perspectives can

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usefully call attention to how a particular binary opposition forms a basis of ‘political cleavage and social division in a given situation’ (184), they may not account for the ways in which ‘different groups have been racialised differently under varying circumstances, and on the basis of difference signifiers of “difference”’ (105). For example, Brah points out that ‘the gendered discourses of the “nigger” and the “Paki” in post-war Britain … are two stands of a common racism structured around colour/phenotype/culture as signifiers of superiority and inferiority in postcolonial Britain’ (105). Yet these labels also represent distinctive racialised ideologies linked to different processes of imperialism, diaspora and migration. As such, it is important to understand how ‘African-Caribbean, South Asian and white groups are relationally positioned within these structures of representation’ (105). In this way, Brah’s analysis illustrates that ‘there are multiple others embedded within and across binaries, albeit one or more may be accorded priority within a given discursive formation’ (184–5). Her perspective suggests that feminist theorists therefore need to be able to account not only for the ways in which gendered and racialised forms of representation are (re)produced through self/other binaries in the context of diaspora, but also how these binaries intersect with (and co-constitute) other binaries in a ‘complex web of power’ (209).22 Postcolonial feminist perspectives both draw on and enhance intersectional approaches by tracing the ways in which embodied and cultural identity categories such as ‘black’ and ‘white’, ‘East’ and ‘West’, ‘Muslim women’ and ‘non-Muslim women’, ‘Third World women’ and ‘First World women’ are (re) produced relationally through transnational circuits of power in which multiple axes of differentiation articulate. They situate racialised and gendered hierarchies within the context of global power relations and emphasise the significance of discursive representation in both reifying and resisting dominant hierarchies. As illustrated through Brah’s (1996a) work in particular, postcolonial feminist approaches have developed frameworks for theorising the complex constitutive relationships among different racialised groups which fragment (yet also shore up) dominant binary constructions.23 These perspectives understand gender, race, class, sexuality and nation as social processes which are mutually constitutive, rather than independent or parallel. As Brah emphasises, the point of her ‘multiaxial analysis’ is that ‘concepts such as capitalism, patriarchy or imperialism do not signal independent, albeit interlocking systems. Rather, these concepts signify contingent relations of power, so that, for instance, capitalist relations are themselves patriarchal, taking different forms in different contexts’ (1996a: 67, italics in original). Feminist perspectives which combine feminist theories of intersectionality and postcolonial feminist approaches to relationality can, from this standpoint, help us to trace and illuminate ‘the historical and experiential specificities and differences of women’s lives as well as the historical and experiential connections between women from different national, racial and cultural communities’ (Mohanty 2002: 522, italics in original).

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Queer relationality Like the postcolonial perspectives discussed above, queer frameworks24 examine how practices, identities and subjectivities are always constructed relationally, but with a particular focus on the constitutive role of binary constructions of sexuality.25 In her landmark text Gender Trouble (1999/ 1990), Judith Butler suggests that an ‘epistemic regime of presumptive heterosexuality’ (xxviii) produces and reifies binary frameworks of gender and sexual difference.26 Published a year later, Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet (1991) argues that ‘many of the major nodes of thought and knowledge in twentieth-century Western culture as a whole are structured – indeed, fractured – by a chronic, now endemic crisis of homo/heterosexual definition’ (1). Exploring the construction of the heterosexual/homosexual binary in her introduction to the collection Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories (1991), Diana Fuss discusses how it produces a distinction ‘between a pure and natural heterosexual inside and an impure and unnatural homosexual outside’ (2), whereby ‘the homo becomes identified with the very mechanism necessary to define and to defend any sexual border’ (3). Homosexuality, she suggests, ‘becomes the excluded; it stands in for, paradoxically, that which stands without. But the binary structure of sexual orientation, fundamentally a structure of exclusion, and exteriorisation, nonetheless constructs that exclusion by prominently including the contaminated other in its oppositional logic’ (3). The ways in which the hetero/homo opposition both produces and elides ‘other’ sexualities and identities (such as bisexual, transgender and transsexual) have also been explored by numerous theorists in recent years.27 Through highlighting the integral role sexualised binaries play in the production of embodied categories and identities, queer perspectives call attention to the effects of repeatedly excluding sexuality from the much cited intersectional feminist triad of ‘gender–race–class’. For example, although some of the founding Black feminist texts on intersectionality paid specific attention to issues of sexuality and heteronormativity,28 meaningful discussion of how sexuality factors in black women’s lives is not addressed in Crenshaw’s articles. While Crenshaw argues that single-axis analyses in feminist and anti-racist discourses erase black women’s experiences, it could be argued that her own analysis elides lesbian, bisexual and transgender women’s (and men’s) stories because her two-vector model excludes examination of how sexuality makes a difference in their lives. I would not argue that sexuality is the one crucial variable ‘missing’ from Crenshaw’s analysis, yet her lack of attention to sexuality seems particularly problematic given that her focus is on sexual violence. Considering the extent to which Crenshaw’s framework has influenced later feminist work in the field of intersectionality, it seems important to consider some of the effects of this elision. Crenshaw is clearly aware of the omission of sexuality in her work. In her later article she acknowledges that factors she addresses ‘only in part or not at all, such as class and sexuality, are often critical in shaping the experiences of

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women of color’ (1991: 1244). Yet, in this same text, she makes some statements which appear to reveal a profound lack of awareness regarding how sexuality may structure the lives of women and men who do not identify as heterosexual. For example, in discussing the ways in which race and gender often conflict in black women’s experience, she claims that ‘the need to split one’s political energies between two sometimes opposing groups is a dimension of intersectional disempowerment that men of color and white women seldom confront’ (1251–2). In neglecting to acknowledge the ways in which, for example, gay, bisexual and transgender men of color (as well as lesbian, bisexual and transgender white women) may experience significant conflicts between race (as well as, for example, religion) and sexuality, Crenshaw not only erases their particularity, but also reifies heterosexuality as the norm. Later on in this text Crenshaw comments that when identity politics ‘fail’ women of color, ‘it is not primarily because those politics take as “natural” certain categories that are socially constructed’ but rather because ‘the descriptive content of those categories and the narratives on which they are based have privileged some experiences and excluded others’ (1297). It is surely true that the negative value attributed to the categories of ‘black’ and ‘female’ (in relation to their positive value accorded to ‘white’ and ‘male’) can, in some contexts, seem more damaging to women of colour than the presumed naturalness of such categories. Yet Crenshaw’s statement fails to acknowledge how lesbian or bisexual women of colour experience oppression precisely because their sexual subjectivity is deemed ‘unnatural’ in relation to constructions of heterosexuality as ‘natural’. As Butler (2004a) argues in her analysis of heterosexual normativity, being called unnatural or ‘unreal can be not only a means of social control but a form of dehumanizing violence’ (217). ‘To be called unreal,’ she maintains, ‘and to have that call, as it were, institutionalized as a form of differential treatment, is to become the other against which the human is made’ (217–18).29 Yet intersectional and postcolonial perspectives have also been employed to interrogate the effects of queer theory’s own exclusions, namely a lack of attention paid to the significance of race and nation. As Katrina Roen (2001) points out, ‘Queer theories have been variously criticized for their ethnocentrism’ (253). ‘White’ and ‘Western’-centred perspectives continue to resonate, largely unacknowledged within queer theorising. In this vein, Biddy Martin (1994) argues that constructions of ‘queer studies’ as able to offer more complex analyses of gender and sexuality than lesbian feminist theory often function to ‘project fixity on to race and gender’ (110). The move on the part of some queer theorists to construct ‘parodic performance as that which makes lesbianism specific and subversive’, she suggests, ‘can obscure the social mobility of racial as well as sexual and gendered meanings and oppositions’ (115). Furthermore, Gayatri Gopinath considers how Western ideals of queer visibility and embodiment often exclude gay and lesbian subjects in other parts of the world. Public and visible forms of ‘queerness’, she argues, may not be available to lesbians in South Asia, where it may be in the private

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sphere of home that bodies can explore homo-erotic pleasures (Gopinath 2003, cited in Ahmed 2004a: 151). These kinds of critique are now being addressed through the growing body of literature that integrates queer theory with critical race, postcolonial and transnational frameworks. Approaches which conduct relational analyses of the intersections of race, nation, gender and sexuality (among other vectors) from such perspectives can illustrate, for example, how binary constructions of sexual identity, such as ‘heterosexual’/‘homosexual’ are produced by and in turn produce oppositional constructions of racial categories, such as ‘white’/ ‘black’. Sibohen Somerville (2000) explores how in the nineteenth century ‘the formation of notions of heterosexuality and homosexuality emerged in the United States through (and not merely parallel to) a discourse saturated with assumptions about the racialization of bodies’ (4).30 As Somerville argues, the ‘crisis of homo/heterosexual definition’ in America during this time intersected with and was shaped by ‘concurrent conflicts over racial definition and the presumed boundary between “black and white”’ in a context in which intense programmes directed towards ‘telling the difference’ between various bodies, including sexology and other expert discourses, had emerged: ‘the heightened surveillance of bodies in a racially segregated culture demanded a specific kind of logic which … gave coherence to new concepts of homo- and heterosexuality’ (4). Similarly, employing a framework which integrates queer and postcolonial perspectives, Joseph Boone (2001) shows how binaries such as ‘West’/‘East’ and ‘heterosexual’/‘homosexual’ were (re)produced in and through one another in the accounts of European male travellers to the Middle East. These narratives imposed ‘traditionally assumed Western sexual categories’ as well as ‘stereotypical colonialist tropes’ to construct a ‘mythic East as an object of desire’ and a site for the satisfaction of Western homoerotic desires (46). Such integrative frameworks can also been employed to trace the ways in which salient figurations are produced relationally through constitutive intersections of gender, race, nation, class and sexuality. Sander Gilman (1992) has shown, for example, how two seemingly unrelated female figures, ‘the black African Hottentot’ and ‘the white, British lesbian’, were produced in and through one another in mid-nineteenth century Britain, and reciprocally linked to the figure of ‘the prostitute’, through notions about their shared deviant and degenerate sexuality and physiognomy.31 Furthermore, drawing on feminist, postcolonial and queer frameworks, Jasbir Puar (2008) illustrates how, in the context of contemporary discourses about nationalism, security and sexual rights in the United States and transnationally, a figure of the sexually aberrant and depraved ‘Muslim terrorist’ has been produced against and through representations of ‘properly queer’ white, American and/or Western subjects (xiii, italics mine). As these texts illustrate, particular raced and gendered experiences or constructions may only become visible in their intersection with sexuality (and vice versa) and indeed may be (re)constituted in various contexts through particular constructions of sexuality.

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Importantly, queer-postcolonial perspectives also develop a perspective on embodied relationality as a process that is never static, but always contextually specific. Such texts explore how embodied identities are variably (re) constructed via intersubjective interactions between bodies which are conditioned by time and space. Queer analyses of the practice of ‘passing’ are particularly relevant in this respect.32 For example, Amy Robinson (1994) conceptualises passing as a ‘skill of reading’ that involves ‘multiple codes of identity’ (716). ‘The pass,’ she suggests, ‘offers competing rules of recognition in the place of discrete essences or “natural” identities’ (716). Within this framework, ‘not only is the passer’s “real” identity a function of the lens through which it is viewed, but it is the spectator who manufactures the symptoms of a successful pass by engaging in the act of reading that constituted the performance of the passing subject’ (728). Similarly, in her analysis of nineteenth and twentieth-century novels of ‘racial passing’, Somerville (2000) suggests that in most passing narratives ‘the protagonist’s exposure is threatened not by her or his body alone but rather by proximity to another body’ (83; see also Ahmed 1999). From this perspective, the constitutive relations between embodied subjects or groups cannot be conceptualised in deterministic ways as such interactions will always be dependent on intersubjective dynamics as well as social and historical context. Moreover, embodied identities cannot be understood as fixed or bounded, as identities and bodies may be constructed differently through various relational encounters. In other words, queer-postcolonial frameworks underscore how different differences come to matter in different times and places. So race might take on greater significance in some times and spaces than others. While this standpoint suggests that particular regimes of power and differentiation may hold greater weight in some contexts than others, it also emphasises – in common with intersectionality theory – that presuming in advance that particular axes can and should be privileged above and beyond others is problematic. Beyond this, however, queer-postcolonial frameworks suggest that the very ways in which race is constituted and interpreted will change across contexts – that is, we do not and cannot always know what race is or how it will signify. It is on this notion of the fluidity and ‘unfixability’ of embodied identity categories that queer theory productively merges with critical feminist perspectives on embodiment.

Embodiment: critical feminist perspectives Critical feminist approaches to embodiment have explored the ways in which bodies and embodied identities are constituted as ‘different’ through gendered relations of power. As discussed in Chapter 1, theorists such as Elizabeth Grosz, Judith Butler, Sara Ahmed, Margrit Shildrick, Raia Prokhovnik, Rosi Braidotti and Moira Gatens examine how complex processes of social, cultural and psychic differentiation proceed through bodily channels, and how power shapes bodies in enduring ways. In several ways these feminist perspectives are similar to, and are intertwined with, queer approaches to

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relationality. Indeed, many of these thinkers may also be characterised as ‘lesbian’ or ‘queer’ theorists. I discuss these thinkers together in this section because, in contrast to other prominent queer theorists, they have all (at some point) identified their theoretical concerns as ‘feminist’. Reading these theorists alongside one another enables me to highlight some of the overlaps in their perspectives on sex/gender, embodiment and power as well as the points on which they (sometimes substantively) differ. In this section, I consider both the tensions between critical feminist perspectives on embodiment and feminist approaches to intersectionality, and in turn, how embodiment theory might be employed to enhance intersectionality. In one sense, feminist, queer and postcolonial approaches to intersectionality, relationality and embodiment might be seen to converge in their common interrogation of the universalising operations through which the category ‘woman’ is (re)produced within mainstream feminist theory. Thus, from Brah and Phoenix’s perspective, ‘intersectionality fits with the disruption of modernist thinking produced by postcolonial and poststructuralist theoretical ideas’ (2004: 82). There are also, however, significant tensions between these literatures which relate to the kind or extent of disruption each advocates and produces. As mentioned earlier, a good deal of feminist intersectionality theory does not seek explicitly to disrupt essentialist identity categories, such as race, gender and sexuality, but rather to address how these categories reproduce specific exclusions. From Crenshaw’s standpoint, the oppression facing marginalised groups such as African Americans stems not predominantly from the fact that they are categorised in essentialist ways, but rather from the fact that particular categories are negatively valued and exclusionary (1991: 1298). She sees it as a key problem that categories such as ‘black’ and ‘woman’ are constructed through narratives which ‘have privileged some experiences and excluded others’ (1298). Indeed, instead of seeking to theorise the fluidity of, or indeed to radically disrupt, embodied identity categories, Crenshaw calls attention to the ways in which ‘the most critical resistance strategy for disempowered groups is to occupy and defend a politics of social location rather than to vacate and destroy it’ (1297). By contrast, critical feminist theorists of embodiment (in conjunction with queer and other postmodernist and poststructuralist approaches) have argued that embodied identity categories are always produced relationally through hierarchical processes of ‘saming’ and ‘othering’. As such, there exists a fundamental problem with the categories themselves which cannot be remedied simply by revaluing or expanding them to make them more equitable or inclusive. A significant amount of theorising in this respect has revolved around the exclusionary and hierarchical production of categories of gender, sex, and sexuality. Luce Irigaray (1985), whose work has been particularly influential to many critical feminist theorists of embodiment, famously sought to illustrate, for example, how women are positioned within the male symbolic system as representable only in relation to men (either as inversion or as counterpart), and hence as ultimately unrepresentable. She points to the

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power of phallocentric structures of thought ‘to reduce all others to the economy of the same … to eradicate the difference between the sexes in systems that are self-representations of a “masculine subject”’ (1985: 76). Both the subject and the Other, she suggests, are masculine foundations within a phallocentric signifying economy which excludes the feminine altogether. The goal is thus not to neutralise women’s embodied differences in order to grant them full membership in the universal realm of humanity, as that would keep the hegemonic male economy intact. The only route to achieving genuine autonomy for women is through radical resignification of the whole phallocratic system of representation through which embodied differences and their effects are produced. Later theorists of embodiment aim to reveal how the history of Western thought, language and ethics has been founded and developed around the exclusion and denigration of the female body, and other bodies outside the white masculine mainstream (Grosz 1994; Gatens 1996; Shildrick 1997; Braidotti 2002). Moira Gatens (1996) has argued that the concept of rationality (one of the key historical criteria for political participation and other citizenship rights) has been defined in opposition to the qualities typically thought to correlate with femininity and the female body. As she asserts, Women are most often understood to be less able to control the passions of the body and this failure is often located in the a priori disorder of anarchy of the female body itself … Political participation has been structured and defined in such a way that it excluded women’s bodies. (50) Such historical exclusions, she argues, have caused the public sphere, in most, if not all, societies, to develop in ways which assume that its participants have a male body and thus to enshrine within public life the preferences, desires and interests of a very specific embodied group. From Gatens’s perspective, these patterns of development have had important material effects on the ways in which excluded bodies have been constituted, affecting both their present capacities as well as their future possibilities (104): ‘Power differentially constitutes particular kinds of bodies and empowers them to perform particular kinds of task, thus constructing different kinds of subject’ (66, italics in original). She points out, for example, that the body of a woman confined to the role of wife/mother/domestic worker ‘is invested with particular desires, capacities and forms that have little in common with the body of a female Olympic athlete’ (69). Gatens thus maintains that denying the historical forms that sexual difference has taken, and treating subjects as essentially sex-neutral, will result only in reifying present inequitable relations between the sexes. In a similar vein to Irigaray, Gatens emphasises that what is required is a politics of difference which accounts for the ways in which bodies have been constituted differently through complex relations of power, and yet acknowledges that different forms of embodiment are open to change.

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Coming from a somewhat different (though related) perspective, Judith Butler proposes that gender, and the accompanying categories of sex and desire, are produced performatively. That is, ‘what we take to be an internal essence of gender is manufactured through a sustained set of acts, posited through the gendered stylization of the body’ (1999/1990: xv). Gender ‘is performatively produced and compelled by the regulatory practices of gender coherence’ (xxviii), which are underscored by the regime of compulsory heterosexuality. In turn, the ontological categories of sex, gender and desire underscore gender hierarchy and compulsory heterosexuality. Our very understanding of ‘what is possible in gendered life’, Butler suggests, is thus ‘foreclosed by certain habitual and violent presumptions’ (viii). The conception of gender presupposes ‘not only a causal relation among sex, gender and desire, but suggests as well that desire reflects or expresses gender and that gender reflects or expresses desire’ (30). Idealising gendered categories within feminist identity politics can thus only function to (re)produce forms of hierarchy and exclusion (vii–iii). As such, Butler is concerned to explore the ways in which gender categories might be ‘denaturalised’ and ‘resignified’.33 By contrast, Crenshaw seeks to distance her approach to intersectionality from ‘anti-essentialist’ and ‘postmodernist’ perspectives which emphasise the constructedness of identity categories, because she fears that such frameworks will lead to the paralysis of marginal politics. It is important to recognise, Crenshaw stresses, that while projects of naming involve ‘unequal power’, ‘there is nonetheless some degree of agency that people can and do exert in the politics of naming’. Identity remains ‘a site of resistance for members of different subordinated groups’ (1991: 1297). From her perspective, ‘recognizing that identity politics takes place at the site where categories intersect thus seems more fruitful than challenging the possibility of talking about categories at all’ (1299). Similarly, Mohanty (2002) objects to the ‘postmodern appropriation’ of her earlier work which produces a misreading ‘that labels as “totalizing” all systemic connections and emphasizes only the mutability and constructedness of identities and social structures’ (504). ‘I am misread,’ she claims, ‘when I am interpreted as being against all forms of generalization and as arguing for difference over commonalities’ (504). Crenshaw’s and Mohanty’s concerns are both understandable and important. In the context of the late 1980s and early 1990s, anxiety surrounding the rise of deconstructionist postmodernist and poststructuralist theories was widespread within feminist academic communities.34 Cogent critiques of the ‘elitism’ and ‘disembodiment’ of postmodernist and poststructuralist theory called attention to the ways in which, through their (ironically) ‘universalising’ frameworks, such perspectives risked marginalising the concerns of those traditionally positioned as ‘other’ all over again and thus thwarting, rather than enabling, social justice. As Ziauddin Sardar (1998) argues, ‘far from being a new theory of liberation, postmodernism, particularly from the perspective of the Other, the non-Western cultures, is simply a new wave of domination riding on the crest of colonialism and modernity’ (13). Such

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concerns have certainly not gone away or become anachronistic in contemporary contexts. Moreover, it is surely true that some postmodernist and poststructuralist approaches contributed to the generation of (sometimes overstated and/or uncritical) academic preoccupation with the dangers of ‘essentialism’ and ‘identity politics’ (Fuss 1989; Hemmings 2011). Nevertheless, I would argue that Crenshaw’s and Mohanty’s representations of the damaging consequences of postmodern deconstruction present less a nuanced portrayal of postmodernism than a caricature. While Crenshaw acknowledges that ‘the descriptive project of postmodernism of questioning the ways in which meaning is socially constructed is generally sound’ (1991: 1296), she focuses narrowly on the dangers of ‘one version of antiessentialism’ which offers what she terms a ‘vulgarized social construction thesis’: ‘since all categories are socially constructed, there is no such thing as, say, Blacks or women, and thus it makes no sense to continue reproducing those categories by organizing around them’ (1296). It is telling that neither Crenshaw nor Mohanty provides any references for texts which participate in the ‘vulgarized social construction’ or ‘postmodern appropriation’ that they criticise. In fact, many critical feminist approaches to embodiment argue for an interrogation and resignification of essentialist binaries and categories, whilst acknowledging that such categories neither can nor should be dispensed with all together. Butler, for instance, argues for ‘not doing away with the category, but trying to relieve the category of its foundationalist weight in order to render it a site of permanent political contest’ (1992: 8). She also maintains that because ‘juridical structures of language and politics constitute the contemporary field of power’ (1999/1990: 8) we can find ‘no political position purified of power’ (xxvi). Thus, for her, ‘the political task is not to refuse representational politics – as if we could’ (8). This is one point at which Butler distances her approach to ‘troubling’ the categories of sex, gender and desire from that of Irigaray, who argues that the only route to genuine autonomy for women is through making the feminine express a ‘different difference’ that goes beyond patriarchal representation. Contra Irigaray, she argues that, ‘if sexuality is culturally constructed within existing power relations, then the postulation of a normative sexuality that is “before”, “outside” or “beyond” power is a cultural impossibility and a politically impractical dream, one that postpones the concrete and contemporary task of rethinking subversive possibilities for sexuality and identity within the terms of power itself ’ (40). For Butler, then, the aim is not to do away with particular categories all together, or act as if they do not exist, but to produce ‘a critical genealogy’ of their constitution and ‘legitimating practices’ (8) which in turn enables ‘a thoroughgoing appropriation and redeployment of the categories of identity themselves’ (163). Moreover, whilst Crenshaw (1991) fears that revealing categories such as ‘black’ and ‘women’ to be wholly socially constructed will deny marginal political groups the means to articulate their agency and resistance, Butler insists that ‘the deconstruction of identity is not the deconstruction of politics; rather, it establishes as political the very terms through

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which identity is articulated’ (189). Political agency, for Butler, emerges then not through the preservation of embodied identity categories, but through their critical interrogation and rearticulation: ‘the question of agency is reformulated as a question of how signification and resignification work’ (1999/1990: 184, italics in original). In this vein, I want to argue that one of the most valuable theoretical tools that feminist embodiment theory offers intersectionality theories, as well as my project as a whole, is a genealogical approach to tracing the complex historical, social and political processes through which particular embodied identity categories are (re)formed and secured as ‘natural’.35 A genealogical method simultaneously enquires into the political processes through which such categories might be disrupted and resignified. Furthermore, critical feminist approaches to embodiment may help to move intersectional approaches away from an abstract, ‘gridlock’ model of social differentiation in which particular pre-formed axes of differentiation interact in deterministic ways, and towards a more fluid framework in which the nature of particular embodied ‘differences’ cannot be known in advance, but rather is continuously (re) formed through located articulations of power. Through treating the production of embodied subjectivities as ongoing and always unfinished, such frameworks acknowledge that no approach to theorising processes of social differentiation can be complete or all-encompassing – there will always be excesses which evade recognition or translation. In what is to follow, however, I examine how critical feminist approaches to embodiment can be (and have been) critiqued from intersectional perspectives. Intersectionality strikes back Several critical feminist theorists of embodiment employ the rhetoric of intersectionality in their work. Judith Butler discusses ‘the political problem that feminism encounters in the assumption that the term women denotes a common identity’ (1999/1990: 6, italics in original). The term ‘fails to be exhaustive’, she points out, because ‘gender is not always constituted coherently or consistently in different historical contexts, and because gender intersects with racial, class, ethnic, sexual and regional modalities of discursively constituted identities’ (6, italics mine). As such, ‘it becomes impossible to separate out “gender” from the political and cultural intersections in which it is invariably produced and maintained’ (6, italics mine). Similarly, Elizabeth Grosz acknowledges that ‘bodies are always irreducibly sexually specific, necessarily interlocked with racial, cultural and class particularities’ (1994: 19–20, italics mine). Yet, despite employing the discursive apparatus of intersectionality, critical feminist perspectives on embodiment may not be as substantively intersectional as their language suggests. Irigaray’s project clearly positions sexual difference as the difference which plays the most crucial role in the constitution of embodied subjects. She famously claimed in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, ‘Sexual difference is one

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of the major philosophical issues, if not the issue, of our age’ (1993: 5). As Rosi Braidotti (1994) points out in relation to Irigaray’s work, ‘In her perspective sexual difference cannot be considered as one difference among many, but rather as a founding, fundamental structural difference, on which all others rest’ (118). Grosz similarly makes it explicit that, for her, sexual difference not only precedes race, but actually conditions how racial differentiations take shape. In a paper focusing on developing feminist links with the work of Charles Darwin, for instance, she advocates Darwin’s view ‘that it may be precisely the sexual appeal or attractiveness of individual racial variations … that explains the historical variability and the genealogical emergence of racial differences’ (Grosz 1999: 37).36 As she argues, ‘Darwin provides an ironic and indirect confirmation of the Irigarian postulation of the irreducibility, indeed ineliminability, of sexual difference, and its capacity to play itself out in all races and across all modes of racial difference’ (42). Thus, for Grosz, it seems that sexual difference is irreducible because it is the founding morphological phenomenon through which all other forms of differentiation are produced. From an intersectional perspective, this ontological privileging of sexual difference is problematic because it assumes that sex or sexual difference is always prior to and separable from other axes of differentiation such as race or racial difference. Grosz argues against an additive approach to social differentiation and emphasises the need to focus on mutual constitution. Yet it is precisely the privileging of sexual difference as primary that underscores the additive analyses of social differentiation which feminist theorists of intersectionality have criticised. As Crenshaw (1989, 1991) has argued, if sexual difference is positioned as prior to racial difference in this way, sexual difference is problematically read as white sexual difference in ways that continue to position non-white women as ‘other’. In this vein, echoing Black feminist critique, Butler asserts that ‘to claim that sexual difference is more fundamental than racial difference is effectively to assume that sexual difference is white sexual difference, and that whiteness is not a form of racial difference’ (1993: 182). While in Gender Trouble Butler focuses on how gender differences are produced through the heterosexual matrix of power, in Bodies that Matter (1993) she revisits this construction, emphasising how the ‘social regulation of race … subverts the monolithic working of the heterosexual imperative’ (17). Despite her stated intentions, however, Butler has been criticised for her work on race by feminists who argue that she continues to subsume race to gender (Fusco 1995; Zita 1998; Schueller 2005). Many of the critiques have been directed at her analysis of Jenny Livingston’s film Paris is Burning (1991), a documentary about black and Hispanic drag ball culture in Harlem. For Butler, the film suggests – contrary to dominant psychoanalytical perspectives on the symbolic – that ‘the order of sexual difference is not prior to that of race or class in the constitution of the subject’ (1993: 130). She claims that the drag queen competitions that the film depicts (all of which are judged on the

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taken-for-granted criterion of ‘realness’) illustrate that the ‘symbolic is also and at once a racialising set of norms’, that ‘the norms of realness by which the subject is produced are racially informed conceptions of “sex”’ (130). Butler’s critics insist, however, that her reading of the film ultimately depends on the act of assuming sexual difference as primary and determinant that she herself claims to critique. Coco Fusco (1995) argues, for example, that while Butler’s analysis is partly a response to bell hooks’s (1992) earlier critique of the film,37 she fails to adequately acknowledge hooks’s particular references to the drag queen’s ‘embrace of white supremacist notions of female beauty’ (72). From Fusco’s perspective, Butler accuses hooks of essentialism in assuming that the drag queens are imitating women in a misogynist way, but does not deal with the distinction hooks makes between ideals of femininity and ideals of white femininity, hence allowing race to drop out of the equation.38 It has also been argued that Butler’s analysis of the intersections of gender, race and sexuality in Bodies that Matter remains lodged within a problematic additive framework. Schueller (2005) suggests that ‘although Butler is clearly aware of the problems of simply adding race to the understandings of the body and of sex, her own positioning of race in the introductive is nonetheless additive’ (83). She points to Butler’s comment that ‘race is not simply another domain separable from sexual difference, ‘“but … its ‘addition’ subverts the monolithic workings of the heterosexual imperative …”’ (Butler 1993: 18, cited in Schueller 2005: 83). In this sense, critical feminist approaches to embodiment such as Grosz’s and Butler’s might be productively interrogated and enhanced through a more substantive encounter with feminist perspectives on intersectionality. It is worth considering, however, whether Butler’s efforts to incorporate race into her analysis of gendered subject formation are problematic from the start because of her reliance on psychoanalytical models which position racial difference as secondary to a logic of (white) sexual differentiation. Sara Ahmed (1998) argues, for example, that ‘the use of psychoanalysis has invariably meant that other differences are explained through an act of translation back into the model which elaborates the division of subjects into sexes (the resolution of the Oedipal crisis, castration anxiety and the phallic logic of fetishism)’ (103). From her perspective, the translation of racial difference into the logic of Freudian psychoanalysis means that ‘the “unmarked” language of that topology is held in place (whereby “the subject” becomes implicitly conflated with “the white subject”)’ (104; see also hooks 1992). Arguably, it is Butler’s rootedness in psychoanalysis which returns her to sexual difference paradigms she would otherwise reject. Different as Butler’s approach to gender resignification is from those of Irigaray and Grosz, they all would seem to reify sexual difference as prior to (or more fundamental than) other axes of differentiation through their mutual focus on the primacy of the psychoanalytical within processes of sexual subject formation. For this reason, I am more interested in examining the wider social, cultural and political processes through which

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embodied differentiations are produced.39 What Butler’s work offers to a process of thinking through how race, nation and cultural difference intersect and mutually constitute sex/gender and sexuality in the production of bodies and embodied subjectivities is an understanding of how embodied subjects are constituted in part through relational processes of ‘othering’. This is the strain of Butler’s work that I see Sara Ahmed as developing. Ahmed’s work provides one example of how feminist, postcolonial and queer approaches to intersectionality, relationality and embodiment can be integrated productively. In Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Postcoloniality (2000), Ahmed explores how bodies come to be lived precisely through being differentiated from ‘other’ bodies constituted as ‘strange’ or ‘alien’, a process which she refers to as ‘interembodiment’. From her perspective, embodied identities and particularities are historically determined (relationally) through antagonistic encounters with (and between) ‘others’. While embodied identities are constituted through such encounters, so are ‘social bodies’: The boundaries of communities are demarcated and fortified by expelling those ‘others’ who, on account of their ‘marked’ bodies, are seen not to ‘belong’. Within this framework, globalisation, migration and multiculturalism all represent particular contemporary modes of proximity, which, through reopening such prior histories of encounter that already mark some bodies as stranger than others, (re)produce both the figures of ‘the stranger’ and the ‘body at home’ in different ways (13). Via such antagonistic embodied encounters, notions of gender, race, sexuality and cultural difference are continually (re)produced. Furthermore, in The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004a), Ahmed extends her framework to consider the role of heteronormativity in (re)forming both individual and social bodies through processes of inclusion and exclusion. Discussing how ‘heterosexuality becomes a script that binds the familial with the global’, she suggests that ‘it is this narrative of coupling as a condition for the reproduction of life, culture and value that explains the slide in racist narratives between the fear of strangers and immigrants (xenophobia), the fear of queers (homophobia) and the fear of miscegenation (as well as other illegitimate couplings)’ (144).40 For Ahmed, acts of othering and fetishisation which produce and fix particular bodies as ‘other’ might be disrupted (and potentially prevented), in part, through conceiving of ‘difference’ differently. She suggests that we need to locate difference, not on bodies of individuals, but within particular modes of encounter: ‘Rather than thinking of gender and race as something that this other has (which would thematise this other as always gendered and racialised in a certain way) we can consider how such differences are determined at the level of encounter’ (2000: 145, italics in original). From this perspective, difference cannot simply be read off the body of ‘the victim of genital mutilation’, ‘the veiled woman’ or ‘the anorexic’; it must be understood as created through a relation between bodies. When embodied particularity is understood ‘as a question of modes of encounter through which others are faced’ (144), transforming essentialist representations of embodied differences

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becomes a project of changing the ways we encounter one another. From Ahmed’s point of view, ‘a generous encounter may be one which would recognise how the encounter itself is implicated in broader relations and circuits of production and exchange’ (152). Thus such an encounter would necessitate awareness of the relations of power which already mark some bodies differently than others and the ways in which particular forms of embodiment must always be conceived in relation to the ‘others’ which have enabled their construction. As a critical approach to analysing processes of social and embodied differentiation, Ahmed’s concept of interembodiment enables theorising of how embodied particularities are (re)formed through intersectional, relational encounters situated within transnational configurations of power. At the same time, her perspective is not deterministic. It seeks to trace the ways in which such relational encounters might be redirected, and hence how the formation of particular problematic and essentialist identity constructions might be rearticulated. Within her framework, various embodied selves and others are differentiated and yet also fundamentally connected, but never essentially fixed in place. As in Butler’s approach to performativity, Ahmed understands embodied identity categories to be the product of complex histories of relational construction. As such, the possibility exists that they might be disrupted and ‘constructed differently’ (Butler, 1999/1990: 11).

Conclusions In this chapter I have explored various conceptual tools for theorising cultural formations and practices offered by feminist, postcolonial and queer approaches to intersectionality, relationality and embodiment. By mapping their specific overlaps and intersections, I have sought to illustrate how these literatures can illuminate and critique one another’s limitations whilst also enhancing one another and producing useful insights. It is important to emphasise that the interpretive framework which I have begun fleshing out through this analysis is not one that simply transplants the tools each approach offers (intact) and combines them additively to create a ‘more comprehensive’ approach. Rather, the theoretical ‘encounters’ between intersectionality, relationality and embodiment I staged in this chapter have, to some extent, altered the character and contours of each, and hence the role they play in the emergent framework.41 By way of concluding, I outline the key elements which define my approach. In tracing the contingent particularity of cultural groups, practices and figures, I seek to resist assumptions of universality or linearity and to avoid privileging (in advance) one axis of social differentiation as primary. Drawing on the insights of Black feminist approaches to intersectionality, my interpretive framework underscores the importance of looking for and addressing complex articulations among multiple processes of differentiation associated with race, gender, class, sexuality, nation and culture, without assuming that

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these axes exist ‘out there’ in any fixed form. My hope is to avoid additive or analogical analyses which elide historical, contextual and embodied specificities and instead to focus on tracing the (re)production of relational links. As opposed to looking exclusively for (or constructing) commonality – which often collapses into superficial or uncritical constructions of sameness – my approach seeks to trace the constitutive connections which mutually implicate particular embodied practices/figures. Focusing on constitutive connection enables an understanding of embodied identities, figurations and practices as relationally contingent, rather than bounded or discrete. It involves the genealogical tracing of the intersectional configurations of power through which social and embodied differentiation occurs and through which particular imagined subjects or figures are (re)constructed. As such, my objective is not to uncover the ‘hidden truth’ of particular forms of embodied practice, but rather to unravel some of the processes and social relations through which salient cultural formations and binaries have come to be understood as ‘natural’. In examining the ways in which social differentiation proceeds through intersubjective embodied encounters which function to (re)shape and (re) constitute bodies, my framework seeks to move away from the abstraction and rigidity that conceptual models of intersectionality sometimes encounter. Avoiding a perspective in which categories of social differentiation come preformed and interact in deterministic ways, it understands such categories as social processes which are continually (re)produced through shifting relations of power, and hence unfinished and always dependent on historical and cultural context. Furthermore, as I will argue in the following two chapters and illustrate in my final chapter, it is precisely the process of tracing the relational histories of construction of various cultural practices and their imagined subjects that provides the means by which such histories might be redirected and by which culturally essentialist constructions might be constituted differently.

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Continuums and analogues Linking ‘African’ female genital cutting and ‘Western’ body modifications

Bored with your Brazilian? Hundreds of North American and European women are choosing female genital mutilation. (Kate Catchpole, Jane magazine, April 2004)

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 This growing rhetorical trend towards making such cross-cultural comparisons is also evident in a range of feminist academic literatures. In The Whole Woman (1999), Germaine Greer suggests parallels between ‘African’ ‘female genital mutilation’ and a wide range of ‘Western’ procedures, including operations on intersex babies, male circumcision, body piercing, cutting, gender reassignment surgery, breast augmentation, episiotomy, hysterectomy and caesarean sections. Similarly, criticising Martha Nussbaum’s (1998)

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portrayal of African-rooted FGC as worse than, and in greater need of eradication, than practices of cosmetic surgery and dieting, Clare Chambers (2004) considers connections between FGC and cosmetic breast implants. Moreover, Lori Leonard (2000) argues that particular forms of FGC are comparable to ‘Western’ body modification practices such as piercing and tattooing in that all such procedures are, in some senses, fads – they are partly ‘about young girls copying each other’ (227). Outside the specifically feminist literature, Gerry Mackie (1996, 2000) links FGC with Chinese foot binding, whilst Sander Gilman (1999a) and David Gollaher (2000) suggest similarities between FGC and male circumcision. Legal scholars Sally Sheldon and Stephen Wilkinson (1998) compare FGC and cosmetic surgery procedures such as breast augmentation, suggesting that the legal frameworks relating to the two sets of practices in the United Kingdom should be made more consistent. An analysis of the diverse collection of actors who seek to link ‘African’ FGC with other practices and the wide array of practices to which FGC gets compared raises a number of critical questions. How is FGC figured as such a porous and flexible practice that can be stretched to link with such a varied spectrum of other practices worldwide? Through what processes has FGC become fetishised as the practice of choice for so many comparisons? What are the motivations on the part of theorists and commentators for making such comparisons? And crucially, what are the potential theoretical, social and political effects of such comparisons? In what is to follow, I hope to address each of these questions. My particular focus, however, is examining how making links across these different embodied practices is employed by feminist theorists as a rhetorical strategy to counter racism and cultural essentialism. Within this context, practices of FCG, which themselves are very diverse,3 have been compared to cosmetic surgery procedures such as breast augmentation, labiaplasty and liposuction;4 ‘body art’ practices such as piercing, tattooing and cutting;5 nineteenth-century circumcision operations performed on women in the United States and Britain to ‘cure’ masturbation, nymphomania or hysteria;6 contemporary reproductive procedures such as caesarean sections, episiotomies, tubal ligations, hysterectomies and radical mastectomies;7 and, more recently, operations to ‘correct’ ambiguous genitalia in intersex babies.8 Feminist theorists living and working in the West author the majority of such texts, but are situated differently in terms of race, ethnicity, nation and sexuality.9 These comparisons are diverse and their authors vary in their approaches and motivations. However, all share an objection to the essentialism involved in mainstream, as well as feminist, representations of such embodied practices as fundamentally different. In order to highlight the cross-cultural affinities between practices, some theorists have adopted what I refer to as the ‘continuum’ and ‘analogue’ approaches. As discussed in the Introduction, I employ the term ‘continuum approach’ to describe the rhetorical model advocated by authors who suggest that imagining FGC alongside other bodyaltering procedures within a single ‘continuum’, ‘spectrum’ or ‘range’ of cross-

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cultural body modification practices would enable a move beyond problematic binary representations. I use the term ‘analogue approach’ to refer to the rhetorical strategy utilised by theorists who seek to highlight similarities between different embodied practices, but do not explicitly conceive of them as forming a single continuum. The continuum and analogue approaches are not mutually exclusive. The continuum model involves identifying cultural practices which are similar and analogues can (though need not necessarily) be part of larger continuums. Some theorists employ a combination of the continuum and analogue approaches or move back and forward between them. Both approaches are utilised to imagine and theorise connections between various forms of FGC and ‘Western’ body-altering procedures deemed to be similar or comparable. It is necessary to make a distinction between the two approaches, however, because in some cases, their structural differences can become significant. Both the continuum and analogue approaches offer appealing rhetorical models for those seeking to disrupt essentialist constructions of FGC and ‘Western’ body modifications. They challenge the widespread perception that practices of FGC are fundamentally different from other body-altering procedures and situate the potential for health risks associated with FGC in the context of similar risks linked to other body modifications. They also highlight the comparable motivations across cultures for undergoing such procedures. Furthermore, continuum and analogue approaches can encourage people to think critically about different cultural practices (including those within their own cultures) and challenge their ethnocentrism, whilst increasing solidarity and ‘multicultural dialogue’ (Gunning 1991: 91). In my view, however, neither the continuum nor the analogue approach provides a model capable of moving beyond the multiple problems associated with essentialist binaries. A continuum is, by definition, ‘a continuous sequence in which the elements next to each other are very similar, but the last and the first are very different’ (O.E.D. 2001: 185). Choices regarding where to position various practices in relation to one another on a particular continuum are shaped by culturally specific norms and beliefs and as such the continuum model risks reifying culturally essentialist differences. An analogue, on the other hand, is defined as ‘a person or thing that is like or comparable to another’ (27). The emphasis in this model is on ‘likeness’ and thus, when employed uncritically, the analogue approach risks collapsing into an economy of sameness that ultimately avoids dealing with antagonistic processes through which embodied practices and their imagined subjects are differentially constructed.10 In this chapter, I analyse some of the ways in which FGC and other body modifications are linked in the feminist literature, with a focus on the potential effects of such rhetorical strategies. Two key critiques of the continuum and analogue approaches are presented. First, because these models privilege sex/gender and sexuality, they tend to efface the operation of other (interlinked) processes of embodied differentiation, namely race, cultural difference

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and nation. As such, the continuum and analogue approaches often reproduce problematic relationships between race and gender whilst failing to address the implicit role which race, along with culture and nation, continue to play in the modes of theorising they enact. This erasure of race, culture and nation, I contend, is linked to the construction of a ‘Western’ empathetic gaze. This is my second key critique. The desire on the part of theorists working in ‘the West’ to establish cross-cultural ‘empathy’ through models which stress similarity and solidarity often conceals the continuing operation of geopolitical relations of power and privilege.

Situating cross-cultural feminist approaches Through employing analogue and continuum approaches which emphasise cross-cultural commonalities among ‘African’ FGC and ‘Western’ body modifications, feminist theorists aim to contest essentialist and racialist constructions which pose these practices as fundamentally oppositional. They seek to break down binaries which depict ‘female genital mutilation’ as the result of complicity, oppression and false consciousness against representations of cosmetic surgery as a free, empowered and authentic choice. Western depictions of FGC as ‘barbaric’ and ‘primitive’ have a long history, incorporating British colonial campaigns to eradicate female circumcision in countries such as Egypt and Kenya.11 It was not until the 1970s, however, that ‘female genital mutilation’ became the focus of widespread media attention in the West, predominantly in response to an antiFGM ‘crusade’ initiated by Fran Hosken, who was joined by many other prominent American feminists, including Gloria Steinem, Mary Daly and Alice Walker (Kennedy 2009: 271). Western feminist depictions of ‘female genital mutilation’ as an ‘unspeakable atrocity’ (Daly 1978) and ‘purely patriarchal’ (Hosken 1981, 1993) have been the subject of extensive critique by African, Arab and other feminist theorists,12 who have conceived such representations as highly problematic in their essentialism and implicit racism.13 As Sudanese doctor and feminist Nahid Toubia (a long-time and vocal campaigner against FGC and current director of the Research Action and Information Network for the Bodily Integrity of Women) argued, in a now oft-cited quote: The west has acted as though they have suddenly discovered a dangerous epidemic which they sensationalised in international women’s forums creating a backlash of over-sensitivity in the concerned communities. They have portrayed it as irrefutable evidence of the barbarism and vulgarity of underdeveloped countries … It became a conclusive validation to the view of the primitiveness of Arabs, Muslims and Africans all in one blow. (1988: 98)


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This kind of cultural essentialism continues to underscore a range of mainstream political, cultural and institutional discourses which portray FGC as ‘the product of delusionary brainwashing by an oppressive patriarchy’ (Kennedy 2009: 224) and ‘African women’ as ‘mutilating their bodies for the sexual satisfaction of men’ (223). By contrast, notwithstanding the prominent trajectory of feminist analysis of cosmetic surgery as an ‘oppressive technology’ (Negrin 2002: 21),14 cosmetic procedures (including a range of genital modifications) are now becoming increasingly normalised within neo-liberal, consumer culture (Weil Davis 2002; Jones 2008; Braun 2009). As Meredith Jones (2008) contends, No longer a bizarre indulgence for the rich, famous or narcissistic, cosmetic surgery has become an everyday practice that popular media tell us we ‘deserve’. It is even presented as something that will enable our ‘true selves’ to emerge. For some, it is an aesthetic and cultural imperative. (2008: 2) Thus, unlike ‘African’ practices of FGC, which are routinely represented as ‘backward’ ‘tribal customs’, ‘Western’ cosmetic procedures are now widely linked to discourses of technological innovation, consumer-choice, selfdetermination and even psychological well-being.15 Cosmetic surgery may still be subject to a degree of mainstream critique or concern, ‘in much the same way that the promulgation of images of thin women in popular media is frowned on as counterproductive and sexist’ (Kennedy 2009: 271). Yet, as Aileen Kennedy argues, the ‘the vituperative hostility towards FGM is of another order all together’ (2009: 271). It is this racialised cultural ‘double standard’ to which feminist advocates of cross-cultural approaches object. Anti-essentialist critics also take issue with national laws and international directives designed to regulate, ban or eradicate practices of FGC and yet not other body-altering procedures which may involve similar health risks.16 Waririmu Ngaruiya Njambi (2004), for example, criticises the American Medical Association and the World Health Organisation for producing directives which describe FGC as ‘medically unnecessary’ and requiring ‘eradication’, while failing to address ‘culturally acceptable’ practices such as male circumcision and cosmetic surgery (291). She also questions how the label ‘mutilation’ becomes attached to practices of FGC in African cultures, yet not to a range of body modifications fashionable in Western cultures, such as tattooing, piercing, penis/clitoris slicing, tongue slicing, and cosmetic procedures, including Botox injections, liposuction, breast implants, and female genital trimming (299). Furthermore, in her analysis of anti-FGM legislation in Australia, Nikki Sullivan (2007) interrogates how laws which characterise FGC as unquestionably ‘mutilatory’ and as a ‘violation of the “common good”’ constitute those who practise such ‘customs’ as ‘morally blighted’ and/ or as ‘criminally bad parents blinded by a cultural tradition that would best

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be replaced by Western values’ (399–400). As far as this construction of ‘female genital mutilation’ and its criminalisation either elides or condones ‘Western’ body modifications such as cosmetic labiaplasty and surgeries on intersex children, she argues, ‘it (re)inscribes asymmetrical relations between the state and its citizen bodies that differ depending on birthplace, cultural context, and skin colour’ (400).17 Thus, in establishing cross-cultural links among FGC and other body modifications, theorists seek to contest the racialised cultural hierarchies that reify notions of fundamental moral differences between Western cultures and their so-called ‘others’.

Reading analogue and continuum approaches Within feminist literatures concerned with questions of culture, essentialism and embodied practice, the rhetorical strategy of drawing cross-cultural analogies between practices seems to be employed frequently, and perhaps increasingly. The American volume Genital Cutting and Transnational Sisterhood (2002) provides a case in point. This collection begins with a reprint of the Women’s Caucus of the African Studies Association’s ‘Position Paper on Clitoridectomy and Infibulation’ (2002/1983). In this piece, the authors critique imperialist Western interventions into debates on African practices of FGC, arguing that such condemnations fail to recognise the many analogous procedures which are part of Western cultures: Surely no one residing in a nation in which newborn males are routinely circumcised without benefit of anaesthesia and in which other operations such as caesarean sections, tubal ligations, hysterectomies, and radical mastectomies are sometimes performed on women for questionable medical reasons ought to single out any other group’s customs for special attention. Western cultures have in the recent past practiced clitoridectomy on young women as a cure for masturbation and nymphomania and certainly do not regard the sexuality of women as a benign or positive force. (2002/1983: 2) In their introduction to the articles which follow, editors Stanlie James and Claire Robertson suggest that much feminist theorising about FGC falls foul of what they refer to as ‘the colonial flaw’: ‘although many feminists by now are aware that clitoridectomy was practiced at different times and places in the United States, most confine it to the past’ (2002: 13). As a means to overcome this problem, James and Robertson advocate an analogue approach which traces the similarities between FGC and other embodied practices normally categorised as ‘different’, namely US intersex operations. Other chapters in the collection, such as Cheryl Chase’s, adopt a similar perspective. Chase critiques Western constructions of African practices of FGC as fundamentally distinct from American operations on intersex babies asserting,


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‘Western feminism has represented African genital cutting as primitive, irrational, harmful, and deserving condemnation. The Western medical community has represented its genital cutting as modern, scientific, healing and above reproach’ (2002: 145–6). She maintains that laws prohibiting African practices of ‘female genital mutilation’ in the United States should apply equally to intersex surgeries. The message conveyed by the collection as a whole is that issues relating to female genital cutting require transnational feminist responses which are sensitive to the links and similarities among different gendered embodied practices across cultures. Another example of the analogue approach can be found in a special issue of Feminist Theory (2004) which focuses on contemporary feminist responses to FGC. The issue is structured around a key article, ‘Dualisms and Female Bodies in Representations of African Female Circumcision: A feminist critique’, by Waririmu Ngaruiya Njambi (2004), and a series of responses to it by various critics, including Kathy Davis, who has become wellknown for her work on cosmetic surgery (1994, 1997, 2003a, 2003b). Njambi interrogates the ‘imperialistic impression that only those with some social, political and economic power and who live in the west have the right to take risks with their bodies’ (2004: 299). She seeks to explore how it may be possible to ‘situate the potential for infections associated with female circumcision in the context of similar risks with the multitude of other body modifications practices by people worldwide’ (298).18 In her response, Davis suggests that Njambi’s argument is ‘well taken’ and that Western feminists should treat African practices of FGC as similar to cosmetic surgery or intersex operations in the sense that all such practices require analysis rather than automatic condemnation (2004: 306). Davis concludes that cross-cultural comparison is a crucial means of making Western feminists aware of their own ethnocentrism, enabling them to become more critical of their own local practices (309). Feminist theorists who explicitly employ continuum approaches to link FGC and ‘Western’ body altering procedures include Diana Teitjens Meyers (2000) and Simone Weil Davis (2002).19 Among those who adopt an analogue model, Isabelle Gunning’s ‘world-travelling’ approach (1991) may be the most well known. Each of these theorists has different motivations for employing such cross-cultural approaches to emphasise similarities between different embodied practices. Meyers wants to advocate FGC-related educational programmes in Africa which emphasise the possibility of autonomy within culture, Weil Davis is interested in examining issues of consent, aesthetics and social control in relation to embodied practices in the United States and elsewhere, and Gunning seeks to consider how international human rights discourse can be employed as a non-punitive model for eradicating practices of FGC. All, however, articulate their projects through a desire to interrogate racist and culturally essentialist representations of these embodied practices. In the remainder of this section I look more closely at the cross-cultural approaches employed by Meyers, Gunning and Weil Davis, focusing on why

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and how they link FGC and other body-altering procedures and what their continuums and analogies do. In ‘Feminism and Women’s Autonomy: The Challenge of Female Genital Cutting’ (2000), Diana Teitjens Meyers utilises a continuum approach to link ‘the range of worldwide FGC practices – including “corrective” surgery for “ambiguous genitalia” in Western cultures as well as the various initiation rites observed in some African and Asian cultures’ (469).20 Through imagining such practices on a fluid continuum she seeks to disrupt neocolonialist binaries which pose FGC and intersex operations as oppositional and distinct. Meyers is particularly concerned ‘to dispel some prevalent misconceptions about culture’ which portray non-Western women who practise FGC as oppressed by culture and without autonomy, in contrast to Western women as active agents freely negotiating their flexible cultural milieus (474). As such, she aims to illustrate that FGC is a practice common to both non-Western and Western cultures. Drawing a discursive similarity between the different sets of cultural practices, she adopts the label ‘female genital cutting’ (usually employed only to refer specifically to African or Asian practices of female circumcision or infibulation) to describe a wider range of body-altering procedures, including Western operations on intersex babies: Many Euro-Americans believe that female genital cutting is a single procedure, but this is not true. In addition to Western cosmetic procedures designed to “feminise” ostensibly male genitalia, practices range from sunna … to infibulation … (473, italics mine) Intersex surgeries and practices of FGC are comparable from Meyer’s perspective because they are both potentially harmful and health-endangering practices of cutting female genital tissue. Linking all such practices in regards to their possible health risks, Meyers suggests a continuum: Correlated with this spectrum of outcomes is a spectrum of health risks in the immediate aftermath of the procedure and a spectrum of long-term consequences for women’s sexuality, physical health and psychological well-being. (473–4, italics mine) She also claims that both intersex surgeries and various forms of FGC are impelled by ‘potent culturally specific feminine bodily norms’ (486) which do not tolerate ‘unnatural’ or ‘ambiguous’ genitalia. Meyers’s key aim in the article is to advocate educational programmes which seek to enhance women’s autonomy within FGC-practising communities, without necessarily calling for the eradication of the practice. She wants to emphasise that ‘autonomy’ is not mutually exclusive with ‘culture’ for women who practice FGC and that


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‘many women exercise effective agency’ with respect to the practice, as both accommodators and resisters (469). In ‘Arrogant Perception, World-Travelling and Multicultural Feminism: The Case of Female Genital Surgeries’ (1991), Isabelle Gunning advocates an analogue approach as a means to disrupt culturally essentialist depictions of FGC and ‘Western’ body modifications. Gunning is particularly concerned to address what she, borrowing from previous feminist critiques, refers to as ‘arrogant perception’,21 a self-centred and culturally essentialist way of viewing ‘the other’.22 As a means to prevent arrogant perception in this context, Gunning draws on the concept of ‘world-travelling’ developed by Maria Lugones (1990) to advocate a three-pronged approach: (1) understanding one’s own historical context, (2) seeing yourself as the other woman might see you and (3) seeing the other woman, her world and sense of self through her eyes (202). Required as part of Gunning’s ‘world-travelling’ approach is ‘an in-depth look at one’s own cultural context in search for analogues to culturally challenging practices in the “other’s” culture’ (205, italics mine). For her, nineteenth-century female circumcisions performed on American and English women as a ‘cure’ for mental illness provide one suitable analogue with FGC. She argues that ‘the same kind of rationales’ have been given for both sets of procedures, such as beliefs in their health benefits, (205, 218). Women have also demonstrated similar attitudes or responses towards the two sets of procedures, including, in some cases, ‘submissive or welcoming behaviour’ (208), and have played a key role in supervising, and in some ways perpetuating, both procedures. Through illustrating that female genital surgeries have been practised in Western cultures too, she seeks to disrupt culturally essentialist and racist perceptions of FGC-practising communities as ‘backward’ or ‘barbaric’ and women who have undergone clitoridectomies as victims of ‘false consciousness’. In a similar (though not identical) way to Meyers, Gunning’s language seeks to equate the two forms of body alteration discursively: The practice of reconstructing female genitalia through surgery is a universal one that crosses cultural boundaries. It is part of our own history. (211, italics mine) Western women have confronted the same problem of female genital surgeries that African women face today albeit in our own cultural context. (226, italics mine) Gunning also makes links between FGC and other embodied practices, such as cosmetic breast augmentation, intersex surgery, abortion and eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia. These comparisons are established to encourage Westerners to acknowledge that ‘non-Westerners too can view Western practices as culturally challenging’ (212) and to increase ‘multicultural dialogue’ through a ‘shared search for areas of overlap, shared

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concern and values’ (91). Establishing such multicultural dialogue is important to Gunning’s overarching objective in this article, which is to advocate ‘the international human rights regime’ as a positive tool, for developing and applying ‘universal human rights norms’ to practices of FGC (247–48). In ‘Loose Lips Sink Ships’ (2002), Simone Weil Davis advocates a continuum approach as an alternative to binary depictions of FGC and ‘Western’ procedures of genital alteration. Concerned with culturally essentialist and racist representations of FGC in the media, US law and Western academic critique, she claims: It is a (prevalent) mistake to imagine a quantum distinction between Euro-American and African reshapings of women’s bodies: far too often, they are measured with entirely different yardsticks rather than on a continuum (21). Elsewhere in the paper she again uses the word ‘continuum’ to link African practices of FGC and American labiaplasty (as well as intersex surgeries) (27). In constructing links between these practices, Weil Davis seeks explicitly to employ Gunning’s world-travelling approach, and its requirement to ‘look at one’s own culture anew and identify [ … ] practices that might prove “culturally challenging” or negative to some other’ (Gunning cited in Weil Davis 2002: 27). From Weil Davis’s perspective, labiaplasty would likely not only seem as ‘culturally challenging’ to African women as FGC appears to American women, but could also be understood as analogous to FGC in several ways. The key motivations impelling women to undergo both sets of practices are similar, including ‘beautification, transcendence of shame, a desire to conform’ (24). Moreover, both sets of practices involve issues of agency, choice, consent and appropriation which should be analysed with a feminist lens. Through mobilising a continuum approach, Weil seeks to move beyond the ‘prurient, bifurcating tunnel vision’ of many Western commentators who ‘pretend a clean break between the “primitive barbarism” or “ritual” cutting of African women … and the aesthetic of medical “fixings” of those AmeroEuropean women’ (27). She argues that a less binary approach to interpreting such embodied practices could lead to ‘a deeper understanding of core issues like the nature of consent, of bodily aesthetics and social control, and of cross-culturalist activist collaboration’ (22). Discussion Meyers, Gunning and Weil Davis provide sophisticated analyses of how cultural essentialism and racism operate problematically in representations of embodied practices. I share significant theoretical and political ground with these theorists and have a great deal of sympathy for such strategies. My argument, however, is that neither the analogue or continuum approaches provides a rhetorical strategy capable of moving beyond the multiple


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problems associated with the essentialist representations and binaries they seek to contest. On the one hand, Meyers’s and Weil Davis’s use of a continuum approach may make them more susceptible than Gunning to reifying problematic differences between various embodied practices. For example, Meyers’s image of a ‘range’ of female genital cutting practices correlated with ‘a spectrum of health risks’ and ‘a spectrum of long-term consequences for women’s sexuality, physical health and psychological well-being’ (2000: 473–4) suggests that some practices of genital alteration will be more serious, harmful or problematic than others. The point I want to make here is not that we should never make distinctions between particular practices (indeed, this book underscores the importance of differentiating practices), but rather that if we are delineating practices on the basis of how harmful, damaging or extreme they are, these judgements cannot be neutral. They will always be guided by culturally inflected values which need to be recognised and accounted for. The continuum argument should thus not be seen as a simple ‘way out’ of cultural essentialism or ethnocentrism. In light of the difficulties the problem of cultural ‘bias’ would seem to raise for advocates of the continuum approach, it is perhaps significant that neither Meyers nor Weil Davis endeavours to undertake any specific plotting of practices within a continuum structure. While the idea of a cross-cultural continuum may have potent rhetorical impact in this context (urging people to question their assumption that ‘African’ and ‘Western’ genital modifications are fundamentally different), the fact that such continuums must remain completely vague in order to avoid re-essentialising embodied practices raises crucial questions about the theoretical implications of this approach. On the other hand, Gunning’s use of the analogue approach may make her more susceptible to the trap of ‘sameness’ than the other theorists. While in her discursive linking of intersex operations and FGC practices Meyers explicitly states that female genital cutting is not a ‘single procedure’ (1994: 473), Gunning’s language at times suggests that nineteenth century circumcisions and contemporary African practices of FGC are ‘the same’ (226). In such moments, her analogy collapses into an equalisation, which effaces contextual and historical distinctions. Yet, in other moments, Gunning appears to re-establish fundamental differences between the very practices she has previously equated. For example, it seems significant that after linking FGC to a number of ‘Western’ practices including, cosmetic surgery, anorexia, bulimia, intersex surgeries and abortion (in addition to her central comparison with nineteenth century clitoridectomy), it is only FGC which she argues should be addressed (and indeed eradicated) through the international human rights regime, albeit through non-punitive means. The unavoidable, if unintended, implication is that ‘African’ practices of FGC are worse than the ‘Western’ body-altering procedures. This would seem to represent a problematic slip into a continuum approach on Gunning’s part. Furthermore, unlike Myers and Weil Davis, who make comparisons between FGC and contemporary

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‘Western’ procedures, Gunning’s central analogue links FGC to Western practices which took place in the past. It may be telling that she chooses to focus her critique on nineteenth-century procedures that no longer exist in the present context of North America or Europe (at least in the specific form and context which Gunning details) and thus cannot be addressed or eradicated through contemporary human rights frameworks. Considering that Gunning claims to be employing a version of Lugones’s ‘world-travelling’ approach, and that Weil Davis seeks in turn to follow Gunning’s methodology, it may be useful to think briefly about the extent to which we might see these theorists as being faithful to Lugones’s vision. Lugones (1990) describes world-travelling as ‘the experience of “outsiders” to the mainstream White/Anglo organisation of life in the US’ which involves ‘the acquired flexibility in shifting from the mainstream construction of life to other constructions of life where she is more or less “at home”’ (390). She suggests that while this flexibility is necessary for the outsider, it can also be employed by those who are at ease in the mainstream as a means to prevent arrogant perception. Travelling to the ‘other’s world’ can enable the self to recognise the other’s complex subjectivity and hence to identify with her: ‘to see oneself in other women who are quite different from oneself ’ (393). Lugones stresses, however, that the approach to travelling must be ‘playful’ rather than ‘agonistic’. While the playful attitude involves ‘openness to surprise, openness to being a fool, openness to self-construction or reconstruction’ (401), the agonistic attitude is imperialistic, revealing a desire to conquer (400). By playfully travelling to other women’s worlds, she contends, ‘we can understand what it is to be them and what it is to be ourselves in their eyes’ (401, italics in original). On the surface, Gunning’s three-pronged methodology would seem to capture the spirit of Lugones’s approach, enabling the (Western) traveller to comprehend what it is to be the (African) ‘other’ and to understand how the ‘other’ sees her. What Gunning adds to Lugones’s methodology is the requirement on the part of the traveller to search for analogues (practices in one’s own culture which may be analogous to those in the others’). As I have suggested, a common outcome of the analogue approach in the feminist literature is a melding of self and other which can result in an uncritical assertion of sameness. Yet, as far as I can see, Lugones does not suggest that travelling to the other’s worlds should require us to identify the ways in which the two worlds are inherently similar or that identification between self and other should depend on the recognition of likeness. In fact, her approach to world-travelling would seem to place an emphasis on the recognition and appreciation of irreducible differences between women and their worlds: ‘Seeing myself in her through travelling in her “world” has meant seeing how different I am from her in her “world”’ (402). From this perspective, it may be that the analogue and continuum approaches are actually incompatible with Lugones’s vision of world-travelling. Keeping in mind these questions regarding the theoretical implications of the continuum and analogue models, the remainder of the chapter fleshes out two more specific critiques.


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Erasing race, erasing history? On the most basic level, feminist cross-cultural approaches link ‘African’ practices of FGC with ‘Western’ body-altering procedures, such as nineteenthcentury clitoridectomies, cosmetic labiaplasty and operations on intersex babies, on the basis that all are practices which are performed exclusively (or predominantly) on female bodies. They are all procedures designed to alter (or, in the case of intersex surgery, construct) female genital tissue in ways that may be harmful or health-endangering. Beyond this primary sex/gender-based similarity, I have mapped five recurring, and overlapping, sub-themes present in the ways in which particular sets of practices are linked. While some theorists make different connections, the five sub-themes I have picked out came up repeatedly in the range of texts I examined, and thus seem to signify (at least some of) the primary ways in which the various practices are connected. The first theme is the cross-cultural notion of there being two separate and distinct sexes which correspond with two separate and distinct gender identities. For example, Gunning links ‘the belief in the existence of only two clearly delineated sexes’ (1991: 210) to the development of African and Asian practices of FGC, nineteenth-century American clitoridectomies and contemporary US intersex surgeries. Along the same lines, Meyers argues that both FGC and US intersex surgery reflect the cultural belief that ‘babies can be born with “unnatural”, though not sexually or reproductively dysfunctional, genitalia’ (2000: 472). She claims that particular forms of both practices are linked to the notion that surgical ‘demasculinising’ is required in order to enable the formation of proper female identity (472). The second theme centres on aesthetic norms about the ideal female body. Weil Davis argues that one of the key motivating factor raised by both African women who support FGC and American women seeking labiaplasty is ‘beautification’ (2002: 23–4). She claims there are ‘aesthetic parallels’ between FGC and labiaplasty which are illustrated through the common desire ‘for the clean slit’ (24). Similarly, Stanlie James and Claire Robertson assert that both FGC and operations on intersex babies are impelled by aesthetic ideals which produce disgust for ‘abnormal’ genitalia: ‘In some African societies, “ugly” female genitalia are made “beautiful” by infibulations; in the United States, nonconforming genitalia are regarded with aesthetic distaste, theoretical puzzlement, and possibly even fear’ (2002: 13). Gunning also comments that ‘contemporary African arguments favoring the [FGC] surgeries are very similar to Western rationales for the enhancement of feminine beauty’ (209). The third theme relates to how such feminine bodily norms are established and enforced. Kathy Davis, who links FGC and intersex surgeries, suggests that both sets of practices reflect ‘the ways femininity is constructed and policed through interventions in women’s bodies’ (2004: 309). In a similar vein, Weil Davis suggests that, in relation to both FGC and American labiaplasty, feminine body norms are often enforced through gendered feelings of ‘bodily shame’, produced and circulated within relations between females. She

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maintains that the two sets of practices are linked in their relationship to ideas about ‘gendered bodily performance’ which girls, in both Africa and the United States, learn through their experiences as ‘members of both real and imagined female “communities”’ (2002: 26). The fourth theme centres on female agency, autonomy and notions of consent. Many theorists relate both FGC and various ‘Western’ procedures to the patriarchal control of women. For example, Gunning suggests that particular forms of both FGC and nineteenth century clitoridectomies are linked to ‘the basic motivating desire to control women into submission’ (1991: 210). Most authors, including Gunning, however, acknowledge that neither practices of FGC, nor the various ‘Western’ procedures to which they are compared, can be understood only through a model of patriarchy. Many seek to examine how issues of women’s agency, autonomy and consent relate to such practices in more complex ways. For example, Meyers includes both African practices of FGC and American intersex operations in a ‘range of worldwide FGC practices’ in which women’s agency and autonomy are at stake (2000: 469). Yet, through emphasising the significant variation within practices of genital cutting, and women’s responses to it, she seeks to ‘undercut simplistic dismissals of women’s autonomy with respect to female genital cutting that rely on attention-grabbing horror stories and generalised theories of patriarchal domination’ (471). Similarly, Weil Davis acknowledges that FGC is often positioned as different from cosmetic surgery on the basis of consent (in this construction FGC is understood to be forced on unconsenting minors and cosmetic surgery freely sought by consenting adults). She argues, however, that ‘we must also look at the social and cultural means whereby consent is manufactured, regardless of age, in the West as well as in African and other countries engaging in FG[C]’ (2002: 22). The fifth theme focuses on the effects of the various procedures on women’s sexuality. Meyers argues that both African practices of FGC and nineteenthcentury American clitoridectomies have been connected to the rationale that ‘female genital cutting reduces women’s sexual appetite and enforces norms of chastity, and thereby protects family honour’ (2000: 472). Similarly, Gunning argues that, in relation to both FGC and nineteenth-century American clitoridectomies, there have been particular contexts where women saw themselves as facing a ‘social quagmire’ in which ‘women undergo the surgeries to secure marriage and satisfy their husbands, but the surgeries can lead to difficulties in sexual satisfaction for both men and women’ (1991: 219). Other analyses have suggested, however, that both FGC and cosmetic surgery procedures have been employed, in particular contexts, in the belief that they will increase women’s sexual sensitivity and pleasure (Ogbu 1997: 414, cited in Meyers 2000: 472).23 Common to all these sub-themes is a linking of FGC and other bodyaltering practices on the basis of sex/gender and, in some cases, its intersection with sexuality. Sex/gender and sexuality are clearly crucial to the operation all of these embodied practices, which makes feminist analysis particularly salient in this context. Furthermore, many of these gendered comparisons reveal salient links salient between particular forms and aspects


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of embodied practice across cultural contexts which are not often identified within the mainstream and are actively effaced by binary constructions which pose the practices as fundamentally distinct. My concern, however, is that within all these comparisons and continuums, establishing similarities on the basis of gender appears to proceed (in part) through a temporary erasing of embodied social and historical differences relating to race, culture and nation. If we examine the language used by particular theorists in their advocacy of the continuum and analogue approaches, I think we can detect this inclination to address problematic constructions of race through acts of erasure. For example, as Weil Davis makes clear of her own use of a continuum, In approaching the politics of female genital operations … I would argue that it is imperative that both consent issues and vaginal modifications themselves be considered on a continuum that is not determined along hemispheric, national or racial lines. (2002: 27) It is obvious that she intends here to emphasise that race and nation should not be used to differentiate ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ forms of genital alteration in neocolonialist and racist ways within the continuum model. However, by occluding the significance of ‘hemispheric, national or racial’ considerations, she leaves her theoretical approach less able to deal with the ways in which axes of differentiation such as race, nation and culture (in their constitutive intersection with gender and sexuality) have been crucial to the construction of meaning in relation to different forms of both sets of embodied practices. Admittedly, the theorists I am critiquing have been making particular political arguments and, as such, have not set out to offer a comprehensive analysis of any of the practices, theorising the significance of every axis of social differentiation within each specific cultural and historical context. Indeed, attempting to provide an analysis which ‘does everything’ is problematic and counterproductive (Butler 1993: 18–19). My argument, however, is that if the object is to address the racism and cultural essentialism inherent in representations of these embodied practices, a model that proceeds by dropping race, nation and cultural difference out of the picture is problematic. We could construct a continuum which situates particular African practices of FGC alongside American labiaplasty on the basis that both procedures relate to aesthetic ideals of femininity, pressures to approximate appropriate gendered bodily performance and desires to conform on the part of women and girls. These links might well be legitimate, but what elements are hidden through this construction? How, for instance, would historical links between slavery and the development of practices of FGC in specific contexts be represented and theorised? Gerry Mackie (1996) has outlined a strong connection between the enslavement of Sudanic people by Egyptians in the fifteenth century and the adoption of FGC in Sudan and Egypt. Documentation

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from this period suggests that female slaves were more lucrative in the Islamic slave trade if they were infibulated in a way that made them unable to conceive (Mackie 1996; Boyle 2002). Here we see how a particular form of FGC in one region may have originated and spread through violent embodied encounters in which race, religion and cultural difference intersected with gender and sexuality. An approach which links FGC and ‘Western’ body-altering practices exclusively on the basis of gender and/or sexuality risks occluding these intersectional historical trajectories and the role they may play in how particular forms of FGC are represented and experienced in specific contexts. Furthermore, how would a continuum approach take into consideration European histories of colonial domination and religious imperialism, which may have been central to the construction of FGC as an oppositional practice in particular contexts? To take the example of Kenya, by the 1930s, after more than two centuries of European Christian missionary attempts to ban FGC, the practice had become closely linked to nationalist sentiments in the country (predominantly through the rhetoric of nationalist male leaders24). In response to such discourses, images of FGC as primitive, barbaric and patriarchal were employed by British colonial administrators to illustrate why such populations were in need of colonial control. This only served to shore up support for the practice among some native Kenyans and to intensify nationalist fervour (Boyle 2002; Njambi 2004). Thus, as Karen Engle and Ranjana Khanna argue, FGC ‘is (and was) in at least some places for at least some people an oppositional practice. Gender violence and patriarchy cannot alone explain it’ (1997: 76). Without downplaying the patriarchal nature of colonial and nationalist rhetoric concerning ‘cultural’ practice and women’s bodies, theorising FGC in this context would necessitate an intersectional approach which avoids repeatedly privileging one axis of embodied differentiation (i.e. gender) above and beyond (or through the erasure of) other articulating axes. We could ask similar questions in relation to practices of cosmetic surgery. How, within the continuum approach, would the relationship between the construction of cosmetic surgery as ‘white’ and ‘Western’ and histories of European imperialism and colonial appropriation be represented? Cultural historians such as Sander Gilman and Deborah Sullivan have suggested that the oldest existing records indicate that cosmetic surgery originated in Hindu castes in India dating back at least to the seventh century.25 Yet, after the ‘discovery’ (and exportation to the West) of such techniques by colonial powers in India, cosmetic surgery was appropriated and portrayed as an invention of modern Western medicine (Gilman 1999b: 75; Sullivan 2001: 33–4). Western commentators’ explanation for why traditional Indian medicine had developed such sophisticated procedures (while Western physicians had been left ‘in the dark’ for several centuries)26 was that Indian culture included ‘barbaric’ customs of punishing thieves, deserters and adulterers which made such surgeries necessary, while European cultures did not (Gilman 1999b: 77). According to this narrative, it was only through exporting the procedures to Europe and North America in the late eighteenth century that they could be redefined as ‘civilised’ within


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structures of ‘modern’ medicine and culture. Thus it is through a relational model of colonial othering that cosmetic surgery comes to be appropriated and constructed as belonging to ‘the West’. We might also ask how a continuum approach would consider the relationship between the medicalisation of cosmetic surgery procedures in Europe and North America in the nineteenth century and popular racial ideologies or how it would enable one to theorise the links between contemporary cosmetic ‘beauty’ procedures such as labiaplasty and breast augmentation and histories of racist aesthetics (Gilman 1999b; Jones 2008). Rather than effacing such racialised constructions, it is crucial to recognise and trace the relational processes of their formation. It is not clear to me that the continuum and analogue approaches are capable of representing and theorising the intersection of sex/gender and sexuality with race, cultural difference and nation, as the examples above suggest is necessary.27 This weakness is particularly notable in the case of the continuum model which, because of its linearity, appears only to work as a means of linking practices through a singular model of social differentiation (in this case, gender). Yet a relational, intersectional analysis tells quite a different story than a linear gendered one about the relations between practices such as FGC and cosmetic surgery. On the one hand, it reveals that the practices are disjunctive. For example, particular forms of FGC appear to be linked to slavery as well as postcolonial nationalist struggle in ways that practices of cosmetic surgery are not. On the other hand, such analysis also links practices in ways that cannot be reduced to gender/sexuality. Here, we might consider how the development of particular forms of both practice are related to European imperialism during the colonial period, as discussed above. I should stress here that I am not arguing here that the thinkers I have mentioned fail to acknowledge the importance of race, nation and cultural difference in the context of their articles. Indeed, the racial hierarchies implicated in certain ways of analysing FGC and other body modifications represent the starting point for most of these authors. Weil Davis, for example, discusses the ways in which ‘gender politics’ has often linked with ‘racial imperialism’ in relation to the historical objectification and manipulation of female genitalia (2002: 18). Similarly, Gunning acknowledges that insidious ideas about race, nation and class intersected with those about gender in the development of nineteenth-century American clitoridectomies (1991).28 The point is that, after identifying the relevance of race as it articulates with gender and sexuality in the development and meaning of particular embodied practices, they then go on to advocate models to representing and theorising the links and similarities between these practices which do not seem capable of illustrating such articulations in any sustained way. Furthermore, while several theorists raise the relevance of issues of race, nation and cultural difference in regard to practices of FGC at some point in their texts (if not in the rhetorical models they employ), most do not see such issues as also relevant to cosmetic surgery. In presuming that FGC is ‘raced’ and that cosmetic surgery is not, this move may keep intact the problematic racialised binaries that these theorists claim to want to disrupt.

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From binary to continuum or analogue How might we better understand what is happening in this erasing of race at the moment that a cross-cultural rhetorical/theoretical model is conceived or advocated? I use the ubiquitous (Euro-American) binary construction of FGC and cosmetic surgery (which is a starting point for these feminist theorists) to work through this process.29 Within this dualism the ‘victim of female genital mutilation’ is invariably raced and coded as ‘black’, whilst the ‘cosmetic surgery consumer’ is (almost) always de-raced and hence coded as ‘white’ (whiteness, within this construction, is seen as not having to do with race, which is only seen to accord with blackness). These codings of race are, within this binary, associated with essentialist ideas about culture and agency, as depicted in Box 3.1. In order to upset this racialised, culturally essentialist binary, the continuum and analogue approaches are then used by feminist theorists to link the two sets of embodied practices and their imagined figures as common gendered subjects through constructing a continuous raceless plane, as depicted in Box 3.2.

Box 3.1 ‘Victim of female genital mutilation’ Black African/Asian/Middle Eastern Oppressed by culture

Sexuality repressed by others Victim of primitive tradition/custom

‘Cosmetic surgery consumer’ White Western Operating outside realm of culture or actively negotiating flexible cultural norms Seeking to enhance own sexuality Active consumer of modern science/technology

Box 3.2 ‘Common gendered subject’ of female genital cutting and cosmetic surgery Restricted by heterosexist norm of dichotomous gender identification Compelled to achieve bodily norms of ideal femininity Under pressure to perform appropriate gendered bodily performance Desire to conform and validate membership within female community/peer group Member of society/cultural group in which choice and consent are manufactured


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As we can see, in the movement from the top box to the bottom box, the continuum and analogue approaches work to collapse the original binary into a single field.30 The imagined characteristics of the common gendered subject in the bottom box (relating to gender/sexuality) do not, on the whole, correspond with those listed in the binary chart above (relating to race, nation, culture). Where we do see an overlap is in regards to sexuality and agency. However, whilst in the original binary, agency and sexuality were figured differentially on the basis of ideas about race, nation and culture, now agency and sexuality are linked with gender. From this perspective, the continuum and analogue approaches have not specifically interrogated each point of assumed difference within original binary, but rather have replaced the entire binary with a new construction emphasising similarity. The new ‘common gendered subject’ is a de-raced subject – it has been constructed through erasing the previous divisions of race, culture and nation. Yet the ‘common gendered subject’ is only a facade, temporarily disguising the role that race, nation and cultural difference continue to play within the continuum and analogue approaches. Within the continuum model, there are implicit assumptions being made (if not explicitly expressed) about where particular practices would sit in relation to each other (e.g. Gunning’s implication that only practices of FGC, and not the other ‘Western’ body-altering procedures she discusses are in need of eradication). These assumptions are often highly racialised – those practices which are seen to be raced (various forms of FGC understood to be rooted in African, Asian or Middle Eastern cultures) are on the whole seen to be more extreme, harmful or damaging, and thus are imagined as sitting towards one pole of the continuum whereas those practices which continue to be seen as de-raced or unraced (cosmetic surgery, reproductive procedures, intersex surgery) are assumed to be less extreme, harmful or damaging and are thus imagined as sitting towards the opposite pole. Within the continuum approach, race continues to play the problematic role that it did within the original essentialist binary. Rather than upsetting the binary structure, the continuum has merely stretched it out, leaving its previous divisions more or less intact. While the analogue approach often risks collapsing into uncritical assertions of sameness, its simultaneous susceptibility to slipping into the continuum mode (as noted in Gunning’s text) reveals what is often a continuing dependence on racialised scales of difference. To be clear, my point here is not to deny that some practices are more extreme or carry greater health risks than others, but to call attention to the ways in which particular notions about race and culture often operate ‘invisibly’ in the process of making such distinctions. I want to argue therefore that, in those approaches which have established similarities between FGC and other embodied practices exclusively (or predominantly) on the basis of sex/gender, we need to put race, cultural difference and nation ‘back into the equation’.31 We need to look at how these axes are mutually constitutive of sex/gender and sexuality (among other processes), in the historical constitution of embodied practices and figures posed as

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oppositional, while also examining the role and significance of such constructions in shaping contemporary experiences and representations of such practices. We also need to interrogate the implicit role that race, culture and nation continue to play in the ways in which we theorise the relationships between different cultural practices, even (or perhaps especially) when they appear to be absent. In the next section, I consider how this erasure of race, cultural difference and nation within the continuum and analogue approaches may be related to the development of a ‘Western’ empathetic gaze.

Empathy, location and the ‘right’ to represent In linking FGC with other body modification practices, several feminist theorists working in Western industrialised contexts have argued for the importance of establishing empathy with those in ‘other’ cultural contexts through recognising ‘common’ experiences of violence or oppression. For example, Gunning’s use of the analogue approach seeks to compel Western feminists to empathise with women in other global locations, by endeavouring to ‘see’ such women as these women ‘see themselves’. As mentioned earlier, Gunning sees the development of empathic understanding as aided by ‘an indepth look at one’s own complex cultural context in search of analogues to culturally challenging practices in the “other’s” culture’ (1991: 205). In other words, being able to empathise with ‘the other’ in her cultural context requires that the Western subject identify similar experiences in her own context. In constructing nineteenth-century circumcisions performed on women in the United States and Britain as an analogue to contemporary practices of FGC in Africa, Gunning implores Western feminists to empathise with African women who ‘today’ face ‘the same problem of female genital surgeries’ (211). Similarly, Meyers argues that empathy on the part of Western subjects is important in disrupting conceptions of embodied practices such as FGC and intersex surgery as fundamentally different: Sensitized to the role that Western gender norms are playing in one’s empathy for the American mother, one now appreciates how potent culturally specific feminine bodily norms are, and one can sympathetically reconstruct how a vastly different set of norms could figure in an African mother’s feelings and decision about infibulation. (2000: 486) Like Gunning, she suggests that developing transnational empathy requires that, through introspection, the Western subject must ‘discover hidden similarities between others’ experience and one’s own’ (486). Although, in contrast to Gunning, Meyers’s language in this example does not suggest that the Western subject should consider the two practices ‘the same’. Indeed, she suggests that the two sets of practices involve ‘vastly different’ sets of norms.32


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As a concept, empathy has been important to the development of feminist ethics and epistemologies.33 From my own perspective, as a white, Western scholar working on cross-cultural and transnational issues, empathy seems important as a continuous reminder that the embodied practices I discuss do not exist merely as words on a page, but are linked to ‘real’ women with ‘real’ experiences and emotions, which may include pain and suffering, but also joy and pleasure. The process of trying to understand the circumstances a woman might face, and the feelings she might have, in a cultural context very different from one’s own seems crucial to conducting valid and ethical research. I remain concerned, however, about the effects of developing ‘empathy’ imagined or produced through collapsing critical historical and contextual distinctions between different embodied locations, practices and subjectivities. The potential for appropriation on the part of the privileged ‘Western’ subject in this context is especially worrying. It is important to acknowledge that I am using the term ‘Western’ here to denote a geopolitical location of relative social and economic privilege within transnational circuits of academic knowledge production and dissemination. The individual theorists whom I include in this category are of course located (and hence privileged) differently on the basis of intersecting axes of social differentiation such as race, ethnicity, class, nation and sexuality. For example, while Meyers locates herself as a white Western feminist theorist, Gunning acknowledges that she speaks from the position of an African American feminist scholar. Other feminist thinkers working on these issues within various Western contexts may identify as ‘African’, ‘black (African-identified)’, or in a multitude of other ways that complicate any clear-cut binary of ‘privileged Western theorist’ and ‘African other’. Such specificities relating to social location and identity will surely make a difference to (without directly determining) the ways in which particular cross-cultural constructions of empathy are formed and interpreted in a variety of ways I want to acknowledge but do not have space to explore fully here. I am aware that in tracing the construction of a generalised ‘Western empathetic gaze’ I sacrifice a more in-depth analysis of the complexities and contradictions of feminist social and geopolitical positionalities and rhetorical strategies. However, I would argue that there are also important locational specificities and discursive patterns associated with ‘the West’ in an academic and political context within which ‘Western hegemony’ remains salient (Mohanty 1991; Grewal and Kaplan 1994; Puar 2008). Such patterns need to be examined and highlighted precisely so that they may be accounted for and addressed. Indeed, what is interesting, and problematic, about a number of ‘Western’ constructions of cross-cultural empathy made from different social locations is the way in which they nevertheless function to reify Western-centric dualisms and discursive hierarchies (though in different ways and to different degrees). In a historical context in which African women’s bodies have been repeatedly fetishised, pathologised and violated by Westerners, interventions in discourses relating to FGC by feminists speaking from Western locations have

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been perceived by many indigenous African (and African-identified) women as ethnocentric and imperialist (Toubia 1988; WCASA 2002/1983; Njambi 2004). In such circumstances, arguments have developed about who has the ‘right’ to represent the interests of women who practise (or are at risk of) FGC and have been directly linked with particular ideas about embodied location. For example, the Women’s Caucus of the African Studies Association argue that ‘changes in the practice of clitoridectomy and infibulation in Africa must be initiated and carried out by members of those African cultures in which the custom exists’ (2002/1983: 2). By contrast, other theorists, such Christine Walley claims that practical or representational restrictions made on the basis of experience or race and ethnicity essentialise ‘both practitioners and nonpractitioners by locating them in bounded groups assumed to share common beliefs – a reductionist view that ignores a far messier reality’ (2002: 21). Within a political framework in which representation is a fraught issue, the continuum and analogue approaches may be employed by ‘outsiders’, in part, as a strategy to establish their authority to speak. If, through the production of cross-cultural ‘empathy’, a Western feminist theorist can show that FGC is inherently similar to practices within her ‘own’ culture, such as cosmetic surgery, body art or operations on intersex babies, and that such body modifications thus represent something shared across cultures, then perhaps she can more easily establish her legitimacy to represent ‘contested’ cultural practices such as FGC. Gunning, for example, argues that, As feminists … we must develop a method of understanding culturally challenging practices, like female genital surgeries … The focus needs to be on multicultural dialogue and a shared search for areas of overlap, shared concerns and values. (1991: 191) Her claim that ‘The focus needs to be on multicultural dialogue’ functions implicitly to reject claims (such as that of the WCASA’s) that only those who are part of cultures in which FGC is practiced should have the right to initiate changes in relation to FGC. Similarly, Kathy Davis encourages ‘sympathetic’ cross-cultural comparisons between FGC and intersex surgeries. She writes: Genital cutting in all its manifestations, both in Africa and in the west, demands a reflexive and sympathetic politics of engagement. This is not the time for feminists in different parts of the world to “back off” and focus on their own parochial concerns, rather it is time to take up the challenge posed by transnational feminism and find ways to build coalitions around issues that are of concern to us all. (2004: 309, italics mine) Within this statement about challenging ethnocentrism there is an explicit claim about Davis’s (and other Western theorists’) authority and legitimacy to


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speak about FGC. Presumably, in this context, it is the privileged Western feminist, and not the indigenous African or ‘Third World’ feminist, who worries (or has been told) that she should ‘back off’ and focus on her ‘own parochial concerns’. Making claims which establish one’s legitimacy or authority to speak is important, and indeed necessary, on an ongoing basis in academic discourse and dialogue. Clearly, I have been involved in multiple acts of implicitly establishing my own legitimacy to discuss such issues throughout this book. As I have suggested, I realise that some might wish to dispute my ‘right’ to intervene in these debates. However, like Walley, I feel that placing restrictions on the ‘right’ to speak or represent on the basis of experience or various other embodied axes of differentiation can be highly problematic due to the essentialist distinctions they construct.34 Yet if privileged ‘Western’ theorists are claiming their ‘right’ to represent or speak about particular embodied practices via constructions of cross-cultural empathy, it seems important to interrogate the relations of power through which this empathy is produced and may in turn reify. Indeed, an empathy based on claims to commonality risks appropriating ‘points of view and modes of expression from the so-called margins and mystif[ying] the very workings of power that enable such appropriations’ (Kaplan 1994: 148). It is thus necessary to ask whether Western theorists’ constructions of cross-cultural commonality can generate empathetic engagement with differently situated subjects that is grounded in an awareness of the relations of power which condition their interaction or whether they are more likely to shore up Western hegemony precisely through covering over such power differentials. Interestingly, there are also examples where continuum and analogue approaches are employed by Western feminists as a rhetorical device within discourses which take ‘Western’ practices as their focus, rather than as a means to enter debates relating to African practices of FGC. For example, Cheryl Chase links African-rooted FGC with American intersex surgery to raise awareness for the US intersex campaign, which seeks to call attention to the dangerous and damaging effects of ‘corrective’ surgery on intersex babies. Chase, who is Executive Director of the Intersex Society of North America, opens the article by criticising ‘media and scholarly discourses on “female genital mutilation”’ which have not engaged with intersex surgeries, ‘instead serving up only representations of African women’ (2002: 126). She frames her concern with this phenomenon as relating to ethnocentrism: These discourses continue a long tradition of making Africans into the “other”, suggesting that ethnocentrism is a key factor in the sometimes purposeful maintenance of ignorance about contemporary US genital surgeries. (2002: 126). Implied by Chase’s opening critique is her belief that FGC and intersex surgery should be considered as analogous, rather than fundamentally different.

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While one might expect the following text to focus on both sets of practices and draw out the links or similarities that may exist between them, the article never makes any explicit case for why FGC and intersex surgery should be considered analogous. While Chase’s article provides a sophisticated and compassionate critique of intersex surgery, the link she suggests (rather than establishes) between intersex surgery and African FGC is predominantly no more than rhetorical. In this sense, it could be argued that while Chase, as an intersex person, speaks from a relatively marginal position, her text nevertheless functions to shore up dominant geopolitical relations of power because she appropriates FGC as a tool to critique various aspects of ‘Western’ culture. Through such a discursive move, critical attention is once again turned back on the Western ‘self ’ and the fetishised figure of the African ‘victim of female genital mutilation’ may be reified (rather than displaced, as the surface of her text suggests). In critiquing particular ‘Western’ feminist theorists in this chapter, I do not want to suggest that such theorists are individually negligent or problematic. Rather, I seek to place their texts within the larger context of global (First World/Third World, West/non-West and North/South) power relations in which particular modes of representation are constructed. In doing so, I acknowledge that I do not operate outside such a context, and hence may also re-create some of the problematic patterns which I identify and critique. It is my hope, however, that it may be possible to disrupt, rather than reaffirm, such hierarchies through employing a reflexive approach which traces and interrogates the ways in which dominant feminist modes of discursive representation are constructed and employed. Returning to Gunning’s use of empathy, she claims that in linking contemporary African practices of FGC with nineteenth-century American clitoridectomies, her intention is not ‘to suggest that because Western women have confronted and “overcome” the specific problem, the practice of genital surgery is a “phase” cultures pass through; that whatever was done in Western societies just needs to be done in African societies’ (1991: 226). Yet the language she uses to call for empathy from Western women – ‘It is part of our own history’ (211, italics mine) – suggests that Western women are being asked to develop empathy on the basis of experiences they have apparently already worked though. As such, it risks preserving particularly problematic notions of cultural difference related to assumptions of advancement and progress. In this case it may be that, as Sara Ahmed articulates in another context, ‘empathy sustains the very difference that it may seek to overcome’ (2004a: 30). Earlier, I suggested that Gunning’s analogue approach might not be faithful to, or compatible with, Lugones’s original world-travelling method. However, in addressing the relationship between empathy and privilege, we may also want to consider whether Lugones’s methodology has its own potential weaknesses. Her playful approach to travelling seeks to encourage identification between divergently situated women through enabling an awareness and respect for each other’s differences, rather than the establishment of inherent


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or essential similarities. Yet, her notion that world-travelling enables one to ‘see oneself in other women who are quite different from oneself ’ opens itself to a rather different interpretation (393). It may risk enabling a projection of the self on to the other, in ways that maintain the privileged self ’s status as the one who is always imagining, seeing, and contemplating her own subjectivity through others, and hence moulding others in her own image. As Adrianna Cavarero argues, ‘To recognise oneself in the other is indeed quite different from recognizing the irremediable uniqueness of the other’ (2000: 91, italics in original). As a strategy for establishing anti-cultural essentialist commonality, empathy may be limited to the second stage of Margrit Shildrick and Raia Prokhovnik’s strategy for disrupting essentialist binaries. In aiding the ‘Western self ’ to see hidden similarities between herself and the ‘non-Western other’, this approach may collapse into a ‘sameness’ which, in flattening histories of embodied differentiation, simply reifies the essentialist differences identified as problematic in the first place. Histories of othering and violence through which particular embodied identities and practices have been (re)constituted, such as slavery, colonialism, imperialism and racism, are again effaced and the cultural and historical context in which particular practices are constructed can be forgotten.35

Conclusions As I indicated earlier, my analysis raises questions about how cultural context and social location may affect the operation, effects and reception of empathy as a rhetorical strategy. While my critiques in this chapter have centred around the potential for reifying problematic discursive hierarchies associated with ‘Western’ feminist perspectives, an extended examination of these issues might focus on how specificities and complexities within the category ‘Western feminist theorists’ play out in this context. It would also be useful to assess how the employment of cross-cultural techniques by feminists working within other geopolitical locations may raise different issues or concerns. For example, what difference would it have made to centralise the ways in which ‘African women’ both in Africa and the West, or black (African-identified) women in the West, either as migrants of settlers, have discussed such issues? I address these questions of social location and positionality further in Chapter 5. My critique of the continuum and analogue approaches in this chapter has underscored the imperative, suggested in Chapter 1, to reorient they way we theorise the relations between self and other across cultural and geopolitical contexts. The original FGC/cosmetic surgery (or FGC/intersex surgery) binary holds these two practices and their imagined subjects apart in a hierarchical relationship of difference (not-A/A). While purporting to disrupt the binary structure, the continuum and analogue approaches end up either stretching out the binary but keeping its extreme poles of self and other intact or merging the two sides of the binary together through collapsing self into

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other. Both approaches fail to interrogate the social, historical and embodied processes through which self and other have been constructed as oppositional. As I have suggested here and in the previous two chapters, one way to approach the self/other dynamic differently in this context is to focus on unravelling the specific ways in which self and other have been constituted relationally. Feminists situated in divergent social and geopolitical locations might more successfully develop understanding, awareness and empathy across cultural and national boundaries through unravelling, and mutually engaging with, the processes through which embodied cultural differences are relationally and hierarchically constructed. Instead of asking how ‘the victim of female genital mutilation’ and ‘the cosmetic surgery consumer’ are inherently similar, we might more fruitfully explore how these imagined subjects are, in part, constructed and defined in and though one another, via complex articulations of race, gender, sexuality, nation, class and culture (Pedwell 2007; Sullivan 2009). I take up these issues in Chapter 5. In the next chapter I examine some of the cross-cultural links drawn by feminist theorists and commentators between Muslim veiling, anorexia and ‘Western’ fashion and beauty practices.

4

Constitutive comparisons Producing Muslim veiling, anorexia and ‘Western’ fashion and beauty practices

Both anorexia and the veil reflect inner conflict and convey distress, symbolic of struggle that looks like resignation, rebellion that takes the shape of conformity and resistance that is dressed in complicity.

(Mervat Nasser 1999: 409) The ‘new’ Muslim veiling phenomenon represents a contemporary ‘equivalent’ to the growing epidemic of anorexia in the industrialised West, Mervat Nasser has argued (1999). Like anorexia, she contends, the new veiling, signalled by the growing number of young Muslim women wearing Islamic dress in universities, workplaces, urban centres and political organisations around the world, responds to multiple pressures felt by women globally, including ‘conflicting cultural messages and contradictory cultural expectations’ (407).1 Both embodied practices2 function as forms of problem solving which, in the absence of real power or control, help women cope with the competing demands of ambitious professional goals and pressure to maintain a traditional female identity. Yet both, she suggests, ultimately lead to the reproduction of tradition and the reinforcement of gender inequality. Similarly, Randi Gressgård (2006) argues that, on a structural level, the figures of ‘the veiled woman’ and ‘the anorexic’ reveal a ‘striking similarity’ (325): Through using their ‘freedom of choice to choose submission’ (336), both display an ambivalence between ‘transcendence’ and ‘immanence’ attached ‘to the notion of woman, within a hierarchical order’ (336). The establishment of ‘the anorexic’ as counterpart to ‘the veiled woman’ within these cross-cultural comparisons draws on a significant strand of feminist literature now pervasive in mainstream cultural discourse. Against constructions of ‘the West’ as the land of gender equality, liberation and freedom, feminist commentators have inaugurated the figure of ‘the anorexic’ as a metaphor for the continuing embodied oppression associated with gendered power relations in industrialised Western contexts (Orbach 1993/1986, 2006/1978; Wolf 1990; Bordo 1993).3 Within these texts, and comparisons between veiling and anorexia which employ their terms, ‘the anorexic’ represents the widespread subjugation of the female body within the industrialised

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West’s patriarchal, capitalist beauty system – a system that impels women and girls to discipline their bodies in pursuit of an unachievable ideal.4 As Nasser comments, ‘weight phobia, fear of fatness and pursuit of thinness are modern terms that are now used interchangeably to refer to anorexia nervosa’ (1997: 1). She adds, ‘If eating disorders are indeed metaphors … it is likely that what they symbolize now encompasses this social disruption and cultural confusion’ (97). A general rhetorical message these cross-cultural comparisons impart is that when it comes to gender and the body, ‘Western cultures’ are no less patriarchal or oppressive, and may in fact be more so, than ‘Muslim cultures’. Contra essentialist constructions of ‘Western’ and ‘Muslim’ cultures as fundamentally different, they call attention to the similar gendered dilemmas and inequalities that girls and women face across cultural and geopolitical domains, and to the ways in which these struggles are so often played out through forms of bodily management and control. Theorists have also made comparisons between Muslim veiling and other practices understood to be linked to the Western ‘beauty system’.5 Nancy Hirschmann (1998) suggests, for example, that Western feminists need to ask themselves whether the veil is more oppressive than fashion trends such as Wonderbras, mini-skirts and blue jeans (361). Similarly, Sheila Jeffreys (2005) contends that make-up and the veil represent ‘two sides of the same coin of women’s oppression’ – both have been seen as voluntary practices through which women can express their agency, yet both arise from pressures linked to male dominance (37). Linda Duits and Liesbet van Zoonen (2006) suggest, moreover, that while public debates about headscarves and contemporary ‘porno-chic’ styles are routinely ‘conducted independently from each other’ (104), these discourses are in fact ‘held together by the regulation of female sexuality’ (103). These types of comparison are now increasingly echoed within mainstream media and cultural discourse. In an article exploring veiling practices in the UK newspaper The Observer, for example, Andrew Anthony argues that ‘the veil and the bra top are really two sides of the same coin’ (2005: 17). The premature recognition of female sexuality implicated by the veiling of girls as young as seven or eight, he contends, ‘is every bit as significant, and disturbing, as dressing a child in a high-street approximation of Britney Spears, all bare midriff and attitude’ (17).6 In this chapter, I seek to illustrate how these feminist cross-cultural approaches are both constitutive and performative. As discussed in the Introduction, comparisons are constitutive in that they do not simply describe – but rather actively produce – the embodied practices that they draw together. Comparisons and analogies must impose what I have termed a ‘metric of commensurability’ to make (at least) two entities comparable within a single discursive framework.7 Through the act of analogising, ‘each analogous component is internally reified while “excluding the fields of force that make them heterogeneous, indeed discontinuous”, if not antagonistic’ (Spivak 1998: 156, cited in Puar 2008: 117–18). My interest in this chapter is in examining what is at stake in imposing gendered metrics to make these practices

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commensurable. In addition to being constitutive, cross-cultural comparisons and analogies are also, I suggest, performative. Here, I follow Judith Butler’s (1993) understanding of performativity as ‘that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains’ (2). Through the repeated acts of translation involved in constructing gendered commensurability among embodied practices, analogies enable particular ways of reading these practices, their imagined subjects and the relations of power in which they are embedded, while disallowing others. I am particularly interested in the performative effects generated through the iterative figuration of ‘the veiled woman’ and ‘the anorexic’ across different texts (Castañeda 2002) – that is, how these ‘specific figures acquire accreted form and accrue affective value in ways that have significant social and political impact’ (Tyler 2008: 16).8 The chapter explores the implications of the constitutive and performative processes entailed by cross-cultural comparisons for wider analyses of gender, culture, embodied practice and agency in feminist theory. Through its critical reading of a range of feminist texts, the chapter also seeks to draw out some of the commonalities between cross-cultural linkings of Muslim veiling and ‘Western’ anorexia and/or fashion and beauty practices and the comparisons drawn between the ‘African’ FGC and ‘Western’ body modifications discussed in the previous chapter. I aim to show how, as antiessentialist rhetorical devices, these cross-cultural linkings are often made in similar ways and with similar goals, but also encounter similar difficulties. That is, in linking embodied practices through an exclusive metric of gender/ sexuality, these analogies often do not enable rigorous analysis of intersectionality and are liable to reaffirm, rather than disrupt, essentialist articulations of cultural difference. Thus, despite their productive possibilities, crosscultural comparisons can constrain analysis of the complexities of the embodied practices they produce as analogous in ways that may ultimately be counterproductive to feminist efforts to address cultural essentialism.

Reading feminist comparisons Links between Muslim veiling and anorexia and/or ‘Western’ fashion and beauty practices are not (yet) made as frequently as those between FGC and cosmetic surgery or intersex operations. The comparison is timely, however, in the context of the contemporary social and political climate in which ‘differences between Muslim and non-Muslim women are constructed as posing insurmountable cultural differences’ (Brah and Phoenix 2004: 79). Feminist authors who draw these cross-cultural links seek to deconstruct the ubiquitous culturally essentialist binary of the ‘liberated, skin-showing Western woman’ and the ‘oppressed, veiled Muslim woman’.9 This dualism can be traced back to representations produced within early European travellers’ narratives, proto-feminist colonial discourse, nationalist and anti-Western idiom and, most recently, the rhetoric of the American-led post-9/11 ‘War on Terror’.10 In the midst of a second Western-initiated war in Iraq, such dualistic

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portrayals of ‘Muslim women’ and ‘Western women’ once again permeate the mainstream Western sociopolitical consciousness, furnishing dominant depictions of ‘a deadly clash of civilizations between a medievalist Islam and a modern, enlightened West’ (Razack 2008: 5). Through highlighting the gendered oppression, control and/or devaluation involved in so-called ‘Western’ embodied practices, cross-cultural comparisons interrogate neo-colonialist representations of Western cultural superiority, freedom and gender equality. Nancy Hirschmann’s (1998) rhetorical linking of Muslim veiling and ‘Western’ sartorial and embodied practices provides a case in point. As she suggests, Westerners often ‘associate veiling with extreme gender oppression’ and may even see ‘the veil as the ultimate symbol of a unified, monolithic Islam’ (357). Yet, in doing so, they routinely ignore the myriad of practices that Western women and involved in, ‘from fashion shows to domestic violence’, which ‘can be seen as deeply patriarchal’ (360). These cross-cultural comparisons also seek specifically to reorient dominant Western feminist analysis of the links between veiling, culture and agency. As Muslim, Arab and Eastern feminist theorists have noted, Western feminists were often vocal supporters of colonial and imperial campaigns to eradicate the practice of veiling in Muslim countries (Ahmed 1992; Yeg˘ enog˘ lo 1998). Leila Ahmed points out, for instance, how European feminists such as Eugenie Le Brun ‘earnestly inducted young Muslim women in the European understanding of the meaning of the veil and the need to cast it off as the essential first step in the struggle for female liberation’ (1992: 154). Significant strands of contemporary feminist rhetoric enunciated in Western contexts continue to express such culturally essentialist attitudes about veiling. For example, as Joan Scott observes, in the context of public debates about Muslim girls’ wearing headscarves in French schools in 2003, many French feminists depicted the veil as an unacceptable symbol of ‘the subordination of women, their humiliation, and their inequality’ which could not be ‘sanctioned by those who believed in the republican principles of liberty and equality’ (2007: 153): Until their ideological confrontation with Islam, many French feminists saw the sexual exhibitionism of their society – particularly as it applied to women – as demeaning to women because it reduced them to a sexed body. But in the heat of the headscarf controversy, those concerns were set aside and equality became synonymous with sexual emancipation, which in turn was equated with the visibility of the female body. (2007: 156). Thus, in highlighting similarities between Muslim veiling with anorexia and/ or fashion beauty practices, feminist cross-cultural comparisons seek to interrogate mainstream feminist depictions of veiling as ‘an inherently oppressive practice’ (Hirschmann 1998: 349). As Hirschmann (1998) argues, echoing a long history of Eastern feminist critique,11 Western feminist


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assumptions that ‘the veil’ represents the ‘ultimate symbol of women’s silencing and oppression’ not only belie a ‘great diversity in the practice’ but also completely ignore ‘the fact that many Muslim women not only participate voluntarily in veiling, but defend it as well, indeed claiming it as a mark of agency, cultural membership, and resistance’ (1998: 345). Her cross-cultural analysis thus aims to understand ‘veiling as a complex practice within which women’s agency functions in similarly complex ways’ (348). Like Hirschmann, Mervat Nasser (1999), Sheila Jeffreys (2005) and Linda Duits and Lisbet van Zoonen (2006) all employ cross-cultural analogies to disrupt culturally essentialist discourses that depict Muslim veiling and anorexia and/or ‘Western’ fashion and beauty practices as oppositional. They also highlight issues of gender, power and agency as central to these practices, and the debates surrounding them. The remainder of this chapter focuses on analysing the rhetorical cross-cultural strategies these authors employ and their wider significance for theorising culture and embodied practice in feminist studies. In ‘The New Veiling Phenomenon: is it an Anorexic Equivalent? A Polemic’ (1999), Nasser suggests that while the ‘new veiling’ may appear ‘completely different, if not alien to the anorexic position’ it is necessary to trace their commonalities as a means ‘to go beyond the traditional Orientalist definition and perception of the veil and to depart from the Western static vision of women of the Orient’ (408). Drawing on Arlene Macleod’s (1991) concept of ‘accommodating protest’, she argues that both practices are types of ‘veiled resistance’ undertaken by women who are torn between tradition and modernity (411). They each represent ‘choices made by women with inherent contradiction, as both are individual/voluntary but also responsive to social pressures/dictates’ (409). Nasser also points to the ‘social contractibility’ of both practices, represented by the phenomenon of ‘me-too anorexics’ and the wide spread of veiling among young women (409), and to the (in)visibility of both subjects, who seek to hide behind anorexia or the veil, yet are ‘paradoxically conspicuous in any group setting’ (409). While Nasser emphasises the importance of understanding how veiling and anorexia are not simply reactionary or regressive behaviours, she concludes that, as both practices ‘are derived from tradition and affirmative of it’, anorexics and veiled women both ‘obstruct the potential for real change’ in regards to gender roles and relations of power (411). In Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Cultural Practices in the West (2005), Jeffreys argues that the UN concept of ‘harmful cultural practices’ should be used to address ‘Western’ embodied practices such as cosmetic surgery, dieting, depilation and the wearing of high heels and make-up, as well as ‘nonWestern’ practices such as female genital mutilation and veiling.12 Jeffreys favours the terminology of ‘harmful cultural practices’ because it situates embodied practices within the culture of male domination, rather than linking them exclusively to notions of individual choice. While veiling and make-up may be seen as opposites, she contends, they are in fact analogous in that

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both mark women as subordinate, revealing their lack of entitlement in patriarchal cultures (38). Jeffreys explains that her book was motivated by a ‘growing impatience’ with the ‘Western bias’ of the UN conceptual categories, which currently interpret practices in the West as ‘emanating from consumer “choice” from “science” and “medicine” or “fashion”’, rather than culture, which ‘may be seen as something reactionary that exists in the non-west’ (34). If ‘Western’ beauty practices are also recognised as harmful cultural practices, she argues, ‘governments will, as required by the UN Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women, need to alter the social attitudes which underlie them’ (45). Through calling attention to the gendered oppression involved in beauty practices common in Western industrialised contexts, Jeffreys contests Western-centric notions of personal choice and individual agency and emphasises that ‘the personal is political’ (10). Her analysis can be seen as serving a valuable political purpose, linked to a well established trajectory of radical feminist critique. Indeed, a key argument of the widely held sexist ideology to which radical feminist models in the 1970s and 1980s protested, and which Jeffreys seeks to interrogate further, was the assumption that women alone – and not men’s desires or patriarchal culture – bore responsibility for their suffering in regard to matters of beauty and the ‘bodily tyrannies of fashion’ (Bordo 1993: 21).13 In ‘Disciplining Girls’ Bodies in the European Multicultural Society’ (2006), Duits and van Zoonen object to the fact that, within the Dutch context, public debates about girls’ wearing of headscarves on the one hand and forms of ‘porno-chic’ such as belly shirts and visible g-strings on the other have been conducted separately, as if they bear no relation to one another. While discussions about headscarves centre on multiculturalism, gender equality and religion, porno-chic is approached almost exclusively as a matter of sexual decency (2006: 105). This, the authors argue, obscures the fact that both debates are ‘held together by the regulation of female sexuality’ (103), and, in both debates, ‘girls are denied their agency and autonomy’ (104). Just like girls wearing headscarves, Duits and van Zoonen argue, those dressed in ‘porno-chic’ are ‘submitted to the meta-narratives of dominant discourse’ which define their everyday practices as inappropriate and deny them the power to define their own action (103). In drawing links between these sartorial practices, Duits and van Zoonen highlight the ways in which women’s and girls’s bodies become the ‘metonymic location’ for contemporary social dilemmas across cultural, ethnic and religious boundaries (104). As Rosalind Gill argues, their analysis calls attention to how, unlike ‘moral panics’ about boys (which often relate to crime and violence), ‘the anxieties projected on to girls’ bodies … are overwhelmingly sexual’ (2007: 70). It emphasises how, across different cultural groups, ‘young women’s clothing choices are invariably situated within a moral rather than political discourse, such that girls are rarely recognised as “doing politics” in their dress’ (70). Although these three feminist texts all mobilise cross-cultural comparison as a rhetorical strategy to call attention to the operation of cultural


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essentialism in the ways in which embodied practices are conceptualised and addressed, they differ in some important respects. While Nassser’s and Jeffreys’ comparisons depend on making claims about the meaning and experience of veiling and anorexia and/or fashion and beauty practices, Duits and van Zoonen structure their analogy not around the nature of the practices themselves, but rather with respect to the discourses through which they are defined. Their objective is not to tease out psychological similarities between veiling and porno-chic (as in Nasser’s analysis of veiling and anorexia), or to theorise these practices as equally oppressive (as in Jeffreys’ comparison with veiling and make-up), but rather to highlight how, despite their seeming separateness, public debates about both practices deny girls the autonomy to articulate the meaning of their own sartorial choices. As I discuss later in the chapter, these texts also appear to express quite different understandings of agency and the appropriate role of feminist praxis in addressing girl’s and women’s agential capacities.14 Indeed, Jeffreys’ rejection of the discourses of ‘autonomous choice’ and ‘personal expression’ that girls and women may employ to explain their sartorial practices in favour of an overarching framework of ‘male dominance’ (2005: 38) might be interpreted as an example of the very silencing of girls’ voices to which Duits and Van Zoonen object. I want to argue however, that, despite their significant differences, Nasser’s, Jeffreys’ and Duits and van Zoonen’s analyses produce some common rhetorical, theoretical and political effects which tell us more about what cross-cultural analogies do in feminist theory, as well as their limitations as an anti-cultural essentialist tool. Reading these three texts in relation to the cross-cultural comparisons examined in the previous chapter, my examination focuses on issues of intersectionality, cultural difference and agency.

Constitutive comparisons In different ways, Nasser, Jeffreys and Duits and van Zoonen all employ a metric of gender/sexuality to translate Muslim veiling and ‘Western’ anorexia and/or fashion and beauty practices into a common theoretical and political language. Duits and van Zoonen’s phrasing makes this process particularly clear. Although debates about the veil and porno-chic ‘are conducted independently from each other’, they argue, ‘they are part of a single hegemonic discourse about women’s sexuality that transcends these partitions’ (2006: 104, italics mine). This section explores some of the potential effects of imposing gendered metrics to constitute these practices as commensurable. Within Jeffreys’ text, veiling and make-up are produced as commensurable through translating make-up into the (Western-centric) logic in which veiling has been commonly understood. Jeffreys’ analogy seeks to overcome the essentialist depiction of make-up as the ‘liberated alternative to wearing the veil’ (2005: 37)15 by framing both as practices that confirm women’s subordinate status as objects of male sexual desire within patriarchal systems. While the expectation that ‘respectable women in Islamic culture’ will ‘cover

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their heads and bodies so that men are not sexually tempted’ may seem opposed to the expectation in the West that women will ‘dress and make up in such a way that men are sexually tempted’, she argues, ‘there can be seen to be a connection’ (37): Through both veiling and make-up ‘women are required to fulfil men’s needs in public places and do not have the freedoms that men possess’ (44). Jeffreys’ analogy therefore constructs both veiling and make-up as defined fundamentally by their patriarchal meanings and effects. Duits and van Zoonen’s cross-cultural comparison functions, in turn, through making veiling intelligible within the logic of sexual regulation and decency through which porno-chic has been widely addressed. As the authors argue, in associating the veil with issues of gender inequality, multicultural excess and the separation of church from state and not the concerns of sexuality and decency through which porno-chic has been defined, public debates in European societies obscure the fact that ‘a basic religious motive for covering the head and the face is tied in with sexuality and unwanted encounters’ (2006: 108). Within Dutch society, they argue, both girls wearing headscarves and those dressed in porno-chic are produced as outliers within an acceptable continuum of female decency. While the former are constructed as ‘too decent’ the latter are judged as ‘not decent enough’. Within Western consumer culture, both are caught between a post-feminist rhetoric in which ‘the overt presentation of sexuality’ is figured as a maker of ‘liberation from repressive societal codes’ and a feminist critique which labels this an ‘illusion’ which ‘joins seamlessly with the commercial interests of individualism and capitalism’ (112). Thus, through Duits and van Zoonen’s analogy, veiling and porno-chic become defined predominantly through their relation to gendered norms of sexuality and decency. The authors make this clear in a rejoinder to their earlier text: ‘It is obvious that both styles are obsessed with girls’ bodies and sexuality: Muslim styles aim to protect girls’ bodies from the public eye, consumer capitalist styles seeking to expose them to the public eye’ (Duits and van Zoonen 2007: 263). Nasser’s linking of veiling and anorexia works somewhat differently in this respect. Unlike ‘Western’ fashion and beauty practices such as make-up and porno-chic, anorexia is not generally read as signifying the overt presentation of sexuality. Rather, in positioning the ‘new veiling phenomenon’ as ‘an anorexic equivalent’ (Nasser 1999: 407), Nasser argues that both can be seen as ‘desexualising’ practices which function as a denial of ‘external femaleness’ (410). Anorexic ‘ultra-thinness’, she explains, has been viewed both as ‘a form of desexualisation’ and as marking ‘a kind of non-reproductive sexuality’ associated with a ‘purge of femaleness’ (410). Similarly, the veil has been understood as ‘nothing but a mobile curtain that automatically removes reminders of gender (even if ironically it still meant gender distinction)’ (410).16 Nonetheless, through Nasser’s cross-cultural analogy, both veiling and anorexia are constituted as practices concerned predominantly with negotiating gendered and sexualised value systems and expectations. Like these authors, I understand relations of gender and sexuality as central to the constitution of these embodied practices. As with comparisons between


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‘African’ FGC and ‘Western’ body modifications, the gendered narratives Nasser, Jeffreys and Duits and van Zoonen employ highlight important congruences elided by culturally essentialist dualisms that position Muslim veiling and ‘Western’ anorexia and/or fashion and beauty practices as fundamentally distinct. In a context in which political discourses often portray ‘women and as symbols of tribal or national identity, or of cultural and religious norms’ in ways that obscure ‘the gendered dimensions of veiling’, these comparisons underscore that it is ‘not just the West’s colonization of the East, but men’s colonization of women needs to be confronted’ (Hirshmaan 1998: 361). Moreover, providing a counter-discourse to post-feminist perspectives which ‘assume female sexual agency and freedom to be inscribed in the visibility and openness to view of the body’ (Macdonald 2006: 12), they highlight the ways in which women’s and girls’ bodies regularly function across cultural contexts as carriers for wider political, cultural, economic and nationalistic imperatives and the surfaces on to which political positions are etched (McClintock 1995; Narayan 1997, 1998). I want to argue, however, that, in each of these feminist texts, the translations involved in making these practices commensurable risk three key effects that I understand as problematic. Firstly, in separating hierarchies of gender/ sexuality from other relations of power, cross-cultural analogies (like those examined in the previous chapter) encounter difficulties in representing veiling, anorexia and ‘Western’ fashion and beauty practices as produced through multiple, co-constitutive axes of differentiation. Secondly, in translating one set of embodied practices into the metric which the other has been commonly understood, without interrogating the relations of power which underscore these metrics, comparisons are susceptible to slipping back into essentialist articulations cultural difference. Thirdly, in mobilising ‘the veiled woman’ and ‘the anorexic’ as metaphors for gender relations in their ‘respective’ cultures, cross-cultural analogies can ontologise them in ways flatten their intersectional and relational histories of production and reify essentialist understandings of cultural identity as bounded and discrete.

Analogy, intersectionality and cultural difference In mobilising a narrative of universal patriarchy to produce Muslim veiling and ‘Western’ beauty practices as commensurable, Jeffreys’ analogy figures gendered relations of power as both ontologically prior to and separable from other systems of domination. This prevents her from theorising the intersection of multiple axes of power as central to the diverse meanings of the varied forms which veiling and beauty practices take. For example, while Jeffreys makes brief reference to feminist analyses of the ways in which veiling may enable Muslim women to ‘alleviate the harms suffered by women as a result of male dominance’ (2005: 39), she does not consider the ways in which veiling and beauty practices may also (in very different ways) serve as adaptive strategies which respond to other (interlinked) oppressive systems, such as racism

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and cultural exclusion. In her study of Muslim women living in Canada, for instance, Homa Hoodfar (2003) observes that veiling played a crucial role in helping some Muslim women adapt to Canadian society in the face of gendered experiences of cultural difference, exclusion and racism.17 Becky Thompson (1992) has argued, moreover, that rather than relating exclusively to the patriarchal ‘culture of thinness’ in the West, eating disorders such as anorexia represent ways in which women cope with a broader host of traumas, including sexual abuse, racism, classism, heterosexism and poverty. As she suggests, the prevention of eating disorders thus depends not simply on the reduction or elimination of patriarchy, but ‘on women’s access to economic, cultural, racial, political, social, and sexual justice’ (559). Jeffreys also does not consider the connections between veiling, anti-colonialism, nationalism and a resistance to ‘Western’ values, which have been linked to indigenous patriarchies in particular contexts, but cannot simply be reduced to a linear logic of gender oppression (Ahmed 1992; Göle 1996; El Guindi 2003). In the context of her comparison of veiling and make-up she seems to suggest that simply deciding not to be concerned with wearing make-up or the veil can provide liberation for Western and non-Western women, insisting: Women can invent themselves anew outside the stereotypes of western and non-western patriarchal culture. Women can have access to the privilege possessed by men of not having to be concerned for appearance and being able to go out in public barefaced and bareheaded. (2005: 38) Jeffreys’ language here veers dangerously close to the neocolonial brand of ‘unveiling for freedom’ rhetoric employed by the Bush/Blair alliance to ‘legitimise’ the Western military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq (as if simply going barefaced and bareheaded could produce gender liberation). It also ignores historical lessons from countries such as Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan, which have shown that unveiling can be felt as just as oppressive to women as veiling, especially if coerced by government pressure (Ahmed 1992; Göle 1996; Macdonald 2006). Thus, in constituting commensurability among practices of veiling, disordered eating and various fashion and beauty practices through a linear narrative of ‘male dominance’, Jeffreys’ cross-cultural framework not only sets rather stark limits on how we can ‘know’ these diverse forms of embodied practice, it also has potentially regressive implications at the level of social and political intervention. While Duits and van Zoonen avoid overly generalising discourses of universal patriarchy, their analogical framework also poses problems for theorising intersectionality with respect to embodied practice. By arguing that veiling has been addressed predominantly in relation to multiculturalism and pornochic primarily in relation to decency, but that both should be understood in relation to decency, the structure of their analogy functions to split off


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discourses of decency (associated primarily with gender/sexuality) from those of multiculturalism (associated primarily with culture/race/nation/religion). It consequently becomes difficult to analyse how gendered and sexualised discourses of decency are frequently co-constituted by racialised constructions of culture and nation. In her study of public debates concerning girls wearing headscarves in French schools in 2003, for instance, Joan Scott (2007) argues that, in being judged as ‘too decent’, the veil became constructed as a sign of Muslim sexual aberrance (i.e. one that prevents the ‘normal’ interaction between the sexes central to ‘proper’ sexual maturation and identity development), which in turn became a marker Muslim cultural difference and exclusion from the French ideal of secularism. In these discourses, sexuality functioned as a ‘measure’ of racialised cultural difference: it signified ‘the distance Muslims had to traverse if they were to become fully French’ (166). Duits and van Zoonen’s analogy also makes it difficult to unpack how the post-feminist and neo-liberal discourses within which they understand pornochic to be embedded are not only gendered and sexualised, but also highly racialised and classed. Indeed, the skin-showing feminine body idealised by post-feminist rhetoric, and popular forms of cultural representation such as Sex and the City and Bridget Jones’s Diary, as a marker of women’s liberty and sexual empowerment is routinely a white middle-class body (Macdonald 2006). Other (racialised) bodies continue to be aberrantly sexualised within these forms of representation (Gill 2006).18 From this perspective, porno-chic would need to be theorised as associated not only with decency discourses structured by norms of gender and sexuality but also with social, cultural and economic relations of power ordered by norms of race. As with the feminist comparisons between ‘African’ FGC and ‘Western’ body modifications discussed in the previous chapter, my argument here is not that Duits and van Zoonen neglect to address the importance of racialised relations of power in the context of their analysis. Rather, my point is that, while they identify the relevance of race, culture, nation and religion as they interact with gender and sexuality in the development and meaning of particular sartorial practices, this recognition of multi-axial complexity is undercut by their use of linear analogical frameworks which do not seem capable of articulating these intersections in a rigorous and sustained way. Similarly, Nasser acknowledges that both the ‘new veiling’ and ‘the global spread of eating disorders’ may be linked to ‘global forces’ which include – but also exceed – gendered relations of power, including ‘urbanization, global markets, the threat to national identity, the experience of discontinuity and the disappearance of traditional cultural idioms for articulating personal distress’ (1999: 409). Yet the central (linear) argument grounding her analogy is that anorexia and veiling are linked fundamentally by their gendered similarities: as both practices ‘are derived from tradition and affirmative of it’, anorexics and veiled women both ‘obstruct the potential for real change’ in regard to gender roles and relations of power (411). Moreover, returning to Duits and van Zoonen’s text, it is notable that while they raise the relevance of issues of

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race, cultural difference and nation in regard to veiling in their text, they do not acknowledge that such issues are also relevant to porno-chic. In implying that veiling is ‘raced’ and that that porno-chic is not, this move may keep intact the problematic racialised binaries that they claim to want to disrupt. If Duits and van Zoonen translate veiling into the metric of porno-chic without examining the racialised hierarchies ordering this metric, Jeffreys translates make-up into the logic of veiling without interrogating the essentialist narratives which underscore this logic. In including ‘Western’ beauty practices alongside ‘non-Western’ practices within the UN category of ‘harmful cultural practices’ she unambiguously assumes that a variety of ‘non-Western’ practices, such as veiling and female genital cutting, are fundamentally patriarchal and harmful to women and simply seeks to have ‘Western’ practices measured by the same yardstick. Linking back to my analysis in the previous chapter, it might also be noted that Jeffreys employs a continuum approach only to articulate the need to theorise distinctions between ‘Western’ practices (suggesting that some of such procedures may be more extreme or ‘harmful’ than others). The implication of this theoretical move is that similar distinctions need not be theorised with respect to ‘non-Western’ practices, which can be less problematically lumped together as ‘oppressive’. Thus, while Jeffreys frames her analysis as motivated by anti-cultural essentialist imperatives, one might argue that her analogy reifies ethnocentrism and essentialism by taking the oppressive nature of ‘non-Western’ practices for granted. She also reinforces a divide between ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ practices that downplays the ways in which these practices clearly cross over national and cultural contexts. My argument here is, of course, not that generalisations or assertions of similarity between practices or subjects can never be made but rather that, in these texts, an uncritical insistence on ‘sameness’ or ‘equivalence’ easily slips into assumptions of essentialist cultural, national and ethnic differences that the authors claimed initially to want to overcome. Through redrawing essentialist boundaries between ‘Western’ and ‘nonWestern’ practices, these comparisons can elide the cultural hybridity, intermixture and reappropriation that characterise women’s embodiment within a range of geopolitical contexts. Such hybridity is illustrated, for example, in Sabrina Kherbiche’s novel La Surtre (1993), in which the female protagonist develops anorexia after a forced genital excision. As Chantal Zabus suggests, while ‘usually defined as a Western ailment’, anorexia nervosa, in Kherbiche’s text, is ‘developed as a tortured response to being wedged between a Western and a non-Western culture’ (2001: 344). Similarly, in Marjane Satrapi’s autobiographical graphic novels Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood and The Story of a Return (2008),19 which depict her childhood in 1980s Iran, her student years in Austria and her return to Iran as a young adult, body image distress is depicted as an effect of the author’s sense of diasporic dislocation and her gendered struggle to negotiate a hybrid ethnic and cultural identity. To provide a slightly different example, cultural intermixture and reappropriation are also evident through the growing online community of girls and women


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sharing make-up and fashion tips through videos on YouTube and other filesharing and social networking sites. On her site ‘Make-up Tutorials by Eily311’ (which lists 18,415 subscribers), Eily, who identifies herself as a Muslim living in the United States, offers a range of video tips from ‘How to style your hijab’ and ‘Egyptian flag nails’, to ‘The Pamela Anderson look’. Indicating her awareness of, and resistance to, dominant assumptions that beauty and fashion are not (and should not) be concerns of Muslim women, Eily’s home page declares, ‘Yes, I am Muslim and I am a make-up artist. If you can’t deal with that, then X out the browser.’20 My objective here is not simply to remind readers that ‘anorexia affects “non-Western” women as well’ or that ‘Muslim girls wear make-up too’. Rather, I want to underscore the ways in which these kinds of embodied practices can develop as specific consequences of transnational exchange, cultural cross-over or diasporic displacement – how they may gain social significance precisely through their fusing or transgression of traditional cultural, national or religious boundaries (Brah 1996a; Bachu 2004) – and how feminist cross-cultural approaches often elide this fragmentation and fluidity.

Fetishising figurations Due to their (in)visibility, ‘the veiled woman’ and ‘the anorexic’ are frequently figured as metaphors for gendered relations in their respective cultures within feminist cross-cultural comparisons. As Nasser explains, In anorexia, the cultural ideal of thinness was seen as a metaphor of woman’s struggle against conflicting social definitions of femineity [sic], combining desirable qualities of the new woman namely control with the qualities required from the traditional woman, i.e. attractiveness, weaknesses and helplessness … The same metaphor is used here as a framework towards understanding this ‘new veiling’, arguing that it could in fact be a contemporary anorexic equivalent. (1999: 408, italics in original) As I mentioned earlier, the construction of ‘the anorexic’ as a symbol for ongoing gender inequality within Western cultures can be traced (in part) to the work of feminist cultural theorists, such as Susie Orbach, Naomi Wolf, and Susan Bordo, who have understood anorexia as a ‘metaphor for our age’ (Orbach 1993/1986: 4). This feminist scholarship has been integral in deconstructing the distinction between ‘the normal’ and ‘the pathological’ with respect to experiences of disordered eating (Malson and Swann 1999: 398). As Bordo argues, when understood within the context of Western capitalist patriarchy, ‘the anorectic thus appears, not as the victim of a unique and “bizarre” pathology, but as the bearer of very distressing tidings about our culture’ (60). These arguments remain cogent today. Indeed, Angela McRobbie contends that ‘feminine pathology’ is now so normalised in contemporary

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culture that it has become one of the primary social expectations through which feminine subjectivities are produced (2009: 9). In figuring ‘the anorexic’ as analogous to ‘the veiled woman’, comparisons like Nasser’s emphasise the ways in which both imagined subjects are ‘embedded within and constituted by the everyday cultural and political contexts in which we live’ (Malson and Swann 1999: 397). The linking of these figures as gendered counterparts serves an important rhetorical role in calling attention to the complex struggles with agency, inequality and identity that girls and women seek to negotiate across cultures through regimes of bodily control. I want to think more carefully, however, about the theoretical, social and political implications of the repeated figuration of ‘the veiled woman’ and ‘the anorexic’ as cultural metaphors within these comparisons. On the one hand, in depicting anorexia and veiling as culturally embedded and produced, feminist analogies seek to move away from the decontextualising and depoliticising frames in which these practices have been interpreted historically (i.e. as individual pathology in the case of anorexia and as religious fanaticism and/or patriarchal oppression in the case of veiling). Yet on the other hand, when ‘the veiled woman’ and ‘the anorexic’ are mobilised to make wider political arguments about gender and culture, the contours of veiling and anorexia can become fixed in (other) troubling ways. That is, the rhetorical positioning of these figures as paradigmatic of gendered relations in ‘Western’ and ‘Muslim’ cultures can fetishise them in ways that flatten the complex intersectional processes through which they have taken shape (Ahmed 2000: 5).21 For example, when anorexia is employed as synecdoche for Western culture’s patriarchal, consumer-driven oppression of women it is often constructed as a condition ‘caused’ exclusively by media ideals of feminine thinness and beauty. This dominant narrative of anorexia not only functions to constitute anorexics as passive victims and/or cultural dupes (Brain 2006), it also effaces the many other complex factors which may combine to produce anorexia in particular contexts, such as experiences of trauma and abuse (Thompson 1992). In fetishising anorexia and ‘the’ problem facing women and girls in the West, such constructions also elide the diversity of other forms of disordered eating and body image distress which women (and men) encounter, not to mention the wide array of other areas in which women in Western industrialised nations continue to be disadvantaged, devalued, discriminated against and/or oppressed, from income inequality to domestic and sexual violence. Furthermore, when cross-cultural comparisons link this imagined ‘Western’ subject of ‘the anorexic’ to ‘the veiled woman’, they can reaffirm essentialist, neocolonial representations of ‘the veil’ as ‘the pivotal definer of Muslim women’s sociocultural positioning’ (Macdonald 2006: 15). This rhetorical move not only risks inhibiting ‘analysis of the social, economic, and political positioning of Muslim women within very different regimes’ (many of whom do not wear the veil) (7), but also obscuring ‘investigations into other, more crucial, indicators of their oppression or agency’ (15).22 Indeed, when ‘the veiled woman’ and ‘the anorexic’ are figured as metaphors for their cultures, critical, context-specific analysis of the relationships


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among gender, culture, embodied practice and agency may be deferred and these imagined subjects can become reified as ‘victims of their culture’ (Narayan 1997). In suggesting that ‘the new veiling’ may be an ‘anorexic equivalent’, Nasser points to the importance of understanding both practices as forms of ‘veiled resistance’ and ‘social action’ that reflect a particular degree of agency (1999: 408). However, the language she employs in her analogy would seem to contradict this aim. In her words, ‘both anorexia and the veil demonstrate women’s confusion about the seriousness of society’s intention towards their progress’ (1999: 411) and, through both practices, ‘women unwittingly obstruct the potential for real change’ (411, italics mine). She goes on to describe both anorexia and veiling as signs of ‘cultural lag’ which must be overcome to produce more appropriate gender relations: It is hoped, however, that this cultural confusion/cultural lag (symbolised in gestures like anorexia and the veil) would finally lead to a proper formulation of gender roles and a better development of a new identity for women that is more reconciled with itself and society. (411, italics mine) The connotations of the term ‘cultural lag’ are clearly problematic, suggesting that as the primitive vestiges of particular cultures who have failed to assume proper gender roles, both anorexic and veiled women remain fixed in an atavistic state.23 The depiction of ‘the veiled woman’ and ‘the anorexic’ (or other imagined ‘Western’ gendered subjects) as analogical can also reinforce essentialist understandings of embodied identity and subjectivity as bounded and discrete. This rhetorical effect is notable, for example, in Duits and van Zoonen’s text, which constructs ‘headscarf girls’ and ‘g-string girls’ as analogous gendered subjects. Arguing for the cross-cultural relevance of a discourse of sexual regulation to discussions about both veiling and porno-chic, Duits and van Zoonen contend that ‘g-string girls … resemble headscarf girls’ in their ‘belief that they are making their own choices’ (2006: 113). In this formulation, girls who wear porno-chic and those who wear headscarves are produced as gendered cultural subjects who are defined both through their sartorial choices and through their explicit difference from one another. Moreover, the authors go on to use this category of ‘headscarf girl’ interchangeably with the term ‘Muslim girl’ (as if all Muslim girls wore the headscarf): ‘While Muslim girls therewith try to throw off the accusations of submission to Islam and their male family, G-string girls attempt to escape the allegation that they submit to capitalism and male desire’ (113). These discursive moves function not only to homogenise ‘Muslim’ and ‘non-Muslim’ girls in problematic ways, they also risk reifying the culturally essentialist distinctions between these categories. As such, they avoid theorising how figurations of ‘g-string girl’ and ‘the headscarf girl’ have been constituted and gained meaning relationally, in and through one another. Moreover, they disallow the possibility that the so-called ‘g-string girl’

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and ‘headscarf girl’/‘Muslim girl’ will ever be one and the same subject.24 The girl who considers herself both ‘Muslim’ and ‘Western’ and who may experiment with mixing make-up and/or elements of ‘porno-chic’ and particular aspects of Islamic dress as a way to negotiate her hybrid cultural identity, to seek a sense of cultural belonging in a Western industrialised context, or indeed to call attention to the specific difficulties in doing this, provides just one example.25 Thus, in representing ‘the veiled woman’ and ‘the anorexic’ or ‘the g-string’ girl as (separate but) analogical, cross-cultural approaches can close off analysis of the relational and fragmented constitution of embodied identity, subjectivity and practice. We might also consider how the rhetorical positioning of these gendered figures as cultural metaphors can reify, rather than disrupt, dominant geopolitical hierarchies of knowledge making. It could be argued that ‘veiled women’ are valued predominantly within some of these feminist texts as conceptual tools which provide insight to ‘the West’ through an appropriation of ‘marginal’ voices and subjectivities. Hirschmann (1998) offers a sophisticated analysis of how agency is constructed differently across cultural contexts in ways that disrupt or exceed any ‘universal’ Western model. Yet, in arguing that ‘veiling can be used as a vehicle’ (349) for developing ‘a cross-cultural feminist perspective on agency’ (360), she does not interrogate how representing veiling as a mirror for Western consciousness and subjectivity may serve not to deconstruct Orientalist representations but rather to reify Western privilege. For example, in her analysis: Indeed, precisely because veiling is ‘other’ to most Westerners, it may be able to reveal aspects of the West to which Westerners are often blind, such as assumptions about individuality, agency, and difference, as well as Western feminists’ lack of self-consciousness about our own practices, including our forms of dress. (1998: 349, italics mine) Westerners must listen, if for no other reason than that more comprehensive understandings of our own experiences – including the way we dress and its significance for Western women’s freedom – cannot occur without such attention. (363, second italics mine) As I argued in Chapter 1, employing reflexivity with respect to one’s ‘own’ social and cultural positioning and practices remains crucial to critical antiessentialist and transnational feminist analysis. However, one could argue that self-consciousness risks functioning here not to produce a more ‘generous’ view of ‘the other’, but rather to reflect the privileged ‘Western’ gaze back to itself (Ahmed 2004b: 2). Thus, while Reina Lewis and Sara Mills comment that the veil ‘is invested with the potency to hide or reveal the “truth” about the Orient which the West ultimately seeks’ (2003: 14), we might add that it


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can also be invested with the power to reveal the truth about the West to the West. From this perspective, the primary role of ‘the veiled woman’ in these examples is to help Westerners become more developed, aware and multifaceted subjects. The risk of such constructions is that both the fixed position of ‘the veiled woman’ and the implicit authority of the ‘Western feminist subject’ remain fundamentally intact (rather than radically displaced) (Hemmings 2011). In what follows, I want to think further about the critical implications of these cross-cultural comparisons for feminist theorising of gender and agency. I focus specifically on Jeffreys’ and Duits and van Zoonen’s analogies.

Analogy and agency As mentioned earlier, Jeffreys’ and Duits and van Zoonen’s cross-cultural analogies could be understood to differ significantly with respect to issues of agency. Jeffreys suggests that the primary concern of feminist analysis should be to identify and remedy women’s experiences of gender oppression, whether or not girls and women understand themselves to be oppressed. Indeed, she quite plainly rejects discourses of autonomous choice employed by girls and women to explain their sartorial choices, arguing that that while ‘both the veil and make-up are often seen as voluntary behaviours by women, taken up by choice and to express agency’, there is considerable evidence that both practices are caused by ‘the pressures arising from male dominance’ (2005: 38). By contrast, while Duits and van Zoonen acknowledge that girls often do not critically interrogate their understandings of their sartorial choices ‘as a matter of individual freedom’, their main concern is that girls’ own perspectives are being excluded from debates about both veiling and porno-chic through patriarchal discourses that figure them as victims without agency. From this perspective, Jeffreys’ rejection of accounts of ‘individual choice’ and ‘personal expression’ might be read as an example of the very silencing of girl’s voices to which Duits and van Zoonen object. Yet, without downplaying these differences, I want to argue that the two texts also convey a similar conception of what agency is and how it operates. That is, both understand agency as something that has been denied to girls and women and thus something that might be given back to them. For Jeffreys, women’s agency has been denied by cultures which compel them to veil or wear make-up as markers of their sexual difference and subordination. Feminist analysis should play a role in restoring women’s agency by urging governments to enact effective societal changes which enable women to ‘have access to the privilege possessed by men of not having to be concerned for appearance and being able to go out in public barefaced and bareheaded’ (2005: 38). For Duits and van Zoonen, girls’ agency has been denied within both public debate and feminist rhetoric which figure ‘girls as “docile bodies” on which power – of Islam, capitalism or “men” is inscribed, and from which (thus) no independent rational contribution can be expected’ (2006: 114).

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Feminist research can contribute to remedying this deficit by ‘giving girls a voice’ (115). In figuring agency as that which has been denied to girls but might be restored through feminist action, both texts construe the capacity for agency as coming after the constitution of the subject, rather than that which the subject is constituted through. I want to argue that this conceptualisation of agency has particular consequences for how the relationships between gender, culture, embodied subjectivity and agency are theorised. That is, in separating embodied subjects from the contexts in which they are produced, it figures ‘the meaning and sense of agency’ as something which can be ‘fixed in advance’ rather than that which emerges only through an analysis of the particular contexts and ‘concepts that enable specific modes of being, responsibility, and effectivity’ (Mahmood 2005: 14).26 In suggesting that feminist empowerment may be achieved through enabling women to choose to present a ‘visible’ or ‘open’ face and body, Jeffreys’ argument implies that women’s embodied actions can be delineated into binary categories of patriarchal oppression (wearing the veil or make-up) and feminist resistance (appearing bareheaded and barefaced). She thus installs one particular conception of embodiment as the universal feminist ideal. This makes it difficult for Jeffreys to analyse the ways in which gendered norms are ‘performed, inhabited and experienced’ differently in different contexts, with varying implications for women’s agency (Mahmood 2005: 22). For example, in her study of women active in the Islamic mosque movement in Egypt, Saba Mahmood (2005) suggests that agential capacity for these subjects ‘is entailed not only in those acts that resist the norms but also in multiple ways in which one inhabits norms’ (15). The task of realising piety placed women of the mosque movement ‘in conflict with several structures of authority’ and yet, she argues, ‘the rationale’ for these conflicts was not predicated upon, and therefore cannot be understood only by reference to, arguments for gender equality or resistance to male authority. Nor can these women’s practices be read as a reinscription of traditional roles, since the women’s mosque movement has significantly reconfigured the gendered practice of Islamic pedagogy and the social institution of mosques (15). Furthermore, in portraying both the veil and make-up as ‘masks’ that might be discarded to enable women to ‘show themselves as the real and equal citizens that they should be in theory’ (Jeffreys 2005: 38), Jeffreys figures veiling and various fashion and beauty practices as both superficial and separate from women’s interior subjectivity and authentic agential capacity. This prevents her from analysing the ways in which embodied practice, subjectivity and agency often develop simultaneously, in and through one another, rather than independently of one another. Returning to Mahmood’s study, the Quaranic ideal of modesty/shyness (al-haya), acknowledged to be central to the pursuit of piety, was understood by the women she interviewed to be achieved through the subjective training entailed in repeated body acts, such as veiling (2005: 156). In this programme of self-cultivation, bodily acts like wearing the veil ‘do not serve as manipulable masks in a game of public presentation, detachable from an


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essential interiorised self. Rather they are critical markers of piety as well as the ineluctable means by which one trains oneself to be pious’ (158). As such ‘one cannot simply discard the veil once a modest deportment has been acquired, because the veil itself is part of what defines that deportment’ (158). These examples illustrate the problems cross-cultural comparisons encounter in separating agency and embodied subjectivity from the specific cultural contexts in which they are produced. Unlike Jeffreys, Duits and van Zoonen do not employ a binary of patriarchal oppression/ feminist resistance to assess Muslim veiling or ‘Western’ fashion and beauty practices. This is in part because they acknowledge that the meanings of these practices are diverse, but also because they aim specifically to critique ‘top-down discourses’ which impose meanings on girls’ clothing choices that do not take account of the opinions of girls themselves. Yet, while the authors spend the first part of the article interrogating the essentialising and objectifying ways in which girls’ sartorial choices are constructed through public discourses, this critical concern with the relationships among gender, discourse and power does not appear to be carried through to latter part of the piece. Indeed, Duits and van Zoonen’s concluding argument that feminist analysis should, above all, concentrate on ‘giving women a voice’ (2006: 11), and their insistence that this imperative need not be qualified, would seem to eschew critical analysis of the complex relations of power which produce girls’ ‘speech acts’. Left unaddressed by their analysis are the key questions of how, in this context, we can understand the relations of power which condition ‘who can speak’ (and be heard) and what kinds of hierarchies are mobilised in the act of ‘giving voice’ (Spivak 1988; Chow 1996). Rosalind Gill (2007) argues that Duits and van Zoonen’s analysis conveys little sense of the cultural contexts in which girls and young women’s sartorial choices are exercised: ‘In the desire to respect girls’ choices,’ she suggests, ‘any notion of cultural influence seems to have been evacuated entirely’ (73).27 I agree with this point, but I also want to make a slightly different one. That is, that the authors may need to think further, not only about the kinds of subjects and voices that the cultural and political contexts they are concerned with engender, but also the kinds of subjects their own discourse (re)produces and ‘gives voice’ to. As I have suggested, if we understand cross-cultural analogies to be both constitutive and performative, then it follows that Duits and van Zoonen’s analogy actively produces not only the embodied practices that they render commensurate, but also the imagined subjects of these practices. In linking veiling and porno-chic through a gendered discourse of sexual regulation, their cross-cultural analogy draws on and reiterates some familiar narratives of gender/sexuality, cultural identity and agency to render particular subject positions intelligible (Butler, 1993). An intelligible subject within their analogy is arguably one who may be defined as either (but not both) a ‘g-string girl’ or a ‘headscarf girl’ (who is understood to be synonymous with a ‘Muslim girl’), who is in a position which enables her to ‘use a discourse of individual agency

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to defend [her] sartorial choices’ and whose articulations of individual choice and personal expression resonate within a framework in which veiling and porno-chic are understood to reflect norms of gender, sexuality and decency (Duits and van Zoonen 2006: 113). By contrast, those embodied subjectivities and voices who do not meet these discursive criteria (e.g. those subjects who disrupt these categories of feminine cultural identity, who remain silent or do not mobilise dominant conceptions of individual choice and agency, or who understand their practices in ways that do not privilege gendered norms or sexual regulation) may be rendered unintelligible.28 My point here is that, in figuring agency as that which has been denied to girls and may be restored to them through making their voices heard in feminist research, Duits and van Zoonen neglect to address the ways in which ‘giving voice’ is itself a powerimbued process – which they (along with a complex range of other actors and forces) play a role in shaping – and through which a particular subject ‘with agency’ is constituted.

Conclusions This chapter has sought to further unpack some of the theoretical and political effects and limitations of cross-cultural comparison and analogy as anti-cultural essentialist tools within feminist theory. As I have discussed, cross-cultural analogy is employed rhetorically by feminist theorists to deconstruct the ubiquitous binary of the ‘liberated, skin-showing Western woman’ and the ‘oppressed, veiled Muslim woman’. Authors seek to contest culturally essentialist representations by highlighting the similar gendered dilemmas and inequalities that girls and women encounter across cultural and geopolitical contexts and the ways in which these struggles for agency are frequently played out through forms of bodily management and control. I have argued, however, that despite their productive possibilities, these cross-cultural comparisons can restrict analysis of the complexities of the embodied practices they draw together in ways that can shore up, rather than critically unravel, essentialist understandings of gender, cultural difference and embodied practice. I have suggested that understanding feminist cross-cultural comparisons and analogies as rhetorical devices that are both constitutive and performative may enable greater critical attention to be paid to the ways in which they mobilise existing narratives of gender/sexuality, culture and agency to (re)produce particular forms of knowledge and subjectivity. As I illustrated through my analysis of Nasser’s, Jeffreys’ and Duits and van Zoonen’s texts, these authors all employ a metric of gender/sexuality to translate Muslim veiling and anorexia and/or ‘Western’ fashion and beauty practices into a common theoretical and political language. As such, they each actively constitute (rather than simply describe) these practices as concerned predominantly with negotiating gendered and sexualised value systems and expectations. Like these authors, I understand relations of gender and sexuality as central to the meaning, representation and experiences of these embodied practices. Yet I have argued that


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the translations involved in making veiling, anorexia and/or ‘Western’ fashion and beauty practices commensurable produce a series of problematic effects which are ultimately counterproductive to feminist efforts to interrogate and work through cultural essentialism. Indeed, in splitting off hierarchies of gender/sexuality from other relations of power (such as those formed around categories of race and nation) cross-cultural analogies encounter difficulties in representing these embodied practices as produced through multiple, co-constitutive axes of differentiation. As such, they constrain analysis of the intersectional complexities of veiling, anorexia and various fashion and beauty procedures. This, in turn, problematically limits the ways in which we can ‘know’ these practices and the extent to which we can understand their shifting embodied, social and political meaning and significance across discursive-material contexts. Furthermore, in translating one set of embodied practices into the metric which the other has been commonly understood, without interrogating the relations of power which underscore these metrics, cross-cultural comparisons are susceptible to slipping back into essentialist articulations of cultural difference. In other words, because these analogies often cover over, rather than interrogate, essentialist articulations of racialised cultural difference, these distinctions are liable to re-emerge to reinstate oppositional categories and prevent analysis of cultural cross-cover, intermixture and reappropriation. The chapter has also argued that in positioning ‘the veiled woman’, ‘the anorexic’ and ‘the g-string girl’ as (separate but) analogous gendered subjects, feminist cross-cultural comparisons can ontologise these figures in ways that flatten their complex and fragmented histories of production and reify essentialist notions of cultural identity as bounded and discrete. As a result, we can lose sight of how these embodied practices and their imagined subjects are discursive-material constructs which have accrued meaning and significance specifically in relation to other practices/subjects. This matters to wider feminist efforts to interrogate cultural essentialism because a detailed understanding of the relational ‘interdependence’ of dualistic pairings (such as ‘Muslim/Western’, ‘veiled/uncovered’, ‘oppressed/liberated’) is crucial ‘in the process of repudiating them’ (Gilroy 2004: 45). Mobilising ‘the veiled woman’ and ‘the anorexic’ as metaphors for gendered relations in their ‘respective’ cultures can also reaffirm, rather than disrupt, their depiction as ‘cultural victims’ and consequently defer examination of the more complex relationships among gender, culture, embodied practice and agency. I have also suggested that comparisons which construct cross-cultural commonalities between embodied practices via a narrative of ‘restoring agency’ often position agential capacity as both knowable in advance and separable from embodied subjectivity. This can prevent analysis of the specific processes through which different forms of agency are constituted and inhabited, as well as examination of the relations of power involved in discursive acts of ‘giving voice’. In the next and final chapter, I examine how reorienting feminist cross-cultural approaches towards a focus on relationality (rather

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than commonality), might allow us to address culturally essentialist constructions of gender, embodied practice and agency in ways take into account significant historical, social, and embodied particularities without reifying essentialist articulations of ‘difference’ or disallowing the possibility of common ground.

5

Weaving relational webs Theorising cultural difference and embodied practice

The alternative to relativism is partial, locatable, critical knowledges sustaining the possibilities of webs of connections called solidarity in politics and shared connections in epistemology.

(Donna Haraway 1990: 191)

As a means to reorient feminist cross-cultural approaches which depend on assertions of similarity or sameness, this chapter examines the theoretical and pedagogical utility of thinking through relational webs. The concept of the ‘web’ has become a salient metaphor within contemporary critical theory. From Donna Haraway’s ‘webs of connections’ (1990: 191), to Avtar Brah’s ‘complex web of power’ (1996a: 209), to Gilles Deleuze’s web-like proliferation of binary terms (2004/1968), the image of the web has been employed increasingly to indicate the necessity of theorising complex interconnections between various discursive-material entities.1 The web metaphor signifies complexity and multiplicity (rather than linearity, binarism or dialectism) as well as relationality (as opposed to sameness or difference). In this chapter, I explore how, beyond being an evocative metaphor, the idea of a relational web provides a productive analytical framework for teasing out constitutive connections among multiple embodied practices and/or figures in ways that may help us address cultural essentialism without flattening significant historical and social particularities. It also signals the possibility of developing empathetic social connections across cultural and geopolitical contexts. I began this book by acknowledging that feminist rhetorical strategies which establish cross-cultural similarities between embodied practices (such as ‘African’ FGC and ‘Western’ cosmetic surgery) can trouble culturally essentialist binaries that pose such practices as fundamentally different and discrete. I argued, however, that cross-cultural continuums and analogues often do not move sufficiently beyond the many problems that culturally essentialist binaries entail. Indeed, I suggested that these cross-cultural strategies risk a range problematic effects which are central, rather than peripheral, to ongoing feminist efforts to work through cultural essentialism, ethnocentrism and racism. In their emphasis on commonality or equivalence, the analogue and continuum

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approaches often either efface crucial embodied, historical and political particularities or end up reifying culturally essentialist differences. To the extent that comparisons over-privilege cross-cultural commonality and/or invest in it as an analytical end point, they risk redirecting critical attention away from the relationships of power and social antagonism which function to constitute bodies, groups and practices as ‘different’. Comparative strategies can therefore set restrictive limits on the ways in which can ‘know’ and engage with particular embodied practices. They can also defer or close off in-depth analysis of the specific processes through which cultural essentialism and racism are perpetuated with respect to embodied practices and may in fact reify, rather than disrupt, the racialised hierarchies that anti-essentialist theorists set out to address. In this final chapter, I extend ideas that I have been developing in the book, as well those that have been percolating in the critical literatures from which my project arises, to propose an alternative relational approach to theorising cultural difference and embodied practice. Using the example of the ubiquitous Euro-American ‘African’ FGC and ‘Western’ cosmetic surgery binary, the first part of the chapter seeks to illustrate the difference it might make to address culturally essentialist constructions of embodied practice with a focus on relationality rather than commonality. Drawing on a range of critical feminist, postcolonial and queer literatures, I argue that, rather than seeking to establish how practices of FGC and cosmetic surgery are fundamentally similar, we might more fruitfully unpack some of the discursive social and political processes through which they have been (re)produced in and through one another. The relational web approach I develop focuses on teasing out the constitutive connections that link fetishised figures such as ‘the victim of female genital mutilation’ and ‘the cosmetic surgery consumer’ (among other imagined subjects) within a wider relational economy. Unlike commonality, the concept of constitutive connection does not imply the ‘sameness’ or ‘equivalence’ of particular practices/figures, but rather points to the ways in which such discursive-material entities are entangled and interdependent. In this way, a relational approach may enable theorising of social, historical and cultural links, along with disjunctures, without reifying essentialist distinctions or disavowing the possibility of common ground. As I suggest in the second part of the chapter, a web framework may also offer feminist thinkers a valuable pedagogical tool for interrogating and mutually engaging with some of the enduring social investments, assumptions and relations of power that underscore essentialist constructions of cultural difference. The chapter also situates the relational web approach with respect to contemporary ‘new humanist’ and ‘anti-humanist’ discourses, emphasising how its focus on constitutive links avoids assertions of fundamental (human) commonality and points instead to the relational and fragmented constitution of embodied identities, subjectivities and practices. Crucially, while I argue that a relational web approach provides a process through which the production of salient gendered embodied practices and

Weaving relational webs

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figures can be traced with an emphasis on intersectional, historical and contextual relations of power, my objective in this chapter is not to call forth relationality itself as an ‘answer’ to the complex problems of cultural essentialism and comparativism, or an ‘end point’ to anti-cultural essentialist analysis. Rather, my focus is on examining what potentially different and productive questions, concerns and forms of analysis a relational web approach may enable or open up with respect to issues of embodiment, essentialism and cultural difference.

Web weaving One starting point from which to launch this kind of a relational analysis is to identify a particularly salient culturally essentialist binary of embodied practices, the imagined subjects (or figures) it constructs and the key assumptions about embodiment, culture and agency it relies on and reproduces. It is important to underscore that, as in previous chapters, I use the term ‘imagined subjects’ to refer to specific categories of discursive representation, which must be distinguished from ‘embodied, situated, historical subjects with varying and diverse personal and collective biographies and social orientations’ (Brah 1996a: 131). Yet, as discussed in Chapter 4, ‘imagined subjects’ or figures also have specific social and material implications. Each figuration of ‘the veiled woman’ or the anorexic’ ‘not only condenses particular semiotic practices, but also brings a particular version of the world into being’ (Castañeda 2002: 4). In the case of the ubiquitous Euro-American ‘African’ FGC/’Western’ cosmetic surgery binary, the two key figures it constitutes and contrasts are the ‘victim of female genital mutilation’ and ‘the cosmetic surgery consumer’.2 As discussed in Chapter 3, while the former is invariably coded as ‘black’ and ‘African’, the latter is (almost) always coded as ‘white’ and ‘Western’.3 These codings of race and geopolitical locale are then attached to essentialist ideas about culture and agency. Whereas the ‘victim of female genital mutilation’ is assumed to be oppressed by her culture, the ‘cosmetic surgery consumer’ is seen either to be operating outside the realm of culture or actively negotiating flexible cultural norms. While the first figure is understood to have her sexuality repressed by others, the second figure is read as seeking to enhance her own sexuality through the consumption of modern science/ technology. At this point, some feminist advocates of commonality-based cross-cultural approaches have responded by replacing this essentialist binary with overarching constructions of gendered similarity. In seeking to pursue a relational approach, however, I want to resist the temptation to substitute problematic ‘difference’ with problematic ‘sameness’ and instead to tease out and interrogate each point of assumed (racialised cultural) difference this binary articulates. We might start by investigating the historical construction of ‘black’ and ‘white’ as morally and aesthetically invested ‘opposites’.4 We could examine how, through such racialised constructions, particular notions of gender,

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sexuality and nation have been mobilised to mark the black African female body as abnormal, grotesque, diseased, libidinous and over-sexualised against constructions of white, Western femininity as ideal, classical, pure, uncontaminated, virtuous and chaste.5 We might then investigate how such divergent constructions of ‘black African’ and ‘white Western’ femininity and sexuality were both reified and disrupted by colonialist discourses which established ‘African’ female genital cutting as a ‘backward’, ‘patriarchal’ cultural practice requiring eradication: Some scientific documents and travel logs depicted African women’s ‘overdeveloped genitalia’ and ‘heightened sexual instincts’ (in comparison with white European women) as a legitimate ‘rationale’ for FGC (Gollaher 2000),6 thus reifying constructions of black African women’s ‘abnormal’ sexuality and/or their over-sexualised ‘nature’. Other discourses, however, such as those produced by missionaries and colonial officials, constructed African women as the downtrodden and desexualised victims of barbaric traditional practices which had to be put to an end, ideally through native Africans’ exposure to the more modern, enlightened and humane ways of their colonisers (Boyle 2002; Njambi 2004). We could, furthermore, consider how, while critical in drawing international attention to FGC, Western feminist efforts to eradicate such practices in the 1970s and 1980s extended colonial representations of African women as oppressed ‘victims’ (Daly 1978; Hosken 1981). They also galvanised a fundamental shift from images of ‘African women’ as stereotypically oversexualised to constructions of African women as essentially desexualised.7 In this context, images of ‘African women’ as helpless, mutilated and ‘robbed of their sexuality’ were, in part, necessary to reciprocally constitute Western feminists as their potential saviours. Indigenous and diasporic African, Middle Eastern and Asian women’s campaigns against practices of FGC have been long standing within a number of different national and cultural contexts.8 Often more attuned to the local specificities of particular forms of FGC than some Western feminist critics, such discourses have, in many cases, produced less homogenising and ethnocentric depictions of FGC and the communities which practise such procedures, including more complex representations of women’s sexuality (Toubia 1988; Obiora 2000). However, such initiatives have not obtained anywhere near the level of financial and institutional support, nor the media attention, that Western-based programmes have (Boyle 2002). As such, their potentially more nuanced and contextualised portrayals9 have not infiltrated public consciousness (in the West) to the same degree as the ‘attention-grabbing horror stories’ produced by Western media and ‘generalised theories of patriarchal domination’ offered by early (and some later) feminist critics (Meyers 2000: 471). Interestingly, where African and Arab women’s engagement with FGC may have informed the FGC/cosmetic surgery binary more significantly is in reinforcing an image of the ‘consumerist Western woman’ as a highly sexualised subject. In an article (published in a collection of papers from the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association Conference) comparing the health risks


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facing Sudanese women with those encountered by Western women, for instance, Nahid Toubia (1988) portrays women in the capitalist and ‘consumerist’ West as constantly being made to fill the role of ‘seductress’ and to ‘see themselves as objects of pleasure’ (99). The contemporary Euro-American FGC/cosmetic surgery binary now depicts the African ‘victim of female genital mutilation’ as wholly unsexualised against constructions of the Western ‘cosmetic surgery consumer’ as actively choosing to increase her sexual desirability and pleasure through procedures such as labiaplasty or breast augmentation. However, traces of the historic sexualisation and fetishisation of the black African female body lurk beneath this veneer and are revealed, for example, through Westerners’ often voyeuristic and prurient interest in images of circumcised girls and women. In this vein, Wackuka Mungai argues that ‘there is a heated and eerily prurient interest expressed over the Web in accessing documentary photos of girls and women who have undergone clitoridectomies, excisions, and infibulations’ (Mungai, cited in Weil Davis 2002: 19).10 We could also pay careful attention to how, through various colonialist, indigenous nationalist and feminist discourses relating to practices of ‘female genital cutting’ within particular African and Middle Eastern contexts, ‘culture’ and ‘tradition’ are made to stick to ‘black’ female bodies rather than (or in different ways than they are to) ‘white’ female bodies (Ahmed 2004b).11 Returning to the example discussed in Chapter 3, we might ask how cosmetic surgery comes to be appropriated (through, for example, the exportation of early Indian surgical techniques) and constructed as belonging to the ‘modern’ West precisely through European colonial models of racial and cultural ‘othering’ (Gilman 1999b; Sullivan 2001). We could also map the ways in which ‘white Euro-American women’ have been constituted as the subjects, consumers or beneficiaries of science and technology through relational historical processes which constructed black African and African-descended women as the objects of scientific investigation and technological development. Here we might consider the nineteenth-century European exhibitions of Saartje Baartman, ‘the Hottentot Venus’ (Gilman 1992), the US gynaecologist J. Marion Sim’s surgical experiments on slave women in the antebellum American south (Barker-Benfield 1975) and the use of poor black and ‘Third World women’ as guinea-pigs for the testing of experimental (and unsafe) contraceptives (Brah 1996a). Pursuing each of these avenues for relational tracing (among the many others that may be relevant) would enable us to gain a more complex, intersectional and historically anchored understanding of the ways in which the contemporary figurations of ‘the cosmetic surgery consumer’ and ‘the victim of female genital mutilation’ have been mutually (re)produced. Through tracing the ways in which the ‘the cosmetic surgery consumer’ and ‘the victim of female genital mutilation’ have been constructed in and through one another within particular contexts and relations of power, this relational approach illustrates how each is implicated with and dependent on the other for meaning. From this perspective it is possible neither to separate the two

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figures through the imposition of rigid boundaries (as culturally essentialist discourses do) nor to collapse one into the other (as commonality-based comparisons do) because they remain constitutively intermeshed. Thus, illustrating how these imagined subjects/figures have been constituted relationally functions to interrogate the binary that holds them apart by exposing its mechanics and its historical trajectories of production. Importantly, a relational approach also avoids binary reversals, which I have argued represent a problematic (and often paralysing) ‘second step’ in feminist and other critical deconstructive strategies. Linking numerous imagined subjects This first stage of relational tracing (while crucial) is not, however, sufficient on its own. Clearly, ‘the cosmetic surgery consumer’ and ‘the victim of female genital mutilation’ are contingent and cannot be seen as insulated from all other embodied constructions and historical and cultural traces. They are not related only to each other and constructed exclusively through each other but, rather, are historically, subjectively and materially linked to a host of other embodied ‘selves’ and ‘others’ (Brah 1996a; Ahmed 2000). As such, we need means of representing and theorising relationality in such contexts as complex and multiple. As Morwenna Griffiths points out in Feminisms and the Self: The Web of Identity (1995), webs are ‘intricate, involved, interlaced, with each part entangled with the rest and dependent on it’ (2). If we widen our field of analysis and imagine the binary in question as existing within a relational web of other binary relations we can think about the relationship between particular practices and figurations from a starting point of multiplicity. Within such a web, ‘the victim of female genital mutilation’ and ‘the cosmetic surgery consumer’ (or ‘the veiled woman’ and ‘the anorexic’, etc.) would be situated as simultaneously linked to numerous other imagined subjects. Tracing some of the multiple links structuring such a relational web may therefore allow us to theorise relationality beyond the binary self/other dialectic, yet without effacing the relations of power that particular binaries produce and secure or disavowing the power of such binaries to endure. Despite the ways in which a relational web approach departs from the commonality-based comparisons I have critiqued, it should not be seen as completely divorced from these but rather as a partial extension of some of their more effective and productive elements. As Sara Ahmed (2004b) usefully points out, ‘the work of critique does not mean the transcendence of the object of our critique; indeed, critique might even be dependent on non-transcendence’ (11, italics in original). For example, weaving a relational web may include theorising similarities between embodied practices or figurations within particular contexts. The point is, however, that the establishment of cross-cultural analogies does not represent the end point of the web approach, but rather one integrated component of a larger genealogical process. Furthermore, while I use the words ‘trace’ and ‘weave’ to describe the process of fleshing out


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relational webs, my language should not be taken to imply that we are weaving webs out of thin air or that we can ever stand fully outside the webs that we create. Deciding to trace the links between any pair or group of figurations or practices depends on a hunch or assumption that such practices are somehow related in the first place. Indeed, as theorists we are, through the process of web weaving, reconstructing (from our own particular locations and perspectives) networks which have already been woven through multilayered histories of discursive-material practice and encounter. Yet we are also always inside these webs, reproducing and redirecting their strands through our actions and interactions with others: ‘The webs we weave are contingent and changing’, and ‘each web affects the next one’ (Griffiths 1995: 2). If we take the relational unit, in which the (superior) ‘A term’ is the ‘cosmetic surgery consumer’ and the (inferior) ‘not-A term’ is the ‘victim of female genital mutilation’, what happens if we think about other imagined subjects which might be relationally linked to each of our original ‘A’ and ‘not A’ figures? Suppose that we draw a relational link joining the ‘victim of female genital mutilation’ to, for instance, the figure of the ‘uncircumcised African woman’. How does adding the imagined ‘uncircumcised African woman’ to the existing relational unit alter our relational web? In order to address this question, we need to begin tracing the relational connections between ‘the victim of female genital mutilation’ and ‘the uncircumcised African woman’ in much the same way that we interrogated the relational construction of ‘the victim of female genital mutilation’ and ‘the cosmetic surgery consumer’. To start, we might acknowledge, as several feminist theorists who employ cross-cultural approaches have, that in some communities which practise specific forms of FGC the genital cutting or circumcision ritual is understood as a mark of virtue, cleanliness and/or proper femininity.12 As Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf points out, ‘the Arabic term for circumcision, tahara, also means purification’ (2001: 116). As such, negative attitudes may be exhibited towards uncircumcised girls and women in various African and Arab circumcising contexts. In her study of a circumcising community in Douroshab township in Sudan, Abusharaf shows how many of the women she interviews understand FGC as a ‘virtuous act’ which morally, aesthetically and ethnically delineates those who have undergone the procedure from those who have not. Drawing on the responses of three women, she explains how within this Sudanese context, ‘circumcised’ and ‘uncircumcised’ women are constructed relationally: To Saadia, Asisa, and Sakia, circumcision is important because it gives voice to gender and collective ethnic identity, serving to distinguish the border between themselves as pure taharat and others as polluted nijsat women. The politics of conformity go beyond keeping clean; they have to do with one’s character, sociality, and personal and collective identity. (127, italics in original)

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From this perspective, we can begin to see how posing the ‘uncircumcised African woman’ in relation to the ‘victim of female genital mutilation’ alters the presumed character of the latter. In this particular relation, the ‘victim of female genital mutilation’ is no longer seen primarily as a victim of patriarchal ideologies or barbaric cultural rituals, but rather becomes a ‘virtuous circumcised African woman’ who is defined hierarchically against ‘the uncircumcised African woman’. Whereas in relation to the ‘cosmetic surgery consumer’, the ‘victim of female genital mutilation’ was ‘other’ (the ‘not A’ term), in her new position as ‘virtuous circumcised African woman’ she becomes the ‘self ’ (the ‘A’ term). One’s perspective within the relational web at this point becomes crucial. In the context of this new three-point linking, the status of the ‘victim of female genital mutilation/virtuous circumcised African woman’ changes in relation to whether one is interpreting the relationship from the perspective point of the ‘cosmetic surgery consumer’ or from that of the ‘uncircumcised African woman’. As such, ‘victim of female genital mutilation/virtuous circumcised African woman’ cannot be interpreted as either self or other, A or not-A. She is in fact both and/or neither. Consequently, neither the original relation nor the new one can be understood solely in terms of a binary model. They must instead be seen as fluid links within a web of multiple relationalities. As part of the process of tracing the relational construction of this new link between the ‘virtuous circumcised African woman’ and ‘uncircumcised African woman’, we need to pay careful attention to the ways in which particular ideas about gender and sexuality have been (re)produced through the construction of notions of virtue, cleanliness and femininity. We need to therefore ask, through which gendered social, cultural and/or religious processes has FGC been constructed as ‘virtuous’ within particular circumcising communities? How do discourses that portray FGC as cleansing or purifying in particular contexts overlap or intersect (and/or differ from) those concerning male circumcision in ways that may disrupt feminist linkings of FGC and cosmetic surgery under the banner of universal patriarchy?13 Furthermore, how might such processes be linked, not only to gendered relations of power, but also to histories of slavery and/or to European colonialism and concomitant indigenous nationalist movements of opposition to colonial rule, in which gender and sexuality have intersected with race, ethnicity and nation?14 But how is the nature of the relational web changed again if we add another imagined figure, for example, ‘the cosmetic surgery rebel’, this time linked to ‘the cosmetic surgery consumer’? While cosmetic surgery has largely been interpreted by feminist commentators as an ‘oppressive technology’ employed to ‘colonise’ women’s bodies (Negrin 2002: 21; see also Jones 2008), some feminist theorists have advocated the use of cosmetic surgery for ‘subversive’ feminist purposes. Kathryn Pauly Morgan argues, for example, that ‘healthy women who have a feminist understanding of cosmetic surgery are in a situation to deploy cosmetic surgery in the name of its feminist potential for parody and protest’ (2003/1991: 179). She suggests that women ‘might constitute


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themselves as culturally liberated subjects through public participation in Ms Ugly Canada/America/Universe/Cosmos pageants and use the technology of cosmetic surgery to do so’ (179, italics in original). The French performance artist Orlan has enacted such radical experiments with cosmetic procedures. Her performative project ‘The Ultimate Masterpiece: The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan’ has involved a series of televised surgical procedures ‘designed to transform her face in ways that destabalis[e] male defined notions of idealised female beauty’ (Negrin 2002: 31). Through this consciously political endeavour, she ‘seeks to disturb the notion of the perfected, the fixed and the standardised, producing a result which is at odds with conventional ideals of beauty’ (32). In Orlan’s words, she is ‘not trying to conform, but refusing conformity’ (Orlan, cited in Featherstone 2000: 160).15 Thus, in contrast to the figure of the ‘cosmetic surgery consumer’ who actively pursues cosmetic surgery as a means to achieve cultural ideals of feminine beauty and sexual desirability, the imagined ‘cosmetic surgery rebel’ undergoes such procedures precisely to resist and destabilise such ideals.16 As with the previous example, the addition of this new relational strand to the web will function to transform the assumed character of ‘the cosmetic surgery consumer’. Through her relational linking with ‘the cosmetic surgery rebel’, the ‘cosmetic surgery consumer’ may now be interpreted, rather differently, as ‘the cosmetic surgery victim.’ When connected in binary relation to the oppressed and downtrodden ‘victim of female genital mutilation’, the ‘cosmetic surgery consumer’ could be constituted as liberated and selfdetermining, making her own ‘free’ choice to engage in cosmetic procedures. However, once linked to ‘the cosmetic surgery rebel’, the consumer’s choices are no longer seen as free, but instead as reductively shaped by dominant cultural imperatives. Rather than being defined as autonomous and empowered, ‘the cosmetic surgery victim’ becomes the interpellated object of patriarchal, consumerist ideologies, the woman persuaded by ‘the beauty myth’ (Wolf 1990) or, even, the obsessive ‘scalpel slave’ (Balsamo 1996: 70). Thus, through the construction of the ‘cosmetic surgery rebel’ as subversive, the ‘cosmetic surgery victim’ is (re)constituted as conformist. It is important to interrogate the various discursive-material processes through which this subversive/conformist binary is produced and secured. The ‘cosmetic surgery rebel’ and ‘the cosmetic surgery victim’ can be posed as oppositional through a largely gendered narrative. (Through her parodic performance of femininity, the ‘rebel’ actively resists oppressive patriarchal ideals of beauty, whilst the ‘victim’ more passively embraces and embodies such norms.) As part of a critical approach which is both relational and intersectional, however, we need to explore how this gendered narrative might also be produced, for example through various raced and classed relations of power. Is ‘the rebel’s’ capacity for subversion via surgical measures secured precisely through her class and race privileges? As other theorists have argued, performative or parodic experimentation with cosmetic surgery is not a strategy that is equally available to all subjects.17 Llewellyn Negrin points out, for

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example, that ‘it is only those who already have a secure sense of their own identity who can afford to entertain the possibilities of its dissolution’ (2002: 38). Drawing on Susan Bordo’s analysis (1993), she argues that radical cosmetic surgery ‘is a rather “aristocratic” form of revolt, which can only be engaged in by those who have the freedom from economic need to be able to contemplate and realise different forms of embodiment’ (39). Christian Klesse suggests furthermore that ‘racialised bodies’ cannot be ‘reconstituted and made into a project’ as easily as other bodies, as ‘there is always a problem of visibility and passing in which the incorporated histories of bodies weighs down the potential for action’ (2000: 21). It has also been argued that, in the industrialised West, ethnic or racial minorities ‘generally have less discursive space than their white counterparts for justifying their decisions to have cosmetic surgery’ (Davis 2003a: 75). As Kathy Davis suggests, while surgery (perceived as being undertaken) to alter ‘racial or ethnic features’ elicits ‘surprise and disapproval’, procedures to enhance femininity ‘may seem so ordinary that they have become – more or less – acceptable’ (2003a: 75). Moreover, ‘mindful of keloid formation and hyperpigmented scarring, [clinics] routinely reject black patients’ (Vaugn, cited in Balsamo 1996: 61). To what extent, then, does the inclusion of the imagined ‘ethnic minority cosmetic surgery patient’18 bring into relief the assumptions of whiteness through which both the ‘cosmetic surgery rebel’ and the ‘cosmetic surgery consumer’ are constituted?19 In order to gain a better understanding of how culturally essentialist constructions of embodied practice operate in particular contexts, the process of web weaving also needs to probe those messier contradictions and complexities of agency and subjectivity that each binary must elide to retain its contingent A/not-A status. As discussed in Chapter 4, Saba Mahmood argues that an investment in the category of ‘resistance’ within feminist and poststructuralist theory often imposes ‘a teleology of progressive politics on the analytics of power’ which makes it difficult to identify and conceptualise forms of agency ‘that are not necessarily encapsulated by the narrative of subversion and reinscription of norms’ (2005: 9). In this vein, we might ask what assumptions about agency the ‘cosmetic surgery rebel’/‘cosmetic surgery victim’ binary reifies through its equation of agentic capacity with the subversion of gendered norms, and in turn what complexities of subjectivity and embodied practices it covers over? We might consider, for instance, how claims to beauty that reproduce particular gendered norms have simultaneously provided a basis for anti-racist political agency in particular contexts. Maxine Leeds Craig suggests that, against a late nineteenth-century racist and classist aesthetics which portrayed black and working-class female bodies as grotesque, ugly and licentious against constructions of white, middle and upper-class female bodies as classical, beautiful, and virtuous, black middleclass women in Europe and North America ‘proclaimed the beauty of black women in ways that simultaneously proclaimed their virtue’ (2006: 170). Claiming gendered norms of beauty was a risky strategy for black women, ‘who as women and blacks were already seen primarily as bodies’, yet also a


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necessary one: ‘black women had to claim beauty … or be annihilated’ (174).20 Making links between these historically sedimented discourses of beauty and contemporary practices of cosmetic surgery, Ruth Holliday and Jacqueline Sanchez Taylor (2006) argue that women who employ surgical measures to ‘adopt the markers of hypersexualisation associated with classed and racialised bodies (such as buttock implants or collagen lips)’ must be seen not as passive ‘victims’ but, rather, as ‘active and desiring (not just desirable)’ (191). Feminist depictions of ‘women as “victims” of the beauty industry and motivated by the pain of being outside normative (classed and raced) ideals of beauty effectively erases their subjectivity’ (191) and are ‘likely to alienate a generation of young women for whom sexual self-determination, expressed through the glamorous body, is a central component of identity’ (192). In complicating feminist equations of agency with resistance, these examples point to some of the more nuanced negotiations of embodied subjectivity and practice that binary formulations of gendered cultural practices routinely obscure.21 We could similarly explore some of the complexities associated with embodied negotiations of agency concealed or suppressed by the ‘victim of female genital cutting’/‘cosmetic surgery consumer’ and ‘victim of female genital cutting’/‘uncircumcised African woman’ binaries discussed above. There are many different relational avenues we could pursue in weaving our relational web. Once fleshed out, what this particular web would illustrate most potently is that the ‘victim of female genital cutting’/‘cosmetic surgery consumer’ binary represents only one constructed link in a much larger representational system, hence disrupting the insulated or dualistic framework that makes a more basic relational approach insufficient. It shows not only that ‘there are multiple other embedded within and across binaries’ (Brah 1996a: 184–5), but also that, within any particular cultural binary, the ‘self ’ is the ‘self ’, and the ‘other’ is the ‘other’, only from one particular nodal point within the web – as your point on the web (and hence your perspective) changes, so do the hierarchical categories (the relation is produced through one’s perspective), and as such, they resist being fixed.22 Theorising particularities and connections What therefore, does this kind of relational approach offer to a critical, transnational feminist project of theorising (and interrogating) cultural essentialism and racism with respect to gendered embodied practices? Reorienting commonality-based cross-cultural approaches, a focus on tracing webs of relationality enables theorisation of (contingent) particularity as well as connection with respect to embodied practices. As such, it moves us away from the reification of essentialist cultural differences and the flattening of important specificities. It provides a process through which the production of salient gendered cultural figures and practices can be traced with an emphasis on intersectional, historical and contextual relations of power. The concept of particularity is useful here because it departs from a neocolonialist ‘difference from’ register

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which posits hegemonic axes such as ‘the West’, ‘whiteness’ and ‘heterosexuality’ as norms against which subordinate entities and embodiments reveal their ‘difference’. In this sense, particularity does not ‘belong’ to the minoritised ‘other’, but rather represents the specific intersection of multiple social and embodied axes through which each imagined subject or practice is constituted. Being attuned to particularities is critical in preventing and/or interrogating essentialist, ethnocentric and homogenising constructions. Crucially, in conjunction with theorising particularity, the web approach also maps the constitutive connections between various figures or practices. Unlike commonality, connection does not imply the ‘similarity’ or ‘equivalence’ of various experiences, practices or subjects. Instead, it points to the ways in which such entities are constitutively linked, and as such, does not disavow the possibility of common ground. Constitutive connection underscores the ways in which processes of social and cultural differentiation and the production social particularities are always relational and contingent, rather than bounded or discrete. The web approach acknowledges that the discursive-material links between various practices or figures are relationships of power which may function as modes of ‘othering’ and exclusion. Yet, as will be discussed further below, it also suggests that such connections represent relationships of mutuality which hold the potential for the development of transformative social links and interactions between differently located subjects. As such, it seeks to negotiate a path between ‘assimilating difference into identity’ and ‘making difference into an unthinking fetish of alterity’ (Butler 1995: 140). Rather than aiming exclusively to ‘acknowledge a responsibility toward the trace of the other’ (Spivak 1999: 198–9) (where both self and other are imagined as singular, fixed entities), the web approach seeks to account for a wider network of imagined subject positions in which one is implicated sometimes as a ‘self ’, sometimes as an ‘other’, and perhaps other times as neither or both – yet always within specific structural relations of power.23 I am aware that a reader might argue that my emphasis on examining the production of stereotypical figures like the ‘victim of female genital mutilation’ and ‘the cosmetic surgery consumer’ could function to refetishise such constructions. Clearly, individual embodied subjects may fit none (or all) of these categories of representation. Does my approach thus risk endorsing the reification of complex lived experience through the figurations used as nodal points on the web? Does focusing on these contrasting positions inevitably continue the essentialising practice that is challenged in throughout the book? These remain pertinent questions. However, it is important to emphasise that I chose these figures as a starting point precisely because they have been constituted as ontological entities with a ‘life of their own’ (Ahmed 2000: 5) in past crosscultural analyses. Rather than simply taking the ‘nature’ of these figures for granted, the web approach I advocate provides a relational framework for unravelling how they are (re)produced as the effects of ‘specific configuration(s) of knowledges, practices, and power’ (Castañeda 2002: 4). It enables us examine how the imagined subjects of FGC and cosmetic surgery have taken shape


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within and through particular formations of colonialism, imperialism, nationalism, patriarchy and capitalism – as well as feminism. In a way, a focus on tracing constitutive connections between embodied entities produces a shift away from thinking of fixed or coherent ‘figures’ and ‘practices’ and towards contemplating the relationships produced in and through various encounters within specific contexts.24 It acknowledges that embodied identity categories are not pre-given or fixed,25 but are rather the product of particular histories of construction and, as such, retain the potential to be radically reconstructed. As the activity of weaving relational webs highlights, there is no (singular or fixed) ‘victim of female genital mutilation’, ‘cosmetic surgery consumer’, ‘uncircumcised African woman’, ‘virtuous African woman’, ‘cosmetic surgery victim’ or ‘cosmetic surgery rebel’. Yet the intersectional relations of knowledge and power through which such figures are (re)produced are ‘real’ and have continuing material effects, which the web approach enables us to tease out and address. While the web approach might be seen to flatten or fix particular cultural and embodied differences through the very act of mapping them, this concern is mediated by the acknowledgement that webs are contingent, changing and always constitutively linked to the positionality of the individual web weaver. On the whole, the relational web is a way of bringing together and potentially moving in a different direction various contemporary critical ideas relating to gender, embodiment, cultural difference, relationality, anti-essentialism, intersectionality and figuration. As I have developed it, a web framework provides a tool for tracing the relational constitution of particular salient categories of representation and is not intended to enable theorisation of complex processes of subject constitution. However, as discussed earlier, an approach to web weaving that involves tracing not only how particular binary strands are (re) produced, but also how they may fray and break under scrutiny, opens space for examining some of the fluid complexities of agency, subjectivity and lived experience that essentialist or fetishising constructions of particular cultural practices (and their imagined subjects) inevitably homogenise or conceal. This process could provide opportunities to theorise the interaction and intertwinement of ‘the real’ and ‘the imagined’, ‘the social’ and ‘the subjective’ and ‘the structural’ and ‘the psychic’ (Brah 1996a), with respect to how cultural essentialism is negotiated, produced and (potentially) resisted through engagements with gendered embodied practice.26 In the next section, I consider some of the political and ethical groundings, effects and potentialities of the relational web approach. This discussion enables me to return to some of the key critical themes, questions and debates raised in the preceding chapters of the book.

Groundings, effects and potentialities Historical analysis is central to the process of thinking through relational webs. One might therefore ask whether I am advocating historicising as ‘the solution’ to the problem of cultural (and other linked) essentialisms. One of my key critiques of feminist cross-cultural approaches is that, in focusing on commonality,

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equivalence or universality, they often fall into a rather ahistorical mode that elides the discursive-material processes through which practices have developed and gained meaning in specific contexts. Within a relational framework, historical tracing provides an important means of addressing this problem. It focuses on unravelling critical links between how practices are understood, represented and experienced in contemporary contexts and their social and political histories of production. I am aware, however, that (even critical) historical analysis has functioned repeatedly to reify dominant discursive and geopolitical hierarchies. Indeed, from Rey Chow’s perspective (1996), ‘the hasty supply of original “contexts” and “specificities” easily becomes complicitous in dominant discourse, which achieves hegemony precisely by its capacity to convert, recode, make transparent, and thus represent even those experiences that resist it with a stubborn opacity’ (130).27 Does my approach thus risk perpetuating epistemic violence in assuming ‘that the particularity of the other is within our grasp, that the place of the other is fully accountable from the outside’? (Shildrick, 1997: 3). In light of these concerns, I would emphasise that the historical analysis the web approach advocates is specifically genealogical (Foucault 1984; Butler 1990/ 1999). As such, my object has not been to uncover the ‘hidden truth’ of particular forms of embodied practice, or to restore ‘authenticity’ to the ‘native Other’ (Chow 1996), but rather to trace some of the processes and social relations through which particular cultural formations and binaries have come to be understood as ‘natural’. The web approach does not claim to represent any given practice or figure ‘fully’ or to provide a ‘comprehensive’ analysis of the infinite discursive-material traces which could be mapped in relation to any cultural formation. Instead, it seeks to identify and interrogate some of the points at which the constitutive trajectories of particular cultural practices or figures cross over and to theorise some of the implications of these articulations for how we understand relationships among gender, cultural difference and embodied practice. One might also ask whether a relational framework risks reifying the problematic links between comparativism and self-referentiality which feminist postcolonial theorists have so incisively critiqued.28 In The Age of the World Target: Self-referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work (2006), Chow suggests that poststructuralist approaches to theorising cultural difference frequently rely on and reproduce a problematic of (Western) self-referentiality whereby ‘what appears to lie “outside” can, indeed, must be continually recoded as what is inside’ and there is ‘hence no outside to the text’ (62). As she argues, When scholars of marginalised groups and non-Western subjects rely on notions of resistance (to Western theory) in their attempts to argue the specificity of X, they are unwittingly replicating the conundrum whereby the specificity of an object of study is conceived of in terms of a differential – a differential, moreover, that has to be incorporated in the chain of signification in order to attain recognition. (2006: 68)


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For Chow, theorising cultural difference outside this circular framework requires that we ‘restore words and things to their constitutive exteriority’ (23). Chow’s arguments raise a number of challenging questions for the relational approach I advocate. In concentrating on tracing constitutive connections between salient figures across cultural and geopolitical contexts, does the web approach risk perpetuating neocolonialist forms of knowledge making whereby the ‘non-Western’ other can be ‘known’ only via reference to the ‘Western’ self ? Does its focus on unravelling self/other binaries inevitably ‘fold on to itself, becoming self-referential and self-incarcerating’ (20)? In light of these concerns, I want to stress that a crucial point of the relational web approach is that it does not prioritise (and indeed seeks to displace) dominant coloniser/colonised binaries as the central mode of representation through which salient figurations are (re)produced. As I have discussed, it traces the ways in which notions of embodiment and cultural difference are produced through relations between multiple ‘selves’ and ‘others’ which exceed and/or fragment familiar (‘West/Third World’, ‘North/South’, ‘black/white’, ‘Muslim/non-Muslim’) dualisms (Brah 1996a; Ahmed 2000). In this respect, the web approach might be understood to work precisely ‘by combating the construction of the native as the straightforward or direct “other” to the coloniser’ (Chow 1996: 137). Furthermore, while I take Chow’s points about the theoretical and political risks of self-referentiality, I would maintain that a perspective which focuses on constitutive connections is necessary to help us grapple with, as Nikki Sullivan (2009) puts it, ‘the complex, intersecting, evershifting ways in which particular modes and practices of embodiment come to matter in relation’ (283, italics in original).29 A relational approach enables us to unpack how, rather than being ‘absolutely unrelated, polarised, or analogous’, embodied practices such as FGC and cosmetic surgery ‘are discursive constructs that come to matter in contextually specific ways and in relation to other discursive formation’ (282–3). To the extent that relational webs are always woven from the perspective of the individual tracer, who is embedded in particular geopolitical hierarchies and practices of knowledge making, ‘we’ may have to accept that ‘our’ analyses of gender, culture and embodied practice will, to some extent, remain inevitably self-referential. Indeed, Chow acknowledges that ‘referentiality may in the end require us to accept it more precisely as a limit’ (2006: 69). However, I maintain that a relational web approach can also serve as a tool to unravel and interrogate the politics of selfreferentiality, even as it may reproduce some of its problematics. Location, empathy and ‘generous’ encounters In addition to offering an analytical tool for theorising salient cultural formations and binaries, a relational web approach can also provide opportunities to reflect critically on the links among location, embodiment, power, rhetoric, ethics and knowledge within cross-cultural and transnational feminist theory projects.30 As I have suggested, decisions about how to proceed in

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weaving any particular relational web will always be in the hands of the individual tracer(s), and, as such, will be shaped by social location and political perspective. Differently situated tracers will inevitably produce different relational webs. In this vein, it is important to try to account for the ways in which the decisions one makes in constructing any relational web are shaped by one’s positionality. I have tried throughout this book to think critically about how my desire to choose certain paths, to develop specific arguments and to make particular connections have been influenced by my own social location. For example, the embodied practices which have been culturally salient to me as a feminist student (and now lecturer) living and working in the United Kingdom, and which I have opted to trace, are shaped by both my feminist lens and the multicultural Western industrialised context in which I am operating. Being an English-speaker working in a London-based university has also, to a great extent, determined the types of historical and contemporary texts I have had access to and drawn on in my genealogical tracings. My academic training has been primarily in poststructuralist and postcolonial feminist methodologies, and this has also influenced my focus on rhetorics, representation and the legacies of slavery, colonialism and imperialism in the (re)production of particular embodied practices and imagined figures. All these factors play into the type of relational web I will produce in respect to any particular cultural formations and thus need to be assessed critically and reflexively. While acknowledging the potential effects of my particular location on the type of web I may produce is a crucial step, it is also important to explore how and why my relational web might differ from a web produced by a theorist working from a different social location. For example, if the binary of ‘the cosmetic surgery consumer’ and ‘the victim of female genital cutting’ had been traced by a theorist centred in an African or Middle Eastern context, it would possibly look quite different from my web, although there may also be some important similarities and overlaps between the two webs. Discussing (with subjects located differently than oneself) the cultural and historical specificities relating to particular embodied practices or figures, and the structures of assumptions that underlie various theoretical formulations, could provide an opportunity to work through some of the challenges cultural translation raises within specific critical frameworks. This process could help theorists in various locations to become ‘accountable for [their] own investments in cultural metaphors and values’ (Kaplan 1994: 139) whilst also developing a better understanding and appreciation of the ways in which others’ cultural investments may differ from (as well as intersect with) their own. Ideally, then, the process of weaving relational webs and tracing the construction of hierarchical cultural and embodied ‘differences’ would become a collaborative cross-cultural project. The time and effort needed to weave relational webs are clearly great. As such, the web approach suggests ‘a politics invested more in its process than in its results’ (Grosz 2005: 2). If this process could be undertaken as a shared endeavour engaged in by two (or more) differently located


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subjects, perhaps this could be a way not only of sharing the labour, but also of facilitating discussion regarding the difference that location and perspective make to feminist theory, analysis and history as they relate to embodied cultural practice. By mutually tracing the ways in which particular embodied cultural, social and historical differences are constructed, it may be possible to engender crosscultural or transnational empathy in ways that acknowledge asymmetries of power and privilege and avoid relying on uncritical assertions of sameness. While my relational approach has not focused on theorising psychic processes of subject formation, one of the most powerful messages that the process of constructing a relational web imparts is how we are all interconnected discursively, historically, socially and politically. Within the web framework, any particular imagined subject is always inseparably linked though discursive and corporeal exchanges with multiple ‘selves’ and ‘others’ and hence is ‘partial’ (Haraway 1990) and ‘non-unitary’ (Braidotti 2006). The embodied ‘self ’, whether interpellated abstractly as ‘the victim of female genital mutilation’, ‘the cosmetic surgery rebel’, ‘the anorexic’, ‘the fashion-conscious Muslim girl’ or otherwise, is thus constructed not as a discrete, contained self, but rather as a ‘representational economy’ (Battaglia 1995: 2). As Deborah Battaglia puts it, the self is ‘a reification continually defeated by mutable entanglements with other subjects’ histories, experiences, self-representations; with their texts, conduct, gestures, objectifications’ (1995: 2). From this perspective, embodied subjectivity is never a completed or individual construction, but always unfinished, ongoing and mutual. Through understanding the constitutive links that bind us to (multiple) selves and others, perhaps we can develop empathetic connections across cultural and geopolitical contexts, not because our experiences are fundamentally similar or because we share common ‘cultural wounds’, but rather, on the basis of our fundamental discursive and social interdependence. In other words, a different kind of empathy might be engendered through recognising and mapping some of the specific ways in which we continuously affect one another and shape one another’s conditions and experiences, if unequally and often violently. As Butler argues, ‘this way of imagining community affirms relationality not only as a descriptive or historical fact of our formation, but also as an ongoing normative dimension of our social and political lives, one in which we are compelled to take stock of our interdependence’ (2004b: 27). Importantly, this empathy would not be produced through flattening distinctions of power between differently located subjects, or by obfuscating ‘privileged’ subjects’ complicity in the maintenance of hierarchies (Spelman 1997), but rather through developing understanding of how such relations of power operate and shape our multi-layered encounters with one another in ways that suggest both ‘radical complicities and radical indebtedness’ (Bell 2007: 24–5). That being said, empathy, like other affective relations, clearly cannot be ‘translated into an outcome’ which ‘would be knowable in advance’ of any social encounter (Ahmed 2004: 182). Moreover,

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in some circumstances, empathy involves ‘acknowledging the power differentials that make absolute mutuality or correspondence an impossibility’ (Ahmed 1998: 57).31 Crucially, the web approach’s aim is not exclusively to jolt oneself out of a particular view of seeing the world, but also to work towards producing more ‘generous’ theoretical and social encounters with the (multiple) selves and others to which one is constitutively linked. As I discussed in Chapter 1, Ahmed envisions a ‘generous’ encounter as one ‘which would recognise how the encounter itself is implicated in broader relations and circuits of production and exchange’ but would also offer room for ‘the one who is already assimilated’ to ‘move beyond the encounter which names her and holds her in place’ (2000: 152). In this vein, the web approach seeks both to recognise the complex relations of power that structure the ways in which discursivematerial encounters between various subjects operate and to allow for the possibility that subjects’ positionality will shift within and between encounters. Providing the possibility of mapping what Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan have referred to as ‘scattered hegemonies’, it may thus enable the production of ‘analysis that acknowledges our structurally asymmetrical links’ and refuses to ‘construct exotic authors and subjects’ (1994: 15). Negotiating anti-/new/post-humanisms In the first chapter of the book I suggested that desires to deconstruct essentialist cultural and bodily boundaries on the part of theorists who employ comparative approaches may be closely related to larger commitments to an ‘unfinished’ humanist project. I argued that such cross-cultural models sometimes imply a tenuous humanist claim (‘fundamentally, we are all the same’) and, as such, may not get at the core of the relationships of social antagonism which continually function to (re)constitute bodies differently. I maintained that we need to pay careful attention to the ways in which bodies are differentially (re)produced in ways that make containing (all of) them in one normalising humanist category problematic. The web approach clearly rejects the notion of the individualist, autonomous and self-contained subject upheld by traditional liberal humanist theory, envisioning instead a fragmented, non-unitary subject who is always linked to other subjects in a relational network. Rather than collapsing different bodies or embodied subjects into one single category or linear plane, the web approach seeks to recognise and account for the ongoing construction of embodied particularities (produced through the multiple intersections of gender, race, sexuality, class and nation, among other vectors). It thus makes a decisive move away from traditional liberal humanisms’ underlying assumptions of (disembodied) sameness. As discussed, a web framework proceeds from the assumption that bodies, as well as embodied practices and their imagined figures, cannot be separated from the contexts in which they are (re)constructed and gain meaning, but rather, must be theorised within


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those contexts. Moreover, it acknowledges that making discursive and/or political connections between various practices in different contexts often necessitates processes of cultural translation, which may not be easy, or indeed possible, in all circumstances – and which always proceed within and through wider hierarchies and relations of power. In Chapter 1, I also provided a brief mapping of how some of the key critical theorists that I draw on in this project, including Judith Butler, Sara Ahmed, Elisabeth Grosz, Rosi Braidotti, Margrit Shildrick, Moira Gatens, Raia Prokhovnik and Paul Gilroy, could be positioned in respect to various anti-/new humanist discourses. Some of these thinkers, I argued, seemed to be expressing a desire (similar to that illustrated by some advocates of comparative cross-cultural approaches) to reclaim and revise a critical ‘new’ humanist project. Since I began the research for this book in 2003, I have the sense that this desire has in some cases intensified. For example, in After Empire: Multiculture or Postcolonial Melancholia (2004), Paul Gilroy provides ‘a critique of racial hierarchy and the infrahuman life forms it creates’ which is informed by, in his words, an ‘unabashed humanism’ (xii). Extending the case he made in Against Race (2000) for the development of an ‘empathetically post-racial humanism’ (37), he argues for ‘a multicultural ethics and politics … premised upon an agnostic, planetary humanism capable of comprehending the universality of our elemental vulnerability to the wrongs we visit upon each other’ (2004: 4). Moreover, in Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (2006), Rosi Braidotti signals her desire to reclaim and radically revise (rather than abandon) the humanist project: ‘classical humanism needs to be reviewed and opened up to the challenges and complexities of our time … I offer a nomadic alternative of a sustainable ethical subject as a way of radicalising the humanist vision’ (35). Pushing forward her earlier argument for the development of what I referred to as a specifically ‘feminist’ humanism (2002: 58), she seeks in this text to develop a ‘materialist posthumanist ethics’ (Braidotti 2006: 182) anchored to a vision of a ‘non-unitary subject’ (35) linked to other subjects through relations of ‘deep affectivity’ (182). While Braidotti’s vision (which might be situated as ‘post-humanist’) differs from Gilroy’s in some significant aspects, they share a similar desire to salvage and redirect humanist-oriented ethics in more productive and inclusive ways. Even Judith Butler, who, along with Sara Ahmed and Elisabeth Grosz, I situated in my opening chapter as critical of new humanist positions, focuses in Undoing Gender on how the ‘human’ might be rethought and resignified by those who have been excluded from it (2004a: 13).32 Advocating what could be described as a ‘new humanist’ ethics, she argues for the importance of developing a ‘new legitimating lexicon for gender complexity’ within ‘law, within psychiatry, within social and literary theory’ which would effectively include and recognise those genders not currently ‘admitted to the terms that govern reality’ (219). In Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004b) she theorises the operation of a common human ‘corporeal vulnerability’ (42) which makes a ‘tenuous “we” of us all’ (20). She is careful to stress, however, that there is no guarantee that our common vulnerability will be

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recognised in any particular encounter: ‘In this sense, vulnerability is one precondition for humanisation, and humanisation takes place differently through different norms of recognition if it is to be attributed to any human subject’ (43). Indeed, in ‘Sexual Politics, Torture and Secular Time’ (2008), Butler suggests that the profound processes of dehumanisation integral to the torture and destruction of ‘Islamic populations’ in the ‘recent and current war’ represent the devastating consequences of the violent refusal, on the part of Western governments, militaries and citizens, to acknowledge the ethical implications of ‘our’ human ‘vulnerability’ (15).33 Meanwhile, other critical theorists have moved towards a more radical antihumanist perspective. For example, in Time Travels: Feminism, Nature and Power (2005), Elisabeth Grosz seeks to ‘push even further the drive to antihumanism that has been central in some key post-Foucauldian developments in feminist theory’ (185). Distinguishing her perspective from Butler’s focus on performative processes of ‘subject-constitution and consolidation’, she advocates a theoretical framework in which ‘inhuman forces, forces that are both living and nonliving, macroscopic and microscopic, above and below the level of human are acknowledged and allowed to displace the centrality of both consciousness and the unconscious’ (186). She argues for a ‘politics of imperceptibility, leaving its traces and effects everywhere but never being able to be identified with a person, group or organisation’ (194, italics in original). Grosz’s analysis can be linked to a wider ‘ontological turn’ within critical theory which has represented (in broad perspective) a shift away from concepts such as ‘subjectivity’ and ‘intersectionality’ and towards notions of ‘affect’ and ‘assemblage’.34 Jasbir Puar’s Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2008) provides a cogent example. While Puar acknowledges the ‘enduring capacities of intersectionality’ (202), she insists that it remains limited by its failure to interrogate ‘the predominance of subjecthood itself ’ (206). She examines how intersectional frameworks might be supplemented by a critical approach to assemblage, which ‘in its debt to ontology and its espousal of what cannot be known, seen, or heard, or has yet to be known, seen, or heard, allows for becoming beyond or without being’ (216).35 Similarly differentiating her critical approach from that of Butler, Puar emphasises that ‘One sees emerging through these practices not necessarily the crafting of the individual subject cohered through acquiescence to or internalisation of norms but assemblages of “militarised bodies”’ (156). How, therefore, can we situate the process of thinking through relational webs in respect to these various anti-/new/post-humanist perspectives? I do not understand the web framework as advocating a revised ‘humanist’ project similar to the one Gilroy envisions. On the one hand, Gilroy’s interest in interrogating dualistic pairings such as black/white, settler/native, coloniser/ colonised (2004: 45) and his desire to offer ‘multiple genealogies of racial discourse’ (31) seem very close to my own theoretical concerns. I share his perspective that such binaries should be investigated and unravelled ‘via a concept of relation’ and a focus on ‘the complex, tangled, profane and sometimes


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inconvenient forms of interdependency’ (45, italics in original). Indeed, this is precisely what a relational web approach seeks to do. On the other hand, his vision that such relational or genealogical work can and should necessarily lead to the development of a ‘post-racial humanism’ seems problematic. From my perspective, it may not be possible or desirable to dispense with embodied categories such as race in the way Gilroy imagines. The argument that particular categories of social differentiation can be disrupted and done away with does not address the ways in which bodies are produced and shaped in part through such categories, and hence bear their corporeal traces and effects. As Sara Ahmed puts it, ‘race, like sex, is sticky; it sticks to us, or we become “us” as an effect of how it sticks, even when we think we are beyond it’ (2004b: 12). In her view, dealing with the effects of racism requires us not to disavow or move beyond the ‘stickiness’ of race, but rather to ‘live with that stickiness, to think it, feel it, do it’ (12). This point about the impossibility of extracting race and sex from their constitutive role in shaping bodies relates to the differences between the various theoretical positions advocated by Butler, Grosz and Braidotti. While Grosz (2005) and Braidotti (2002, 2006) see Butler as advocating a project of ‘undoing gender’ (which might be seen as comparable to Gilroy’s project of ‘doing away’ with race), they argue that gender cannot be simply ‘undone’ as the effects of sexual differences remain permanently ingrained with particular bodies as a productive corporeal force. In relation to this debate, the web approach does not claim to provide a model through which gender, sex or race can be undone in any total sense of the word. Instead, it offers a framework that might allow us to better understand the discursive-material histories and encounters which shape (rather than determine) the contemporary formations and effects of such categories/processes. Illustrating that race, sex and gender have a history (indeed, multiple histories) not only disrupts their status as ‘natural’ or ‘essential’ categories (within, for example, culturally essentialist constructions of embodied practices such as female genital cutting and cosmetic surgery), but also provides an impetus for thinking through possibilities for their radical reconstruction or redeployment within specific contemporary contexts. Yet, following Grosz (2005) and other critical theorists such as Puar (2008), a relational approach must also acknowledge the contingency of these categories/processes; that we do not always know, and cannot presume, what they are, how they will take shape, or what they will do in particular contexts. Returning to Gilroy’s work, I would also question whether his notion of a new humanism that is specifically ‘post-racial’ problematically implies that race remains the only category preventing the development of a new humanist epoch – or, to put it another way, that doing away with one vector of social differentiation (race) and its oppressive and exclusionary effects will somehow also lead to the demise of all other vectors and their problematic effects (for example, gender, sexuality or nation). From a critical intersectional perspective, any radically new non-exclusive humanism would have to be inclusive of (and pay attention to the effects of) all categories of social differentiation (i.e.

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not just race). In this regard, it is interesting (and I would argue troubling) that Gilroy pays little attention to the ongoing oppressions and exclusions associated with categories such as gender and sexuality.36 In short, Gilroy’s new humanist vision problematically extricates race from its constitutive relationships with other axes of embodiment. He is not alone, however, in implying that ‘doing away’ with one oppressive social vector can bring down the whole house of embodied oppressions. As I discussed in Chapter 1, Margrit Shildrick (1997) has envisioned a rearticulation of the humanist subject through the development of a concept of radical sexual difference. While I have drawn on Shildrick’s deconstructive method as a critical model, her ‘new humanist’ approach, like Gilroy’s, is undercut by a failure to effectively integrate intersectionality (and its relationship to embodiment). While I do not see the web model as a ‘new humanist’ framework, I also would not categorise it as strictly ‘anti-humanist’ along the lines, for example, of Grosz’s project. Grosz’s interrogation of the ‘drive to identity, recognition, and self-affirmation’ within ‘contemporary feminist, queer and minoritarian politics and theory’ (2005: 186) provides an incisive critique of the ways in which critical politics can problematically reify, and indeed fetishise, particular identities and subjectivities. I share her perspective that developing ‘a politics of acts, not identities’ (186) might provide a means for critical feminist theory to break down essentialised constructions of gender, sex and culture and to open (rather than restrict) its possible future trajectories. Unlike Grosz, however, I do not think that we can or should dispense with concepts such as ‘subjectivity’ and ‘identity’ altogether. Like Puar (2008), I feel that ‘intersectional identities and assemblages must remain as interlocutors in tension’ (2008: 213). Examining and tracing the ways in which particular constructions of subjectivity and identity are (re)constructed and mobilised within specific contexts remains crucial not only to addressing embodied and epistemic oppressions, exclusions and violences, but also to tracing possible spaces for resistance. Furthermore, while I would argue that Gilroy’s new humanism privileges race problematically, Grosz’s anti-humanism, as I suggested in Chapter 2, maintains an exclusionary focus on sexual difference. Neither perspective offers the kind of critical engagement with intersectionality that I have argued remains crucial to maintaining rigorous analysis within critical theory of the ways in which bodies are constantly (re)produced differently. The relational web approach occupies a theoretical space somewhere between Gilroy’s humanism and Grosz’s anti-humanism (although, as I have suggested, it does not make sense to think of their perspectives simply as oppositional). While the web approach is based on a rejection of a rigid humanist notion of sameness and a recognition that bodies are constantly produced as different it is also underscored by a principle of relationality. Bodies and embodied subjectivities are constituted differentially through particular relations of power and thus cannot be subsumed within any normative category; however, they are also linked constitutively to other bodies and embodied subjectivities. In being (re)produced by and through others, ‘each of


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us carries with us “impressions” of those others’ which shape our bodies, gestures and turns of phrase’ (Ahmed 2004a: 166). As Vikki Bell puts it, ‘what is seen as one body is in fact made up of several bodies, entwined with various types of narratives’ (1996: 231). In this sense, relationality (and the notion of relational subjectivity the web approach implies) intervenes productively between sameness and difference, disrupting their dialectic relationship through theorising both particularity and connection. Importantly, as I have emphasised, connection is not the same as commonality. So, rather than providing a framework for theorising the ways in which we, despite our differences, all share basic or fundamental commonalities, the relational web approach offers a model which illustrates how we are all connected through, or because of, our differences.

Postscript

This book has argued that reorienting anti-essentialist feminist analysis from an emphasis on commonality to relationality allows more in-depth examination of the complex discursive, historical, social and political processes through which particular embodied practices and figurations have been both linked and constituted differently. This in turn enables greater attention to be paid to the ways in which practices may be both ‘known’ and experienced differently in different contexts, as well as to some of the specific formations and circuits through which cultural essentialism and racism have operated in relation to the representation of embodied practices. On the whole, and specifically through the web approach developed in its final chapter, the book seeks to generate a relational transnational feminist theory and politics premised predominantly not on the recognition that our experiences are essentially similar, or that we have suffered common ‘cultural wounds’, but rather on the basis of our fundamental discursive and social interdependence – that is, how we both depend on and affect one another both within and across cultural and geopolitical contexts. Potential directions for future research in this context are multiple. For example, while my project has concentrated primarily on the similar theoretical, social and political effects that various comparative cross-cultural approaches may produce, it would be productive to examine the significance of their differences in further depth. How, for instance, does the social and geopolitical location from which particular cross-cultural parallels are constructed make a difference to the potential political effects of such comparisons? How might location shape the ways in which various cross-cultural comparisons are interpreted by different audiences? Moreover, my focus has been on how making links between different cultural practices is employed as a rhetorical strategy within feminist theory. It would also be useful to examine how comparative cross-cultural strategies are mobilised specifically within feminist and other forms activism or how they might be employed within more mainstream or popular cultural mediums. In this vein, we might consider whether, in addition to its potential contribution to feminist theory projects, the web approach might be utilised or adapted by activists or practitioners working ‘on the ground’. In conclusion, the web I have begun to

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weave here suggests one particular path (produced from my own specific social perspective) that the development of a critical relational approach of this nature might take. It is unfinished and, as such, unfixed. I would encourage others to build on it, critique it, or to explore alternative paths, directions or shapes that such a project might take.

Notes

Introduction 1 While all cultural, religious and political practices are ‘embodied’ in the broadest sense of the word, I use the term ‘embodied practices’ to refer to those habits, rituals or performances that are oriented specifically towards intervening in and/or altering ‘the body’. 2 See Narayan 1997, 1998; Volpp 2001; Phillips 2007; Razack 2008. 3 I have chosen the label ‘female genital cutting’ (FGC) to refer to the broad group of procedures which are, or have been, practised (with great variation) within some African, Asian and Middle Eastern countries (i.e. Sudan, Somalia, Yemen, Egypt, Mali, Kenya and Ethiopia) and their diasporic communities. I have selected the label FGC as it avoids the pejorative tone of the term ‘female genital mutilation’ as well as the equation with male circumcision that the label ‘female circumcision’ implies. I also avoid using the terms ‘clitoridectomy’ and ‘infibulation’, which refer only to more specific forms of FGC. These are value-laden choices, however, as there is much controversy regarding what an appropriate label to identify such practices is, or whether it is appropriate to use one label to identify such a wide variety of practices (see Sullivan 2007: 400; Njambi 2009: 172). Some alternative labels that have been employed include the terms ‘female genital surgeries’, ‘female genital operations’ and ‘female genital alterations’. 4 For a historical analysis of such procedures, see Barker Benfield 1975. 5 As I discuss in Chapter 3, practices of FGC understood to be rooted in African, Asian and Middle Eastern contexts have also been compared to a host of other so-called ‘Western’ practices such as cosmetic breast augmentation, operations on intersex babies, body modification procedures (such as piercing, branding and cutting), transsexual surgery, female reproductive procedures (such as episiotomy, hysterectomy and caesarean sections), abortion and eating disorders, as well as various ‘non-Western’ practices, including Chinese foot-binding and Indian sati (or widow burning). 6 Parallels have also been drawn between Muslim veiling and other so-called ‘nonWestern’ practices such as surgical hymen repair (Saharso 2003). 7 See also Volpp 2000; Phillips 2003, 2004. 8 See Toubia 1988; Gunning 1991; Ahmed 1992; Golë 1996; Engle and Khanna 1997; Abusharaf 2001; Njambi 2004, 2009. 9 See Davis 2004; Njambi 2004; Pedwell 2008a. 10 See Duits and van Zoonen 2006, 2007; Gressgård 2006; Gill 2007. 11 See Braun 2009; Kennedy 2009; Sullivan 2009. 12 See Meyers 2000. 13 See Sheldon and Wilkinson 1998.

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See Nasser 1999. See Gunning 1991. See http://research.iainmorland.net/index.blog?topic_id=1018924. See http://comentisfree.guardian.co.uk/cath_elliot/2008/01/designer _vaginas_anyone. html. See Ahmed 2007. See Narayan 1997, 1998; Volpp 2001; Phillips 2007. Wariumi Njambi (2009) suggests, for example, that the label ‘female genital mutilation’ functions like colonial ‘travelling metaphors’ of the past in that it lumps ‘together all non-European others along with their cultures under a single rubric as a convenient means of managing their differences’: ‘Rooted deeply in Western Christian and scientific understandings of nature and bodies, the term FGM, like the colonising travelling metaphor, is interested in managing female genital practices in Africa by eliminating their differences and complexities’ (172). See Meredith Jones (2008) for an analysis of the specific histories, forms and meanings of cosmetic surgery in countries including Saudi Arabia, Brazil, China and Japan. As Jones argues, ‘Global media perpetuate global ideas about beauty and project “master terms” that most people who choose cosmetic surgery are aware or influenced by’, but ‘cosmetic surgery in any geographic context is also subject to local economic, social and political factors, to “upwardly mobile” class aspirations and to definitions of national and domestic identity’ (42). See also Elam and Wiegman 2003; Hemmings 2005, 2011; Bell 2007. See Stoler 2006; Sullivan 2007, 2009. See Mohanty 2002; Grewal 2005; Puar 2008. For an example of such critiques in the feminist academic literature see Nussbaum (1998). For examples in mainstream media see responses to Elliot (2008) in The Guardian: http://comentisfree.guardian.co.uk/cath_elliot/2008/01/designer_vaginas_anyone.html. With respect to wider academic, medical and political contexts see analysis in Sullivan, 2009: 218; Braun, 2009: 234. For an important exception see Sullivan (2009), who provides an incisive critique of ‘analogical’ approaches to genital modifications (which link FGC to other procedures such as intersex surgery). She argues that in ‘appropriating the other’s corporeality in the service of one’s own view of the idea, “natural” human state’, analogies, deny ‘the historic-discursive construction of particular modes and practices of embodiment, and their relation to other somatic technologies’ (280). I use the term ‘discursive-material’ to convey the complex coimbrication of ‘discursive’ and ‘material’ processes and structures of power. I use the term ‘imagined subjects’ to refer to the figurative representations which have become associated with particular embodied practices, for example the ubiquitous figure of ‘the victim of female genital mutilation’ that has become fused to practices of FGC within both feminist and mainstream discourse (see Pedwell 2008a). As categories of representation, figures such as ‘the victim of female genital mutilation’ must of course be distinguished from ‘embodied, situated, historical subjects with varying and diverse personal or collective biographies and social orientations’ (Brah 1996a: 131). Yet these figures also have specific social and material implications: Each figuration of ‘the victim of female genital mutilation’ ‘not only condenses particular semiotic practices, but also brings a particular version of the world into being’ (Castañeda 2002: 4). See also Said 1978; Ahmed 1992; Gilroy 2000, 2004. See also Mohanty 1991; Naryan 1997, 1998. In Stanton’s words, ‘The prolonged slavery of women is the darkest page in human history’ (Stanton, cited in Spelman 1997: 111). See also Schueller 2004. Critical theorists have also interrogated the use of analogies within gay and lesbian civil rights discourses. As Jasbir Puar (2008) notes, the ‘analogizing of race and

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sexuality has a protracted history in gay liberationist tenets that eventually rendered sexuality a form of minoritization parallel to ethnicity and race’ (118). From her perspective, in suggesting that ‘gays and lesbians are the last recipients of civil rights that have already been bestowed on racial minorities’, this approach ‘relieves mainstream gays, lesbians, and queers from any accountability to antiracist agendas, produces whiteness as a queer norm (and straightness as a racial norm), and fosters anti-intersectional analyses that posit sexual identity as “like” or “parallel to” race’ (118). See also Somerville 2000; Stokes 2001; Ferguson 2004. Crenshaw’s analysis drew on and developed earlier Black feminist analyses. See, for example, Combahee River Collective 1997/1977; Feminist Review 17 (1984). See Hill Collins 1990; Spelman 1990; Brah 1996a, b; Somerville 2000; Brah and Phoniex 2004; Schueller 2005; Puar 2008. Relationality has obviously also been theorised extensively from other disciplinary perspectives, such as critical sociology and anthropology, psychoanalysis and Marxist economics, which I do not draw on explicitly in this book. See also Haraway 1989, Ahmed 2000 and Tyler 2008, who employ figurative methodologies. For feminist analyses of how figures such as the ‘the Muslim woman’ and ‘the veiled woman’ have been constituted as cultural metaphors with a range of problematic implications, see Ahmed 1992; Yeg˘ enog˘ lu 1998; Puar 2008; Razack 2008. Through this analysis I also employ figuration, as Imogen Tyler (2008) does, ‘to describe the ways in which at different historical and cultural moments, specific “social types” become over-determined and are publically imagined (and figured) in excessive, distorted, and caricatured ways’ (8). As Tyler argues in her analysis of class and representations of the ‘chav mum’ in the British media, the emergence of such fetishised figures ‘is always expressive of an underlying social crisis or anxiety’ (8).

1 Comparing cultures 1 See Toubia 1988; Gunning 1991; James and Robertson 2002; Njambi 2004; Sullivan 2007; Kennedy 2009. 2 Jeffreys is referring to the UN ‘Fact Sheet No. 23,’ ‘Harmful Traditional Practices Affecting the Health of Women and Children’ published in 1995. 3 As Brah (1996a) explains, a ‘binary is a socially constructed category whose trajectory warrants investigation in terms of how it was constituted, regulated, embodied and contested, rather than always already taken as present’ (184). Clearly, binaries are only one particular mode (among others) through which essentialism is (re) produced. However, analysing the constitutive effects of a salient binary – that is, ‘investigating the conditions of its formation, its implication in the inscription of hierarchies, and its power to mobilize collectivities’ (184) – provides a productive means of probing the complex operation of cultural, racial and sexual essentialisms in a specific context. 4 See also Judith Butler (2008), who argues that, in producing Europe as ‘a privileged site of radical freedom’ which ‘must be protected against the putative orthodoxies associated with new immigrant communities’, Western state discourses premised on a problematic understanding of cultural wholism can ‘facilitate a political division between progressive sexual politics and the struggle against racism and the discrimination of religious minorities’ (Butler 2008: 2–3; see also Scott 2007; McRobbie 2009). 5 It has also been argued that cultural essentialism is sometimes produced through efforts intended to prevent gender essentialism. As Narayan (1998) suggests, ‘The project of attending to differences among women across a variety of national and

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cultural contexts then becomes a project that endorses and replicates problematic and colonialist assumptions about the cultural differences between “Western culture” and “non-Western cultures”, and the women who inhabit them. Seemingly universal essentialist generalizations about “all women” are replaced by culturespecific essentialist generalizations that depend on totalizing categories’ (italics in original) (87). Butler takes up this argument in Precarious Life (2004b), suggesting that the racialising of culture operative in the US sociopolitical sphere not only positions some subjects as ‘victims of their cultures’, but also constructs some lives and bodies as more disposable than others. See also Butler 2008. One pervasive strand of feminist discourse relating to ‘strategic’ or ‘provisional’ essentialism involves debates over whether Luce Irigaray’s (1985) approach to sexual difference can be considered problematically essentialist. Early critics of Irigaray’s work, such as Toril Moi (1985), objected to Irigaray’s ‘essentialist’ position of women and femininity. Contemporary advocates of Irigaray’s approach, such as Diana Fuss (1989), Elizabeth Grosz (1989, 1994, 2005), Naomi Schor (1994), Margaret Whitford (1994) and Rosi Braidotti (2002, 2006), however, argue that her ‘essentialism’ is in fact strategic or provisional. They insist that her project should ultimately be understood as one geared towards affirmative deconstruction. The major misinterpretation of Irigaray’s work, they claim, has been to see her essentialism as the final stage, when it is actually part of a larger deconstructive process. Interestingly, other theorists advocate the development of new forms of ‘essentialist’ feminist analysis. For example, Mridula Nath Chakraborty (2004) argues for an ‘embodied essentialism’ imagined within the locus of race. For her, current trends of anti-essentialism merely reinscribe the racist and ethnocentric assumptions of hegemonic feminist theorising. Focusing on histories of slavery, imperialism, colonisation and global capitalism, this embodied essentialism would provide an in depth reading of the race relations structuring feminist knowledge. See also Zack 2005. Prokhovnik’s (2002) strategy is conceived in two steps but is quite similar, as she takes Shildrick’s first step as a given. Her steps include: (1) increase women’s visibility rather than attempt to degender women, (2) construct a relational mind– body connection, expressed in the recognition of corporeal subjectivity (11). I do not want to claim, however, that such deconstructive strategies can be (unproblematically) conceptualised as involving three discrete and sequential steps. I take Susan Bordo’s (1993) point that, as ‘relocations of this sort are always concrete, historical events enacted by real people, they cannot challenge every insidious duality in one fell swoop, but neither can they reproduce exactly the same condition as before “in reverse”’ (32). Clearly, as Shildrick and Prokhovnik point out, the steps overlap in different ways and therefore cannot be separated entirely. This is why, for them, each step must be conceived of and tackled as part of an integrated scheme, and not in isolation. Making a distinction between ‘short-term’ (second step) and ‘long-term’ (third step) goals is important, however, as trying to do both at the same time generates confusion (Prokhovnik 2002:163). As Narayan suggests in her conclusion, not only are the statistics for the deaths of women as a result of the two practices of violence comparable, but so are the reasons given by women in both contexts for remaining in abusive marriages, including ‘economic dependency, worries about the custody and welfare of children … and the threats of violence that have followed upon previous attempts at leaving’ (1997: 115). See, for example, Hirschmann 1998; Honig 1999; Sullivan 2007. See also Frankenberg and Mani 1993; Chow 2006. See also England 1994.

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15 In their introduction to this special issue, Njambi, Murray and Sullivan articulate their aim ‘to traverse critical avenues that diverge from current impasses in debates around specific genital practices (often considered in isolation) with a view to beginning conversations that bring a range of practices and experiences into dialogue with one another in order to consider genital modifications in new and compelling ways’ (2009: 147). In her feature article, Sullivan seeks to tie together ‘the critical enterprise of [the] special issue by introducing the term “transsomatchnics”, which enables examination of a range of genital modifications together whilst holding them in what she calls a “productive tension”’ (2009: 148). See also Pedwell 2007, 2008. 16 Mohanty’s note reads: ‘For an argument which demands a new concept of humanism in work of third world women see Lazreg: “ … when feminists essentially deny other women the humanity they claim for themselves, they dispense with any ethical constraint. They engage in the act of splitting the social universe into ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’”’ (Lazreg, cited in Mohanty 1991: 77). 17 For discussion of how particular cultural ‘wounds’ can become problematically transformed into identities, see Brown 1995 and Ahmed 2004a. 18 From a slightly different perspective, feminist cross-cultural approaches may be understood as responses to a ‘cross-cultural nihilism’. These comparative frameworks may be interpreted as calling attention to the ways in which women’s bodies are violated and damaged across cultures in ways that signal a common (problematic) will to power which represents a fundamental inhumanity. In this sense, cross-cultural or transnational invocations of empathy may be employed to counter nihilism. This reading links with Gilroy’s vision of a ‘planetary humanism capable of comprehending the universality of our elemental vulnerability to the wrongs we visit upon each other’ (Gilroy 2004: 4; see also Butler 2004b, 2008). 19 The differences between Grosz’s approach and Butler’s approach indicate, for example, two significantly different embodied strategies of deconstruction. Influenced by Monique Wittig’s work, Butler believes that the categories of sex and gender can be radically disrupted through parodic acts which reveal their constructed nature. By contrast, because Irigarian influenced theorists such as Grosz and Rosi Braidotti see sexual difference as irreducible they believe that ‘feminists cannot afford to merely cast off their sexed identity’. Instead, they need to radically repossess it (Braidotti 1994: 120). Shildrick and Prokhovnik’s three-step deconstructive strategy involves a similar process of ‘repossession’. Thus Grosz and Braidotti’s approaches may be described as seeking to repossess the feminine through an affirmative mode of mimesis and Butler’s strategy might be articulated as aiming to disrupt the feminine through a parodic practice of performativity. 20 Rosi Braidotti’s (2002) position complicates this anti-/new humanist divide between critical feminist perspectives on embodiment. On the one hand, her focus on sexual difference and her emphasis on embodied materialism provides a radical anti-humanist critique of the traditional humanist subject. She also underscores the importance of resisting ‘the uncritical reproduction of sameness on a molecular, global or planetary scale’ (13–22). On the other hand, her Irigarian linking of sexual difference with ‘issues of transcendence and universality’ suggests that underlying her motivations for resignifying binary sexual differences is a desire to develop a new feminist humanism (58). Thus what Braidotti’s position throws up is the need to make a distinction between ‘new humanist’ projects per se (whereby all human beings might be acknowledged and represented as human, first and foremost, and not as ‘sexed’ or ‘raced’ in specific ways) and ‘feminist (or feminine) new humanist strategies’ aimed at creating a new version of humanity whereby sexed subject positions are assumed from the start. Braidotti may be more aligned in this respect with Shildrick, who also envisions a rearticulation of the humanist subject through the development of a concept of radical sexual difference.

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21 As I discuss in Chapter 5, Elizabeth Grosz takes a more decisive ‘anti-humanist’ stance than either Butler or Ahmed. 22 See also Butler 2008. 23 See also Spelman 1997; Chabot Davis 2004. 24 It is also clear that reading all forms of FGC (or other body modifications) as ‘wounds’ or ‘injuries’ reifies (rather than disrupts) culturally essentialist and colonialist frameworks, which are premised on processes of imperialist exclusion rather than (new humanist) inclusion.

2 Critical frameworks 1 I employ the label ‘Black feminist’ to signify a specific political position and perspective, rather than a fixed embodied identity category. 2 It is important to acknowledge that the history and development of feminist approaches to intersectionality differ in other geopolitical contexts. This is partly because categories of social and embodied differentiation, such as gender, race, sexuality, class and gender, do not retain the same meaning across different cultural contexts. Bahovec and Hemmings (2004) explore, for example, the ways in which the meaning of concepts such as sex and gender are ‘context specific across space and time’ (334). Moreover, Knapp (2005) has addressed how the Anglo-American triad of ‘race–class–gender’ does not hold the same resonance in the German context: ‘Rasse [race] is a category that cannot be used in an affirmative way in Germany,’ she explains: ‘it is neither possible to ascribe a Rasse to others nor is it acceptable to use Rasse as a basis for identity claims, which by comparison is a common practice in the United States’ (256). 3 See also Elizabeth Spelman’s Inessential Woman (1990), which analyses the texts of founding second-wave feminist theorists such as Kate Millet, Shulamith Firestone, Betty Friedan and Mary Daly to illustrate the problems associated with additive analyses of gender and race that privilege one as more fundamental than the other. She argues that ‘as long as race is taken to be independent of sex, racism as independent of sexism, we are bound to give seriously misleading descriptions of gender and sexual relations’ (117). It remains crucial for feminism to address ‘how one form of oppression is experienced is influenced by and influences how another form is experienced’ (123). 4 In June 1983, several Black feminists were approached by a member of the Feminist Review collective with the suggestion of doing a special issue on black women in Britain. However, as editors Valerie Amos, Gail Lewis, Amina Mama and Pratibha Parmar recount, we were ‘only prepared to consider using this form if we could have complete editorial autonomy, which was agreed’ (Amos et al. 1984: 1). 5 In a more recent publication, ‘Ain’t I a Woman? Revisiting Intersectionality’ (2004), Avtar Brah and Ann Phoenix employ a broader perspective on intersectionality which encompasses the articulation of multiple axes of social differentiation within numerous overlapping frames of social analysis, including the ‘economic, political, cultural, psychic, subjective and experiential’ in ‘historically specific contexts’ (76). From this perspective, intersectionality signifies not only the importance of multiaxial analysis, but also the necessity of an interdisciplinary feminist framework. 6 For examples of feminist texts which draw on Crenshaw’s analyses see Butler 1997a; Narayan 1997; Knapp 2005; McCall 2005; Zack 2005; Nash 2008. 7 In an article published two years later, Crenshaw (1991) extends her analysis of how race and gender interact in black women’s experiences of violence, employing domestic violence and rape as case studies. In both cases, she emphasises, linear feminist or anti-racist analyses which fail to address the ways in which ‘systems of race, gender and class domination converge’ produce inadequate theories of

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violence against black women and lead to ineffective interventions (1246). Singleaxis frameworks also constitute counterproductive resistance strategies for feminist and anti-racist politics as ‘the failure of feminism to interrogate race means that the resistance strategies of feminism will often replicate and reinforce the subordination of people of color, and the failure of antiracism to interrogate patriarchy means that antiracism will frequently reproduce the subordination of women’ (1252). See, for example, Brah 1996a, b; Brah and Phoenix 2004; McCall 2005; Shueller 2005; Puar 2008. In recent years, a number of international feminist conferences and workshops have focused on intersectionality, and journals such as Politics and Gender (2007) and the European Journal of Women’s Studies (2006) have dedicated special issues to it. While Zack (2005) is clearly aware of the problems associated with generalising frameworks employed within feminist theory in the past, she argues that it is now time for a return to essentialism, yet this time a ‘relational essentialism’ which theorises women’s commonality without denying diversity or inequality. See Flax 1987; Hekman 1990; Butler 1999/1990, 1992; Ahmed 1998. Clearly, however, as an intersectional approach would stress, ‘Black feminists’, ‘lesbian feminists’, ‘working-class feminists’ and ‘postmodernist feminists’ are not mutually exclusive categories. As Avtar Brah (1996a) notes, for example, ‘Black feminism in Britain emerged in conversation with a number of political tendencies. It was partly formed around politics of the “black”, partly within the nexus of global class politics, while simultaneously articulating a constitutive moment within British feminism, and gay and lesbian politics. It interrogated these political formations even as it was a product of the relationality between them’ (13). Schueller (2005) argues that influential critical feminist texts which continue to be highly salient within feminist theory and practice, including Gayle Rubin’s ‘Thinking Sex’ (1984) and Donna Haraway’s ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ (1990), ‘offer the dominant paradigm for the imperialist incorporation of women of color in contemporary gender and sexuality studies: incorporation by analogy’ (65). While Haraway’s more recent text, Modest_Witness (1997), as well as Judith Butler’s Bodies that Matter (1993) further ‘feminist theory’s investigation of race’, she suggests, ‘they simultaneously continue to include race analogically’ (65). See, for example, Butler 1999/1990; Nash 2008. It should be acknowledged, however, that some key feminist texts employing intersectional frameworks have emphasised the importance of tracing the relational social and historical processes through which embodied categories have been produced and reified. Hazel Carby (1987), for example, examines how norms of white and black femininity in the antebellum American south were constructed relationally through ‘two very different but interdependent codes of sexuality’ which produced ‘opposing definitions of motherhood and womanhood for white and black women which coalesce in the figures of the slave and the mistress’ (20). See also Brah’s (1996a) analysis of ‘differential racisms’, which I discuss later in the chapter. Another important set of questions which I do not have space to address here in any depth concern the possibilities and implications of intersectionality as a ‘travelling theory’. Does intersectionality remain limited by its Anglo-American roots? Can it account for specificity across cultural and geopolitical contexts? What are the problems involved in transposing Anglo-American intersectional frameworks on transnational contexts? (See Bahovec and Hemmings 2004; Puar 2008.) Again, ‘Black’, ‘radical’ and ‘lesbian’ feminism should clearly be taken not as discrete categories but rather as political designations which overlap and intersect. See Jennifer Nash (2008), who argues that Crenshaw ‘offers little attention to the ways in which race and gender function as social processes in distinctive

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ways for particular back women in varying historical moments. That is, black women’s race and gender are treated as transhistorical constants that mark all black women in similar ways’ (7). She contends that the theoretical reliance on black women’s experiences of subjectivity and oppression within intersectionality ‘has obscured the question of whether all identities are intersectional or whether only multiply marginalized subjects have an intersectional identity’ (9). From her perspective, ‘progressive scholarship requires a nuanced conception of identity that recognizes the ways in which positions of dominance and subordination work in complex and intersecting ways to constitute subjects’ experiences of personhood’ (11). Theorising both particularity and relationality in this way is also crucial to the project of disrupting essentialist binaries. In order to resignify binary structures we need to understand and illustrate how they are (re)formed and operate in various contexts. It should be noted, however, that several Black feminist approaches to intersectionality developed in the 1980s and 1990s were also postcolonial in their perspective. See, for example, Feminist Review issue 17 (1984); Amos and Parmar 1984; Brah 1996a, b. See Spivak 1988; Mohanty 1991; Aziz 1992; Grewal and Kaplan 1994; McClintock 1995; Brah 1996a; Yeg˘ enog˘ lo 1998; Ahmed 2000, 2004a; Lewis and Mills 2003; R. Lewis 2004 and G. Lewis 2006. Mohanty first published a version of this article in 1984, following up with a revised version in 1988 and a subsequent version in 1991, which I draw on here. Brah’s (1996a) examination of ‘differential racialisation’ is central to my own relational analysis, and particularly Chapter 5, where I develop the idea of the ‘relational web’ as a framework for theorising the links among embodied practices and figures in ways that may avoid flattening out differences and relations among practices. Mohanty problematises her earlier construction of ‘Western hegemony’ in ‘Under Western Eyes Revisited’ (2002): ‘Within the United States, the European Community, and Japan as the nodes of capitalist power in the twenty first century, the increasing proliferation of Third and Fourth Worlds within the national borders of these countries, as well as the rising visibility and struggles for sovereignty by First Nations/indigenous peoples around the world, Western and Third World explain much less than the categorizations North/South or One-Third/Two-Third Worlds’ (505, italics in original). I am using the term ‘queer’ broadly here to refer to critical literature which critiques binary constructions of heterosexuality and homosexuality as well as stable notions of lesbian, gay (or straight) identification. There are many diversities and specificities within this literature, however, which complicate and fracture any notion of ‘queer studies’ as an overarching or all-encompassing theoretical or disciplinary designation. See, for example, Foucault 1978, 1984; Butler 1999/1990, 1993, 2004a, b; de Lauretis 1991; Sedgwick 1991; Fuss 1991; Epstein and Straub 1991; Hemmings 2002; Halberstam 1998, 2005; Prosser 1998; Fausto-Sterling 2000; Ahmed 2006; Puar 2008. I save discussion of Butler’s framework until the next section on critical feminist perspectives on embodiment. In Bisexual Spaces (2002), Clare Hemmings investigates ‘the repeated production of bisexuality within much queer and feminist theory as an abstract and curiously lifeless middle ground’ (1). In Second Skins: Body Narratives of Transsexuals (1998) Jay Prosser examines the ways in which the ‘transgender subject’ is (re)produced as the subject who crosses, and hence subverts, boundaries through constructing the ‘transsexual subject’ as the agent that reifies them (5). Similarly, though from a different perspective, Judith Halberstam interrogates the subversive/ conformist binary construction of ‘butch lesbian’ and ‘FTM transsexual’ in Female

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Masculinity (1998) by examining ‘the differences and continuities between transsexual, transgender, and lesbian masculinities’ (142). See Combahee River Collective (19997/1977) and Feminist Review, issue 17 (1984). In Feminist Review, for example, Amos and Parmar (1984) point out that while debates around sexuality ‘rage virulently among white feminists … many Black women have rightly felt that we do not have the “luxury” of engaging with them in the context of the intense racism of the British state’ (11). This does not, the authors pointed out, mean that black women in Britain ‘have not always thought about and discussed these issues with each other’ but, rather, that the ways in which they have ‘discussed and prioritized issues around sexuality have differed markedly from white women’ (11–12). Moreover, when ‘challenging heterosexuality as the norm many Black lesbians have had to face the profound homophobia of both Blacks and whites’ (12). Similarly, while Said’s analysis of Orientalism has been interrogated on the grounds that it does not deal effectively with gender, it has also been criticised for reifying heterosexuality. For example, Joseph Boone (2001) argues that Said’s analysis of colonialist erotics remains ‘ensconced in conspicuously heterosexual interpretive frameworks’ (44). See also Mason Stokes (2001) and Roderick Ferguson (2004), who trace how ‘whiteness’ congealed as a category during the same time period through its ‘ambivalent proximity to, and interaction with heterosexuality’ (Stokes, 2001: 13) and the simultaneous establishment of ‘African American corporeal difference as the sign of nonheteronormativity’ (Ferguson, 2004: 20–1). Similarly, Somerville (2000) examines how the figures of ‘the mulatto’ and ‘the invert’ were constituted relationally within both nineteenth-century sexological texts and later psychological discourses. The term ‘passing’ describes an individual (or group of people) regarded by others as belonging to an identity group (i.e. race, gender, sexuality, class, religion, etc.) which is not their ‘own’. Thus a person who considers herself to be, or has habitually been labelled by others as, ‘black’ may, in particular circumstances, pass for ‘white’. Passing may be motivated by a wide range of overlapping (and conflicting) concerns, from safety and social mobility to erotic excitement and pleasure and may be deliberate or unintended, permanent or temporary. See Epstein and Straub 1991; Garber 1992; Tyler 1994; Bell 1996; Ahmed 1999; Schlossberg 2001; Halberstam 2001, 2005. It should be acknowledged that several critiques of Butler’s notion of performativity suggest that it is inherently a disembodied approach. Grosz (2005) and Braidotti (2002) argue that, in reducing morphology and corporeality to discursive practices, Butler ultimately de-emphasises the embodied nature of the subject. Furthermore, Lynne Pearce (2004) claims that performativity is probably the ‘most striking and familiar instance of disembodied thinking in 1990s feminist and cultural theorising’ (144). From her perspective the linguistic performative ‘is not adequate in all the contexts that Butler uses it and all the different things she clearly hopes it will suggest’ (144). What is common to these critiques is the assertion that linguistic strategies are ultimately ineffective in this context, because they function to reduce everything to discourse. I accept that Butler’s theory is geared more to language than to the materiality of the body. However, I do not agree with the charge that her approach is fundamentally limited by its focus on language or that performativity is essentially disembodied. I think that Butler makes some convincing arguments about why taking materiality for granted as irreducible can be a dangerous exercise, and her suggestion that ‘feminists should be invested not in taking materiality as an irreducible, but in conducting a critical genealogy of its formulation’ is key (1993: 32). Theorists of performativity in fact seek to trace the relationship between ‘the linguistic’ and ‘the material’ as opposed

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to permanently dismissing the latter in favour of the former. As Butler emphasises, performativity is not just about speech acts, but also about bodily acts – and more specifically the relation between them (2004a: 198). While some scholars argued that feminist studies had much to learn from postmodernist and poststructuralist perspectives (see Flax 1987; Hekman 1990; Butler 1992), others voiced concern that, in dismissing the ‘grand narratives’ of modernity and facilitating deconstruction of the category ‘women’ into an array of multiple and fragmented identities, postmodernist frameworks obscured material inequalities between the sexes (see Klein 1991). It was also claimed that deconstructive postmodernist approaches bolstered post-feminist claims regarding the ‘death of feminism’ and feminist studies (see De Groot and Maynard 1993). Butler’s genealogical approach (1999/1990, 1993), which draws significantly on Foucault’s reformulation of Nietzche (Foucault 1984), offers a different resiginificatory approach to Shildrick’s and Prokhovnik’s three-step deconstructive strategy because it does require a provisional phase of binary reversal. From Grosz’s perspective, ‘Darwin provides an ironic and indirect confirmation of the Irigarian postulation of the irreducibility, indeed ineliminability, of sexual difference, and its capacity to play itself out in all races and across all modes of racial difference’ (1999: 42). hooks (1992) argues in regard to Livingston’s film that ‘within the world of the black gay drag ball culture she depicts, the idea of womanness and femininity is totally personified by whiteness’ (147). From her perspective, what viewers are seeing in the film is ‘not black men longing to impersonate or even to become like “real” black women but their obsession with an idealised fetishized version of femininity that is white’ (147): ‘The film in no way interrogates whiteness’ (149). Furthermore, Fusco, along with Jacquelyn Zita (1998), cites Butler’s claim that Livingston’s apparently ‘gender-bending’ gaze (as director) subverts ethnographic convention as another instance of sex and gender taking priority over race in her analysis. They argue that, while Butler wants to see the possibility of a white lesbian director’s desire for a black transvestite subject as transgressive because it introduces ambiguity which subverts gender identity, such a perspective functions to efface histories of racial exploitation that cross genders and sexualities. From Fusco’s perspective, Butler’s reading of the film reveals a tendency to fetishise crossing as inherently transgressive, which depends on once again positing sex and sexuality as primary and downplaying the role of race. I do, however, want to acknowledge the productive feminist work that seeks to trace links between psychoanalytical and postcolonial perspectives. See, for example, Ranjana Khanna’s Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism (2003). These themes are developed further in Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (2006), in which Ahmed examines the relationships between phenomenology, queer theory and Orientalism. In this sense, while my framework seeks to incorporate some of the most productive insights of intersectionality, it may not itself be characterised as ‘intersectional’ if intersectionality remains associated with a more deterministic project of examining the ways in which particular pre-formed vectors come together to produce experiences of oppression or with a superficial process of paying lip service to the ‘race–class–gender’ triad.

3 Continuums and analogues 1 As noted in the Introduction, I use labels such as ‘African practices of FGC’ and ‘Western body-altering procedures’ to indicate how particular practices have been differentiated within the literature I am analysing. Such descriptive markers,

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however, are problematic because they group together a vast range of practices, downplaying diversity, complexity and hybridity, and force false dichotomies between ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ procedures which are often untenable. These discursive categories also efface the historical processes through which practices have been constructed as ‘African’ and ‘Western’ in the first place. My use of terms such as ‘African practices of FGC’ (or simply ‘FGC’) and ‘Western body-altering procedures’ should therefore not signal an assumption that all practices placed within particular categories (such as that of ‘FGC’) are necessarily similar in their origins, characteristics or meanings. However, as most of the theorists who make comparisons between practices of FGC and other body-altering procedures do not consistently specify which particular form of FGC they are referring to, it will often be difficult for me to make such distinctions in my own discussions. See, for example, Kira Cochrane (2007), who, writing in New Statesman, compares the growing popularity of complete genital depilation in affluent industrialised nations to the ritual female circumcisions carried out in ‘non-Western’ contexts. For an analysis of the diversity of practices of female genital cutting understood to be rooted in African, Arab and Asian contexts, see Kouba and Muasher 1985; Gunning 1991; Obiora 2000; Boyle 2002. See Women’s Caucus of the African Studies Association (WCASA) 2002/1983; Wolf 1990; Gunning 1991; Greer 1999; Meyers 2000; Weil Davis 2002; Chambers 2004; Njambi 2004; Jeffreys 2005. See Leonard 2000; Salecl 2000; Njambi 2004; Jeffreys 2005. See WCASA 2002/1983; Gunning 1991; Meyers 2000. For a historical analysis of such procedures see Barker-Benfield 1975. See WCASA 2002/1983; Greer 1999. See Meyers 2000; Boyle 2002; Chase 2002; Weil Davis 2002. For examples of cross-cultural comparisons of FGC and ‘Western’ bodily procedures made by ‘non-Western’ feminists see El Saadawi 1980; Toubia 1988. For further analyses of analogical approaches see Pedwell 2007; Sullivan 2009. See Zabus 2001; Boyle 2002; Njambi 2004. See Toubia 1988; Gunning 1991; Mohanty 1991; Njambi 2004; 2009. More recent portrayals of FGC, such as Alice Walker’s novel Warrior Marks and Walker and Pratibha Parmar’s subsequent film Warrior Marks: Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexual Blinding of Women (1993), have been similarly critiqued (see Engle and Khanna 1997; Abusharaf 2001; James and Robertson 2002). These critics also reacted with anger to the blindness of Western feminists to the indigenous opposition to practices of FGC, which had been both vigorous and long-standing across a range of contexts. See Kouba and Muasher 1985; Gunning 1991; Obiora 2000; Meyers 2000; Boyle 2002. See also Morgan 1991/2003; Balsamo 1996; Jones 2008. See Virginia Braun, who examines ‘the use of choice rhetoric in relation to Western women’s bodies and genital practices’ and argues ‘that such rhetoric is necessary to discursively (and politically, and practically) separate FGCS from “FGM”’ (2009: 233). See also Weil Davis 2002; Pedwell 2007; Sullivan 2007, 2009; Kennedy 2009. The platform of the UN Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995 explicitly cited FGC as dangerous to women’s reproductive health and a violation of their human rights, and directives urged countries to pass and enforce strict laws ‘against the perpetrators of practices and acts of violence against women, such as female genital mutilation’ (Gollaher 2000: 194–5). Joint statements by the international bodies WHO, UNICEF, UNFPA and UNDP in 1996 expressed support for FGC eradication efforts under the ‘women’s rights as human rights’ model (Boyle 2002: 55) and strategies for eradication have been pursued in countries such as Senegal, Sierra Leone and Egypt (Lionnet 2003: 371). The United Kingdom was the first Western country to introduce legislation prohibiting FGC in 1985, with

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similar laws banning the practice in the US, Canada, New Zealand and Australia following in the 1990s (Sheldon and Wilkinson 1998). In France, and more recently in the United States (Haines 2006), officials have taken legal action against both circumcisers and the legal guardians of circumcised children. Furthermore, in 1996 the US Board of Immigration appeals granted Fauziya Kassindja political asylum, establishing fear of female genital mutilation as legitimate grounds for granting asylum (Gollaher 2000: 188). By contrast, while the US Food and Drug Administration has banned the use of silicone implants for women who want them strictly for cosmetic reasons, cosmetic surgery and other ‘Western’ body modification procedures have not, on the whole, been seen as a matter of criminal law, and there have been no international movements, directives or calls for eradication by international bodies in relation to such practices (Sheldon and Wilkinson 1998). See also Chase 2002; Kennedy 2009. Njambi’s (2004) text is exceptional (representing a departure from most texts which employ analogue and/or continuum approaches), however, in that it suggests crosscultural links between FGC and other ‘Western’ body modifications in ways that avoid uncritical and ahistorical assumptions of sameness, and interrogates universalist constructions of female embodiment. See also the special issue of Australian Feminist Studies (2009) on genital modification edited by Njambi, Samantha Murry and Nikki Sullivan. As the editors explain, the papers in this collection avoid drawing overarching cross-cultural commonalities between different forms of genital modification, and instead seek to ‘collect and connect perspectives around these issues together into a meaningful dialogue about the complexities, inconsistencies and questions these practices present’ (Murray et al. 2009: 147; see in particular Sullivan 2009). See also Sally Sheldon and Stephen Wilkinson (1998), who suggest that making legal frameworks pertaining to body modifications in the United Kingdom more consistent would challenge ‘the perception that female genital mutilation and cosmetic surgery are fundamentally different’ and situate ‘both on a continuum of body modification practices’ (284, italics in original). Meyers also links nineteenth-century American clitoridectomies to African practices of FGC, although it is not her central comparison (472). Marilyn Frye uses the term ‘arrogant perception’ in her collection The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory (1983). Maria Lugones in turn draws on Frye’s use of the term in her article ‘Playfulness, “World”-travelling, and Loving Perception’ (1990). As Gunning explains, arrogant perception involves the construction of distance between self and other: ‘The “other”, in arrogant perception terms, is unlike me. The “other” has no independent perceptions and interest but only those that I impose. Any evidence that the “other” is organised around her own interests is evidence of defectiveness in the “other”’ (1991: 199). She claims that arrogant perception operates in many representations of FGC, including those of the well known second-wave feminist Fran Hosken (200–1). See also Abusharaf 2001; Braun 2005, 2009. In his national treatise, Facing Mount Kenya: The Tribal Life of the Gikuyu (first published in 1938), Jomo Kenyatta, who would later become Kenya’s first President, criticised missionaries and other Westerners for seeking to eradicate FGC without any true understanding of the practice. He portrayed FGC, referred to as irua, as a source of cultural and ethnic Kikuyu identity (Zabus 2001: 336), describing it as ‘the very essence of an institution which has enormous educational, social, moral and religious implications’ (Boyle 2002: 39). The oldest known written account of surgical reconstruction of the nose and ear lobes is contained in the Sushruta Samhita, written approximately 600 BCE and based on the Hindu hymn Rig Veda, which originated some 900 years before

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(Brown 1986, cited in Sullivan 2001: 33). The procedures, which involved using skin grafts from the cheek, and later the forehead, were first carried out by families in the lowly Hindu castes of potters and bricklayers (Sullivan 2001: 33–4). While a similar technique had been employed in Europe in the sixteenth century to rebuild syphilitic noses, it had subsequently fallen into disuse and disappeared until it was ‘rediscovered’ by the British colonial powers in India in the eighteenth century, and published in a 1794 edition of The Gentleman’s Magazine (Gilman 1999b: 9–10). These embodied practices may of course also be constructed through other processes of social differentiation such as class, ability and religion. For example, cosmetic procedures such as Botox may be discursively constructed through recourse to religion in various contexts. An article in The Guardian, ‘Malaysian Muslims told not to use Botox’ (Aglionby 2006), reports on a ruling by the country’s National Fatwa Council ‘that Botox contains substances prohibited under Islam, including those from pigs’. Gunning points out that while the operations were practised mainly on upper or middle-class white women, related gynaecological surgery had first been ‘tested’ on black slave women and then destitute white immigrant women (Baker Brown 1978, cited in Gunning 1991: 204) For analyses which identify the social and political salience of this binary see Weil Davis 2002; Njambi 2004; Pedwell 2007; Sullivan 2007, 2009; Jones 2008; Braun 2009; Kennedy 2009. Within the analogue approach both subjects would exhibit each of the criteria or characteristics listed in the chart in (largely) analogous ways, whilst in the continuum approach it is assumed that there will be some differences in the quality of or degree to which each criterion is exhibited or experienced by the different cultural subjects, and these differences will determine at which points particular subjects are placed on continuum structure. This is not to suggest that sex/gender, race, nation and culture are separable analytics that may simply be added or subtracted from one another (Crenshaw 1989), but rather to underscore their ongoing operation as mutually constitutive processes (Brah 1996a). In addition to this example of transnational empathy, Meyers discusses the importance of developing empathy within particular local communities that are divided by differences in regard to religion, socioeconomic class, sexuality, etc. This particular invocation of empathy is not about encouraging the privileged Western subject to empathise with the Third world ‘other’ (2000: 485). See Hill Collins 1990; Meyers 1994; Koehn 1998; Spelman 1997; Chabot Davis 2004; Pedwell 2007; Hemmings 2011. There is also the question of how practical, or indeed possible, it is to delineate particular embodied locations in definite and distinct ways. For example, whilst the Women’s Caucus of the African Studies Association argues that changes in practices of FGC in Africa ‘must be initiated and carried out by members of those African cultures in which the custom exists’ (2002/1983: 2), the boundaries of this category remain blurry. Does it refer only to indigenous Africans living within circumcising communities or does it also include African Americans (such as Gunning) who identify with African culture yet live and work in the United States, and claim no attachment with circumcising communities? Karen Engle and Ranjana Khanna have similarly critiqued the ways in which empathy is used as a tool in transnational politics in Alice Walker’s novel Warrior Marks (1993). They suggest that in linking African practices of FGC, gum surgery and her own eye injury as a child by her brother with a bb gun as comparable forms of patriarchal ‘mutilation’, Walker employs a ‘particular transnational empathy’ which ‘suggests that the cultural context of wounding is irrelevant’ (Engle and Khanna 1997: 69).

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4 Constitutive comparisons 1 The English word ‘veiling’ is used to refer to a very wide array of women’s Islamic dress around the world, such as the turban in Turkey, the chador in Iran, the hijab in Britain, the burqa in Afghanistan and the many internal variations of Islamic covering in all these and other locations. While the term ‘veiling’ has wide currency in Western industrialised nations, it homogenises a diverse collection of practices, which vary extensively both in terms of style and with respect to how they are carried out, running the gamut from ‘overt coercion’ to ‘modest social pressure with an overt emphasis on women’s individual choice’ (Hirschmann 1998: 345–6). Indeed, as Egyptian feminist Fadwa El Guindi points out, there is no one Arabic term equivalent to the English ‘veil’ (1999, xi: 7). Moreover, veiling is not exclusively a Muslim practice, but is also associated with Jewish, Christian and Hindu traditions. 2 Anorexia is today the object of various competing discourses. It is constructed simultaneously in terms of physiological dysfunction, genetic predisposition and cognitive deficits or biases, as a consequence of familial dysfunction, social ideals of thinness and of patriarchal oppression (Malson 1998: 98). While anorexia is understood in some contexts as a ‘practice’ with may involve a degree of ‘individual choice’ (Nasser 1999), in others it is conceived as ‘pathology’ or ‘disease’ (Malson and Swann 1999). 3 These feminist writers have argued that, while women have made professional, economic and legal gains since the second wave of feminism in the West in the 1970s and 1980s, claims to universal equality and female empowerment are undercut by the rising epidemic of anorexia and other forms of disordered eating and bodily discipline which point to the conspicuous operation of Western culture to ‘keep women down’. 4 The figure of ‘the veiled woman’ has long been read by Western commentators as a synecdoche for Muslim culture as a whole. Western fantasies of ‘penetration into the mysteries of the Orient’ through looking behind the veil have a lengthy colonial history (Yeg˘ enog˘ lo 1998: 39–40; see also Said 1978; Fanon 1965). Veiling, moreover, continues to be represented in the West as the ultimate symbol of both Muslim women’s oppression and the failure of Muslim cultures to embrace modernity, constructions which enable and consolidate dominant claims to Western or Euro-American cultural superiority (El Guindi 2003; Razak 2008). 5 In this as in previous chapters I employ terms such as ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’, ‘Eastern’ and ‘Muslim’ to indicate the types of distinction made in the literature I am analysing. The generalisations they imply, however, are often problematic. For example, labelling Muslim veiling ‘non-Western’ obscures the wide practice of veiling in Western industrialised countries by women who may consider themselves both ‘Muslim’ and ‘Western’. In turn, labelling ‘anorexia’ as ‘Western’ similarly effaces the growing number of women who experience eating disorders in locations outside the industrialised West. It is also clear that so-called ‘Western’ fashion and beauty practices are popular all over the world and linked specifically to accelerating processes of globalisation (Bachu 2004; Jones 2008). 6 See also Jackson 2007. 7 See Stoler 2006; Sullivan 2009. 8 See also Ahmed 2000; Castañeda 2002. 9 Theorists have also attempted to interrogate the Western/Muslim binary by reversing it (valuing veiled Muslim woman as empowered and devaluing Western women as oppressed). For example, Fadwa El Guindi (2003) discusses how veiling and Islamic religiosity are seen to offer women true emancipation, in contrast to the false freedom of Western women, exploited and sexualised in Western consumer culture. Such strategies correspond to the second stage of Shildrick and Prokhovnik’s three-step process for deconstructing and resignifying binaries.

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10 Colonial and imperial interventions in Muslim countries have long been justified ‘as missions to rescue women from the brutality of oppression signified by the veil’ (Macdonald 2006: 9; see also Ahmed 1992). As Myra Macdonald argues, appropriating ‘feminist’ discourse in this way enables ‘Western powers to “sanitise Western history” by suggesting ‘the exemplary freedoms of women in their own societies’ (2006: 9). 11 However, as Hirshmann notes, ‘there is vast disagreement on the significance, status, and meaning of veiling among Eastern feminists’. Some feminists, ‘such as Alya Baffoun and Fatima Mernissi, see veiling as largely oppressive … Other feminists see veiling, along with the practice of purdah, or the seclusion of women, as a clear example of resistance to Westernisation and to the preservation of culture … Still others dismiss veiling as a minor issue compared to more pressing problems of women’s education, poverty and economic dependence, violence against women, divorce and child custody, and health care for women and children’ (1998: 352). 12 Jeffreys is referring to the UN Fact Sheet No. 23, ‘Harmful Traditional Practices Affecting the Health of Women and Children’, published in 1995. 13 As Susan Bordo (1993) argues, ‘The insistence that women are done to, not the doers, here – that men and their desires bear responsibility; and that female obedience to the dictates of fashion is better conceptualised as bondage than choice – was a crucial historical moment in the developing articulation of a new understanding of the sexual politics of the body’ (21–2). While she acknowledges that such radical feminist models ‘may have been insufficiently attentive to the multiplicity of meaning, the pleasures of shaping and decorating the body, or the role of female agency in reproducing patriarchal culture’, Bordo emphasises that these discourses offered ‘a systemic critique capable of rousing women to collective action’ (31). 14 Furthermore, analogies of veiling and anorexia can be qualitatively different from those between veiling and makeup or ‘porno-chic’, given that fashion and beauty practices are not generally understood, as anorexia often is, in terms of discourses of ‘individual pathology’ (Malson 1998: 98). As such, comparisons between veiling and ‘Western’ beauty and fashion trends do not risk the same contentious (and potentially offensive) association of veiling with ‘disease’ or mental illness that analogies of veiling and anorexia do. Moreover, while fashion trends such as ‘porno-chic’ are often read as the overt display of sexuality (Duits and van Zoonen 2006), anorexia has more often been understood as radically desexualising (Nasser 1999). 15 Make-up has been widely conceived as being about women’s choice, and even a sign of their liberation, against readings of the veil as a symbol of women’s oppression. For example, as Myra Macdonald (2006) notes, in the context of the Western military intervention in Afghanistan in 2003, the triumph of the ‘liberation’ of Kabul was expressed not only through images of (a small number of) Afghani women removing their burqas, but also through stories of their pleasure in engaging with a range of previously forbidden beauty practices – as noted in the headline ‘Afghan lipstick liberation’ given to the BBC’s account of the establishment of a beauty school (funded by American money) in post-Taliban Afghanistan (14). However, as Eric Louw points out, ‘the Pentagon’s public relations strategy of emphasising the rescue of oppressed women was dropped very quickly once Afghan women’s retention of the burqa became clear’ (Louw, cited in Macdonald 2006: 10). 16 However, in suggesting that veiling, like anorexia, is an inherently ‘desexualising’ practice, Nasser’s comparison, like Jeffreys’, risks reifying ‘assumptions about the veil’s abnegation of sexual desire that ignore Islamic thinking about female sexuality’ (Macdonald 2006: 7). 17 Hoodfar (2003) explains, for example, how Somali refugees who had fled to Canada to escape civil war and upheaval turned to Islam, the Muslim community

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and veiling for support upon their arrival, as ‘for many Somalis emphasising their membership and participating in the Muslim community is a means of coping with a new culture and social system’ (13). As Rosalind Gill argues, the ‘whiteness’ of post-feminist cultural texts such as Bridget Jones’s Diary is ‘unmarked, unspoken and all-pervasive’ (Maddison and Storr 2002: 2). While Bridget and her white friends have no interaction with British members of ethnic minorities at all, people of colour in the texts are constructed as ‘funny foreigners’ and ‘perverted orientals’ (Gill 2006: 231–2). Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood was originally published in France in two volumes as Persepolis 1 and Persepolis 2 in 2000 and 2001. Persepolis: The Story of a Return was originally published in France in two volumes as Perspolis 3 and Persepolis 4 in 2002 and 2004. In 2008, Satrapi’s novels were adapted into a major motion picture, Persepolis. See www.youtube.com/user/Eily311. Following Sara Ahmed in her discussion of ‘stranger fetishism’ (2000), I employ the term ‘fetishise’, derived from the Marxist account of ‘commodity fetishism’ (4). As she argues, Marx’s theory suggests that ‘the process of fetishisation involves not only the displacement of social relations on to an object, but the transformation of fantasies on to figures’ (5). What is at stake is the ‘cutting off’ of figures from the social and material relations which over-determine their existence and the consequent perception that such figures have a ‘life of their own’ (5). Fatima Mernissi suggests, for example, that, as a consequence of Westerners’ fixation on ‘the veil’, ‘women’s liberty … has been viewed almost exclusively as a religious problem’ rather than an economic and political one (Mernissi, cited in Hirschmann 1998: 351–2). While Nasser draws on Macleod’s (1991) analysis of the ‘new veiling’ in Egypt and her theory of ‘accommodating protest’ to frame her argument, Macleod herself criticises the concept of ‘cultural lag’, arguing that terms such as ‘break’, ‘gap’ and ‘lag’ ‘disguise a lack of understanding of the actual dynamics of the moment of social and political change’ and fail to grasp ‘the concrete actions and concerns of subordinate groups in relations of power, the concrete struggles and negotiations which end at times in the reproduction of power relations and occasionally in real change in the terms of inequality’ (15). Although Duits and van Zoonen acknowledge that girls’ decision to wear a headscarf may represent ‘a particular way of making Islamic fashion statements’ (2006: 113), their dualistic categorisation of girls as either ‘g-string girls’ or ‘headscarf girls’ (113) would seem to render unintelligible a range of subjects who straddle or exceed these boundaries. The work of the British Muslim artist Sarah Maple provides an interesting, if contentious, example in this respect. Comprised mainly of self-portraits, Maple’s photography and paintings often depict herself as embodying a mix of fetishised signs of Muslim femininity and cultural difference (such as the burqa) and seemingly incoherent symbols of dominant ‘Western’ femininity (such as fake blond hair and red-painted nails) and/or explicit sexuality (such as ‘Playboy bunny’ ears and a badge reading ‘I love orgasms’). According to Maple’s Web site (www.sarahmaple.com), much of her ‘inspiration originated from her being brought up as a Muslim with parents of mixed religion and cultural backgrounds. Understandably, issues of identity are of huge interest to her’ (see www.sarahmaple.com). See also Mohanty 1991. From Gill’s (2007) perspective, ‘the role of the feminist intellectual’ must involve ‘a practice of “respectful listening”’ which seeks to contextualise girls’ stories, ‘to situate them, to look for their patterns and variability, to examine their silences and exclusions, and, above all, to locate them in a wider context’ (77).

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28 For example, Myra MacDonald discusses how, in the wake of the events of 11 September 2001, Muslim women became ‘much sought-after media interviewees, as the Islamic world became an object of intensified fascination and fear’ (2006: 15). Yet, she argues, their increased visibility and ‘apparent audibility’ in mainstream British and North American media in this context cannot ‘be read as an automatic sign that diversity has been achieved’ (19). If those voices being heard ‘are mainly those of diasporic or Western Muslims, and the shrouded, silenced images those of women in Afghanistan, Iran or Saudi Arabia, then Orientalist polarity between “liberating” Western Islam and “repressive” Eastern Islam is accentuated’ (19).

5 Weaving relational webs 1 See also Alcoff 1995; Griffiths 1995; Braidotti 2002. 2 For analyses which identify the salience of this binary see Weil Davis 2002; Njambi 2004; Pedwell 2007; Sullivan 2007, 2009; Jones 2008; Braun 2009; Kennedy 2009. 3 This dominant depiction may, however, be changing with the widespread normalisation of cosmetic surgery (Jones 2008), as well as increased academic and media attention directed towards the so-called ‘ethnic minority’ cosmetic surgery consumer (Gilman 1999b; Kaw 2003; Davis 2003a; Jones 2008). 4 This is a long trajectory which ranges from the traditional associations of ‘blackness’ with death and sin in Christian symbolism to the juxtaposition of black and white bodies in art, literature and travel narratives, to the institutionalisation of hierarchical constructions of black and white femininity in the ‘Great Chain of Being’, to the racialised gender roles enshrined in the ‘cult of true womanhood’, to contemporary representations of black and white women’s bodies in popular cultural discourses (Carby 1987; Young 1990; Gilman 1992; Hill Collins 2004). 5 See Carby 1987; Roberts 1994; Hall 1995; Stoler 1995, 1997; Morgan 2005; Holliday and Sanchez Taylor 2006. 6 For example, David Gollaher describes how students of African cultures in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries concluded that ‘the operation was performed only to lessen the extraordinarily active sexual instinct of women among the African tribes … or because so many African women had unusually large clitoral or labial bulges’ (2000: 196). From this perspective, it was because African women’s bodies were ‘abnormal’ and their sexual instincts ‘overdeveloped’ that FGC was ‘necessary’ as a corrective and repressive method. 7 See Kouba and Muasher 1985: 106; Boyle 2002. 8 African opponents of FGC (in its various forms) had been present for some time before second-wave feminist campaigns (Boyle 2002: 45). In 1960, at the UN seminar on the participation of women in public life, held in Addis Ababa, African delegates called upon WHO to undertake a study of the medical aspects of FGC (Kouba and Muasher 1985: 106). However, it was not until the better financed and institutionally supported Western feminist campaigns of the 1980s that international awareness of the practice and substantive support from WHO to eradicate it were achieved (Boyle 2002). Campaigns and programmes directed at eradicating or reducing the health risks associated with FGC have been led by numerous groups, including Women Living under Muslim Law, the International African Congress, the Union nationale des Femmes de Djibouti, the Somali Democratic Women’s Organisation, the Mouvement Femmes et société (Senegal), the Union nationale des Femmes du Mali, the Babiker Bedri Foundation for Women’s Studies and Research (Sudan), the Association of African Women in Research and Development, the Women’s Group against Sexual Mutilation (France) and RAINBO (UK). (See Kouba and Muasher 1985; Gunning 1991; Obiora, 2000; Meyers 2000.)

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9 To be clear, in acknowledging these broad historical differences in discourses pertaining to FGC, I do not seek to position indigenous African, Asian of Middle Eastern women as ‘authentic insiders’ (Naryan 1997) through fusing ethnicity, geographical location or experience with ‘privileged knowledge’. Homogenising and/or culturally essentialist representations of FGC have clearly been (re)produced within both ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ settings and by differently located actors. However, social and geopolitical locations of enunciation do, I believe, shape (without directly determining) political representations and arguments, if in complex and sometimes conflicting ways. 10 In a CNN news programme aired in 1994, for example, a young Egyptian girl’s circumcised genitalia were displayed on video for ten minutes (Dawit 1994, cited in Njambi 2004: 285; see also Boyle 2002). 11 See also Narayan 1997, 1998; Volpp 2000; Walley 2002. 12 See Gunning 1991; Abusharaf 2001; Weil Davis 2002. 13 See Gollaher 2000; Njambi 2004; Fox and Thomson 2009. 14 See Mackie 1996; Boyle 2002. 15 Initiated in 1991, ‘The Ultimate Masterpiece: The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan’ was completed in 1996, yet Orlan’s other artistic, performative and theoretical work in this area remains ongoing (www.orlan.net). 16 See also Meredith Jones (2008: 29), who argues that ‘alternative and subversive adoptions of cosmetic surgery are possible and are happening, not just with “extreme practitioners” like Orlan … but also with people who use cosmetic surgery to design, rather than deny age, to call into question traditional intergenerational relationships, and to challenge surgeons’ traditional monopoly over provision and acceptable aesthetics of cosmetic surgery’. 17 See Bordo 1993; Skeggs 1997; Ahmed 1999; Negrin 2002. 18 See Gilman 1999b; Kaw 2003; Davis 2003a; Jones 2008. 19 We might also enquire into the effect of adding the figure of ‘the male cosmetic surgery consumer’ to our relational web. How, for example, is the (female) ‘cosmetic surgery consumer’ defined in part through the imagined ‘male cosmetic surgery consumer’ via the (re)production of traditional gender roles? Balsamo argues that the ‘cultural meaning’ of women’s and men’s ‘gendered bodies already determines the discursive rationale they can evoke to explain bodily practices’ (1996: 69). As ‘their “essential” natures are defined differently, men must construct elaborate justifications for decisions for plastic surgery’ (69). Such processes can in turn function to (re)produce rigid gendered identities that become materially expressed in particular ways. 20 See also Hill Collins 2004. 21 We could also ask, for example, in what ways the notions of embodied agency associated with the ‘cosmetic surgery consumer’/‘cosmetic surgery rebel’ binary are complicated through considering the narratives of subjects who deploy normalised discourses about cosmetic surgery, such as medicalised transsexual discourse, to produce aberrant bodies and subject positions? (See Prosser 1998; Halberstam, 2005; Sullivan 2007, 2009.) 22 We could also apply a relational approach to theorise the the ‘anorexic’/‘veiled woman’ pair within a wider relational framework. We might examine, for example, how self/other relations between ‘the anorexic’ and ‘the veiled woman’ have been historically mediated through the construction of ‘other’ imagined figures, including the ‘Arab Muslim woman’, the ‘black Muslim woman’, the ‘hysteric’, the ‘workingclass Victorian woman’, the ‘non-heterosexual Victorian woman’, the contemporary ‘porno-chic girl’, the ‘fashion-conscious Muslim girl’ and the ‘pious Muslim girl’ (see Pedwell 2008b). It would be productive to map the multiple histories of relational construction binding each of these other ‘selves’ and ‘others’ to the ‘anorexic’ and the ‘veiled woman’. How is the ‘liberated and self-determining Western woman’

150

23

24

25

26 27 28 29

30

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constructed against the ‘oppressed and downtrodden Muslim woman’? How is the ‘anorexic’ defined, both through her presumed opposition to the ‘liberated and selfdetermining Western woman’ and her similarity to the ‘veiled woman’ and the ‘hysteric’? How is the figure of the ‘hysteric’ (produced at the intersection of gender, sexuality and race) constructed through the othering of both the ‘middle-class Victorian woman’ and the ‘radical Muslim’? How, through the articulation of sexuality, gender, religion and class, is the ‘pious Muslim woman’ defined against the ‘anorexic’ and the ‘fashion-conscious Muslim girl’? How does the addition of each new relational link alter the presumed character of the original relational unit, disrupting its self/other dialectic and the notion of essentialist categories of embodied identity? My perspective here pivots on the notion that we all operate in an intersubjective social economy in which one’s own sense of subjectivity is always caught up with, and constructed through, that of multiple others. As Linda Alcoff (1995) puts it, ‘we are collectively caught in an intricate, delicate web in which each action I take, discursive or otherwise, pulls on, breaks off, or maintains the tension in many strands of the web in which others also find themselves moving’ (109). In illustrating that ‘there is no neutral place to stand free and clear in which my words do not prescriptively affect or mediate the experiences of others’ (108) the web approach provides the basis for thinking (beyond the self/other dialectic) about multiple interdependencies between a range of differently located (and shifting) subjects. At the same time, there is no reason that a relational approach has to take such figures as a starting point. For example, Elizabeth Grosz (2005) advocates a (relational) theoretical framework in which ‘inhuman forces, forces that are both living and nonliving, macroscopic and microscopic, above and below the level of human are acknowledged and allowed to displace the centrality of both consciousness and the unconscious’ (186). Within the network of dynamic, relational links that a web approach teases out, there is ‘no way to “be” simultaneously in all, or wholly in any, of the privileged (subjugated) positions structured by gender, race, nation and class’ (Haraway 1990: 193). Moreover, as suggested above, within the relational web, binary categories of ‘self ’ and ‘other’ are shown to be unstable and untenable. See also Mama 1995; Ahmed 2000, 2004; Cheng 2001. See also Spivak 1988, 1999. See, for example, Spivak 1988, 1999; Mohanty 1991, 2002; Chow 1996, 2006. In response to these concerns, we might wonder whether the answer is to stick to analysing embodied practices individually, in isolation from other practices. Yet, as Sullivan (2009) argues in her analysis of how different forms of genital modification have been understood within academic, legal and medical discourses, ‘analogical’ and ‘isolationist’ frameworks share a common theoretical problem. That is, each is ‘informed by and reproduces the logic of the one: a logic that denies the necessarily intercorporeal movement of (un)becoming’ (282). In ‘failing to acknowledge the intercorporeality of identity and difference (the reliance of “the normal” on its constitutive outside, the “abnormal”)’, both approaches ‘veil over the debt to the other that is incurred in the (re)production of the self ’ (282). From this perspective, an approach which focuses on ‘specific “kinds” of bodies and bodily practices in isolation from others’ (277) does not provide an escape from the problems of comparativism and self-referentiality, but rather defers critical analysis of these complex issues. As an alternative to these (and other) limited frameworks for understanding genital modifications, Sullivan develops the notion of ‘transsomatechnics’, which focuses on examining the ‘trans-ing’ of somatechnologies and ‘the bodies (of flesh, knowledge, politic) to which they are constitutively bound’ (282). My analysis remains indebted to the legacy of feminist writing on ‘the politics of location’. See Rich 1986; Spivak, 1988; Haraway 1990; Hill Collins 1990;

Notes

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32

33

34 35

36

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Frankenberg and Mani 1993; Braidotti 1994, 2002, 2006; Diprose 1994; Kaplan 1994; Alcoff 1995; Hemmings 2005, 2011. This discussion raises a number of challenging questions relating to the transnational politics of empathy which I do not have space to address here. For example, who is being compelled to empathise and who is being empathised with in critical (Western) discussions about empathy? Do such discourses risk reifying categories of ‘empathiser’ and ‘sufferer’ which reproduce dominant geopolitical and academic hierarchies? Daryl Koehn (1998) argues that empathy must be specifically ‘dialogical’: ‘Ethics must provide a space in which people who are on the receiving end of care or trust or empathy … can contest effectively the caregiver’s trust or empathy’ (4). Yet, as Sanda Bartky (1996) queries, ‘we assume that the advantaged have a special obligation … to cultivate in themselves certain affective states vis a vis the disadvantaged’, but ‘is it in the interests of the disadvantaged to do likewise’? (180). Moreover, from Clare Hemmings’s (2011) perspective, empathy is not boundless, but always has a limit point, which can function to reaffirm particular boundaries and hierarchies (see also Hill Collins 1990; Meyers 1994; Engle and Khanna 1997; Spelman 1997; La Capra 2001; Nussbaum 2001; Ahmed 2004; Berlant 2004; Chabot Davis 2004; Pedwell 2007). Evaluating the impact of Gender Trouble here, Butler describes her agenda in that foundational text as arising from ‘humanist’ ideals: ‘I wanted something of Gender Trouble to be understood and accorded dignity, according to some humanist ideal, but I also wanted it to disturb – fundamentally – the way in which feminist and social theory think gender, and to find it exciting, to understand something of the desire that gender trouble is, the desire it solicits and the desire it conveys’ (2004a: 207). Butler argues that, through being assigned to ‘a time of cultural infancy or to a time that is outside time as we know it’, Afghani and Iraqi populations are ‘regarded as not yet having arrived at the idea of the rational human’. It is ‘precisely this particular conceit of a progressive history’, she suggests, ‘that positions the “West” as articulating the paradigmatic principles of the human – humans worth valuing, whose lives are worth safeguarding, protecting, whose lives are precarious, and worth public grieving as well’ (2008: 15). See, for example, Patricia Ticineto Clough with Jean Halley (eds), The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (2007). Describing the differences between these two analytical approaches, Puar suggests that, while ‘intersectional models of identity presume that components – race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, age, religion – are separable analytics can thus be disassembled, an assemblage is more attuned to interwoven forces that merge and dissipate time, space, and body against linearity, coherency, and permanency’ (208, italics mine). She argues that, ‘no matter how intersectional our models of subjectivity, no matter how attuned to locational politics of space, place, and scale, these formulations may still limit us if they presume the automatic primacy and singularity of the disciplinary subject and its identitarian interpellation’ (206). Gilroy also does not draw on the vast body of feminist literature which analyses the ways in which race always intersects with other vectors of embodied differentiation. Indeed, Gilroy mentions feminism in this text only to comment on its ‘demise’ (2004: 28, 79).

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Index

Abu-Odeh, L. 2 Abusharaf, R. M. 113 activism: feminist 130; transnational 19 aesthetics: and cosmetic surgery 63; feminine 71, 73; and genital modification 65, 68, 71; 113; racist 75, 109, 116 affect 123, 125–6 agency: and anorexia 13, 89, 98–9; and binaries 14, 77, 109; and cosmetic surgery 76–7, 116; and culture 7, 14, 17, 76–7, 89, 109; and figuration 98–9; and genital modification 16, 67–8, 72, 76–7, 117; and humanism 29; and identity politics 51–2; and makeup 86, 89, 101–4; and porno-chic 90, 101–4; and resignification 29, 52; and resistance 99, 102–3, 116–17; and sexual regulation 90, 93, 104; and subjectivity 102–3, 119; and veiling 13, 86, 88–91, 98–104; Western model of 90; 100–1 Ahmed, L. 88, 94 Ahmed, S. 9, 18–20, 23, 25, 29–31, 33, 48–9, 55–7, 82, 98, 100, 111–12, 118, 121, 123–5, 127, 129 Alexander, J. 16 American Medical Association 63 Amos, V. 9, 34–5 analogue approach 7; and comparisons of embodied practices 60–83, 94–5, 99–100; and comparisons of gender and racial oppression 9–10; and intersectionality 37; and relational web 107, 112 anorexia 2, 59, 67, 69, 85–9, 91–9, 104–5; and comparison with veiling 2, 85, 92, 94, 97–105 anti-humanism 15, 29–31, 108, 124–8; see also humanism

appropriation: and cosmetic surgery 74, 79; and empathy 79–81; and genital modification 68, 79; and identity 52; of marginal voices, 100; postmodernist 51–2; and veiling, 100; see also reappropriation. Arab Women’s Solidarity Association 110 assemblage 126, 128 Aziz, R. 35 Bachu, P. 4, 97 Balsamo, A. 115–6 Battaglia, D. 123 beauty: practices 2, 15, 81, 89; and genital modification 21, 71; myth 115; and racism 55, 75, 116–17; system 86; see also aesthetics Bell, V. 4, 123, 129 Binaries: culture-based 16–17; and embodied practices 76–9, 108–9, 111; and feminist theory 20–6; and oppression/resistance distinction 103; and postcolonial theory 42–4; and queer theory 45–7; see also cultural essentialism; deconstruction; heterosexual/homosexual distinction; mind/body distinction; resignification; sex/gender distinction; western/nonwestern distinction bisexuality 45–6 body: construction of female 50, 56, 110–11, 117; art 60–3; and cultural difference 3, 14, 56, 86, 88, 102; and anti-humanism 29; image distress 96, 98; modification 1, 3–4, 15, 60–3; piercing 60–3; and passing 48; and postfeminism 95; view of natural 112, 126

168

Index

Bordo, S. 59, 90, 97, 116 Boyle, E. 74, 110 Brah, A. 4, 16, 35, 38, 41, 43–4, 49, 87, 97, 107, 109, 111, 112, 117, 119, 121. Brain, J. 98 Braidotti, R. 19–20, 48, 50, 54, 123, 125, 127 Braun, V. 63 Bridget Jones’s Diary 95 Bulimia 67, 69 Butler, J. 9, 19–20, 29–31, 33, 38, 45–6, 48, 51–5, 57, 73, 87, 103, 118, 120, 123, 125–7 capitalism 11, 44, 86, 92, 97, 99, 101, 111, 119 Carby, H. 34 Castañeda, C. 11, 87, 109, 118 choice: and anorexia 85, 89; and cosmetic surgery 3, 62–3, 68, 76, 115: and cultural essentialism, 90; and female genital cutting 3, 62–3, 68, 76, 115; and makeup 90, 101; and sartorial practices, 90–1; 99, 103–4; and veiling, 85, 89, 101–4; see also agency Chase, C. 64, 81–2 Chow, R. 9, 16, 25, 103, 120–1 circumcision 1–2, 25, 60, 62–3, 65–7, 69, 78, 113–14 clitoridectomy 64, 69, 80 colonialism 4, 11; and cosmetic surgery 4, 73–5; and cross-cultural comparison 9, 64, 66, 73, 120–1; and empathy 83; and female genital cutting 4, 62, 73–5, 110–11, 114; and postmodernism 51; and representation 22; and veiling 87–8, 94, 98 Combahee River Collective 34 Commensurability: of embodied practices 5, 10, 13, 30, 86–7, 91, 93–4, 105 comparativism 9–10, 109, 120 constitutive connections 13, 30–1, 57, 107–8, 118–19, 121; see also crosscultural comparison constructionism 18 continuum approach 7, 12–13, 15, 26, 60–70, 73–81, 83, 92, 96, 107–8 cosmetic surgery 4, 15–16, 59–65, 70–83, 108–17: botox 63; breast augmentation 15, 59–60, 63, 67, 75, 111; and colonialism 74–6; consumer 76–7, 109–17; feminist critiques of 63; labiaplasty 3, 15, 59–60, 64, 68, 71, 73,

75, 111; liposuction 60, 63; and racist aesthetics 75; rebel 119; and sexuality 72, 76–7, 109–110; tourism, 4; victim 115–16; see also body; figure; Orlan Craig, M. L. 116 Crenshaw, K. 10, 35–6, 4–41, 45–6, 49, 51–2, 54 cross-cultural comparison: and colonialism 9–10; and cultural essentialism 1–3, 15–16, 19–26; and figuration 11, 47, 87, 97–99, 109, 111–21; and humanism 26–31; as a rhetorical strategy 4–5; see also analogical approach; comparativism; continuum approach cultural difference: anxieties about 3; and the body 3, 14, 56–7, 86, 88, 102; and essentialism 17–19; and gender 17–22; and race 5, 17–18, 22–4 cultural essentialism 1, 5–7, 15–19: and binaries 15–19, 22–6; and crosscultural comparison 1–3, 15–16, 19–26; and deconstruction 22–6; and discursive colonisation 17, 42; and gender 17–22; and gendered violence 2, 18, 22–4, 27–8, 43, 74, 88; and moral difference 18, 64; and race 6, 17–18, 23; and reflexivity 25, 82, 100, 122 cultural hybridity 96 cultural wounds 8, 28, 123, 131 culture: metaphor for 7, 11, 13, 85–6, 93, 97–8, 100, 105, 122; preservation of 17; racialising of 18; victims of 18, 99 Daly, M. 6, 62, 110 Darwin, C. 54 Davis, A. 10, 34 Davis, K. 65, 71, 80–1, 116 deconstruction 13–14, 18–23, 26–7, 29, 112, 128 Deleuze, G. 107 diaspora 34–5, 43–4, 96–7 discrimination 10, 35–6, 38, 90 disembodiment 12, 24–5, 34, 51, 124 Duits, L. 86, 89–96, 99, 101, 103–4 eating disorders 67, 94–5, 97–8; see also anorexia; bulimia El Guindi, F. 5, 94 El Saadawi, N. 5 Elliot, C. 3, 59

Index embodiment: and cultural hybridity 96; feminist theories of 19–24, 28–9; 48–56, 128; and universalism 6–7, 29–30; 102 empathy: and cross-cultural comparison 78–83; and grief 30–1; and humanism 28; and relational web 123–4 encounters: generous 25, 121–4; and subject constitution 36, 56–7, 124 Engle, K. 74 Ensler, E. 59 essentialism: and anti-essentialism 16–26; gender 17, 19–22; racial 16–18; strategic 18; see also cultural essentialism figuration 11, 47, 87, 97–9, 109, 111–121. figure: of anorexic 85–7, 97–100; of cosmetic surgery consumer 76–7, 109–17; of cosmetic surgery rebel 119; of cosmetic surgery victim 115–6; of ethnic minority cosmetic surgery patient 116; of Muslim woman 13, 87, 104; of Third World woman 8, 16, 42–3; of uncircumcised African woman 113–14; of victim of female genital mutilation 76–7, 82, 109–17; of veiled woman 85–7, 97–100, 105 fashion: and Muslim women 5, 97; and patriarchy 2–3, 86, 88, 90, 94, 102–3; porno-chic 86, 90–2, 95–6, 99–103 female genital cutting: and aesthetics 65, 68, 71; and agency 16, 67–8, 72, 76–7, 117; campaigns against 62–3, 110; and colonialism 62–4, 73–5, 110–11 114; and consent 16, 65, 68, 72–3; and legal and institutional frameworks 60, 63–4, 68; and patriarchy 1, 6, 15–16, 39, 42–3, 62–4, 72, 114; and sexuality 1, 72, 110–11; and slavery 73–5; see also circumcision; clitoridectomy; figure; infibulation feminism: Black 40; international 12; and intersectionality 34, 36–7, 40–1, 53–4; mainstream 34, 36–7, 40–1; post- 92–3, 94–5; second wave 6; third wave 37; transnational 80; Western 9, 64–7; see also feminist theory Feminist Review 34 feminist theory: Black 9–10, 34–5, 37; 40–2, 45, 54, 57; Eastern 88; and humanism 28, 126, 128; lesbian 37, 46; mainstream 10, 34–6, 49; postcolonial

169

8–9, 16–17, 24–5, 42–4, 46–8, 56–7, 120; queer 45–9; 55–7, 126–8; radical 16, 90; and rhetoric 4; Western 2, 7–8, 22, 28; 42–3, 62, 65, 78–9; working class 37; transnational 5, 8, 10–12; see also feminism Foucault, M. 120 Fusco, C. 54–5 Fuss, D. 18, 45, 51 Gatens, M. 19–20, 28, 48, 50, 125 gender: and cultural difference 17–22; and embodiment theory 19–24, 28–9; 48–57, 128; and essentialism 17, 19–22; ontological privileging of 11–12, 39–40, 54–5, 93; reassignment surgery 59 genealogy 53, 58, 112, 120 Gill, R. 90, 95, 103 Gilman, S. 4, 47, 60, 74–5, 111 Gilroy, P. 26–30, 105, 125–8 globalisation 4, 56 Göle, N. 94 Gollaher, D. L. 60, 110 The Good Body play 59 Greer, G. 59 Grewal, I. 79, 124 grief 30–1 Griffiths, M. 112–3 Grosz, E. 19, 24, 29, 40, 48, 50, 53–5, 122, 125–8 Gunning, I. 1, 15, 18, 21, 28, 31, 61, 65, 67–73, 75, 77–80, 82 Haraway, D. 107, 123 Hemmings, C. 18, 40, 51, 101 heteronormativity 45–6, 56 heterosexual/homosexual distinction 19, 45, 47 heterosexuality 20–2, 45, 54–6, 118; compulsory 51; and intersectionality 34, 37, 46, 47, 55–6 Hill Collins, P. 34 Hirschmann, N. 2, 86, 88–9, 100 Holliday, R. 117 homosexuality 45, 47 Hoodfar, H. 5, 94 hooks, b. 34, 37, 55 Hosken, F. 6, 42, 62, 110 Hottentot Venus 47, 111 Human: constitution of 28–31 human rights 3, 65, 68–70 humanism 26–30; 124–28; see also anti-humanism

170

Index

identity: and anorexia 85, 93, 96, 99; and cultural essentialism 9, 17, 23; and diaspora 96; fluidity of 39, 41, 48–9, 99–100, 119, 128; human 27; and intersectionality 38–9, 41, 49, 53–4, 57; and the ontological turn 128; and passing 48; politics 46, 51; relational constitution of 30, 49–53, 99–100, 103, 119; sexual 47, 95; and veiling 85, 93, 95, 99 imagined subjects 6, 109 infibulation 64, 66, 71, 78, 80, 111 interdependency 8, 19, 30, 41, 105, 108, 123, 126 Intersex Society of North America 81 Intersectionality: and embodiment 48–57; and Black feminist theory 10–11, 34–8; history of 34–8; limitations of 38–53; and postcolonial theory 41–5, 47–8; and queer theory 43–8 intersex surgery 1, 59–60, 64–73, 77–8, 80–3, 87 Irigaray, L. 49–50, 52–4 Islam: and cultural essentialism 80; and female agency 99, 101 Islamic: dress 85, 100, 102; mosque movement in Egypt 102 Jackson, M. 3 James, S. 64, 71 Jeffreys, S. 15–16, 18, 21, 28, 31, 86, 89–94, 96, 101–4 Jones, M. 4, 63, 75, 114 Kaplan, C. 79, 81, 122, 124 Kennedy, I. 62–3 Khanna, R. 74 Klesse, C. 116 Knapp, G.A. 37 knowledge making 5, 32, 100, 121 La Suture novel 96 Lewis, G. 34 Lewis, R. 100 location: and cross-cultural comparison 5, 78–80, 83; 113, 122; and relational web 113, 122–3; and reflexivity 25 Lugones, M. 67, 70, 82 McCall, L. 37 Macdonald, M. 5, 93–5, 98 Macleod, A. 89 Mackie, G. 60, 73–4

McRobbie, A. 97 Mahmood, S. 102, 116 make-up 15, 86, 89, 91–3, 94, 96–7, 100–2 Mama, A. 34–5 marriage: and female genital cutting 72; underage 17, 22–4 Meyers, D. T. 65–9, 71–2, 78–9, 110 migration 4, 35, 44, 56 Mills, S. 100 mind/body distinction 20–1, 29 Mohanty, C. T. 8, 16–17, 19, 25, 27, 29, 33, 42–4, 51–2, 79 Morgan, K. P. 114 multicultural dialogue 61, 67, 80 multiculturalism 3, 56, 90–5; and humanism 125 Narayan, U. 2, 5, 8, 14, 16–19, 22–4, 27–9, 93, 99 Nasser, M. 2, 86, 89, 91–3, 95, 97–9, 104 nationalism 11, 47, 119; and female genital cutting 74–5, 111, 117; and veiling 87, 93–4 Negrin, L. 63, 114–16 Njambi, W. N. 25–6, 63, 65, 74, 80, 110 Nussbaum, M. 59 Obiora, L. 110 Orbach, S. 59, 97 Orientialism 2, 42–3, 89, 100 Orlan 115 othering: colonial 75, 111, 118; and humanism 15, 28; and identity production 49–50, 55–6, 83 Paris is Burning film 54–5 Parmar, P. 9, 34–5 particularity; contingent 12, 34, 38, 57, 117–18, 120, 129; of bodies 28, 58; and sexuality 56 passing 48 patriarchy 11, 119; and agency 101–3; and anorexia 86, 97–8; and cosmetic surgery 115; and cultural essentialism 6, 24–5, 42; and female genital cutting 6, 15, 62–3, 72–4, 110–14; and fashion and beauty practices 86, 88, 90–4, 96, 101–2; and intersectionality 34–5, 44; and representations of sexual difference 21, 52; and veiling 90, 98, 101 Pearce, L. 4 Pedwell, 84

Index performativity 51, 57, 86–7, 103–4 Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood and the Story of a Return novels 96 Phillips, A. 17 Phoenix, A. 38, 49, 87 postcolonial theory 8–9, 16–17, 24–5, 42–4, 46–8, 55–7, 120 postmodernist theory 30, 37, 49, 41–2 poststructuralist theory 30, 37, 49, 41–2, 116, 120 Prokhovnik, R. 19–20, 48, 123, 125, 127 psychoanalysis 55 Puar, J. 39, 41, 47, 79, 86, 126–8 queer theory 45–9; 55–7, 126–8 race: and comparativism 9–10; and cosmetic surgery 71–8, 107–10, 114–7; and cultural essentialism 6, 17–18, 23; and embodiment theory 54–7; and female genital cutting 71–8, 107–10, 114–7; and humanism 26–7, 124–5, 127–8; and porno-chic 95; and sexual violence 36; and queer theory 46–8 racism: and anorexia 94; differential 144; and female genital cutting 62, 68, 73; and intersectionality 35–6, 40–4; and veiling 93–4 Razack, S. 16–17, 88 reappropriation 96, 105; see also appropriation reflexivity 25, 82, 100, 122 relational: analysis 8, 11, 26, 30–2, 41, 108–29; economy 15, 30, 108, production of subjectivity and identity 30–2, 55–7, 99–100; web 8, 108–29 relationality: and constitutive connection 108, 118; and cross-cultural comparison 108–29; and embodiment theory 48–9, 57: and empathy 123–4; and genealogy 119–20; and intersectionality 39–41, 48–9; and humanism 127–9; and postcolonial theory 42–5, 47–8; and self-referentiality 120–1; and queer theory 45–8 relativism 17, 22 representation: culturally essentialist 5, 8, 16–18, 23–4, 88; and location 78–83; phallocentric system of 50 representational: economy 8, 13, 30, 123 reproductive procedures 60, 77

171

Research Action and Information Network for the Bodily Integrity of Women 62 resignification 23, 29, 51–5; see also deconstruction rhetoric: and feminist theory 4; and cross-cultural comparison 4–5, 8–12, 16, 22, 59–64, 68, 76, 81–3; 86–90, 98–101, 107; postfeminist 92, 95 Robertson, C. 64, 71 Said, E. 42 Sanchez Taylor, J. 117 Sardar, Z. 51 Satrapi, M. 4, 96 Schueller, M. J. 37, 55 Scott, J. 88, 95 Sedgwick, E. 45 Sex and the City 95 sex/gender distinction 20–21, 28, 49 sexual difference: and cultural essentialism 42; and feminist theory 21, 28–9, 49–56, 127–8; and intersectionality 53–5; and make-up 101; ontological privileging of 54–5; and queer theory 45, 127; and veiling 101 sexual regulation 92, 99, 103–4 sexuality: and cosmetic surgery 72, 76–7, 109–10; and female genital cutting 1, 72, 110–11; and embodiment theory 19–24, 28–9; 48–56, 128; and intersectionality 34, 5–6, 39–40, 45–8; and veiling 92, 95; and queer theory 45–9; 55–7, 126–8; see also bisexuality; heterosexual/homosexual distinction; heternormativity; heterosexuality; homosexuality social differentiation 37, 39, 41, 53–4, 57–8, 73, 127 Somerville, S. 47–8 Spelman, E. 10, 123 speech acts 103 Spivak, G. C. 9, 16, 18, 25, 31, 34, 37, 86, 103, 118 Stoler, L. 9 subjectivity: as bounded 99–100; corporeal 21; and embodiment 102–3, 116; and intelligibility; and lived experience 119; and relational web 116; 119, 123, 126, 128; and world-travelling 70, 83; sexual 46 Sullivan, D. 4, 74, 111 Sullivan, N. 8, 26, 63, 84, 121

172

Index

Thompson, B. 94, 98 Toubia, N. 5, 62, 80, 110–11 transsexual surgery 3, 15; see also gender reassignment surgery translation: cultural 30, 122, 125; and cross-cultural comparison 87, 93, 105; and psychoanalysis 55 UN: Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women 90; and definition of harmful cultural practices 15–16, 21, 28, 60, 89–90, 96 The Vagina Monologues play 59 van Zoonen, L. 86, 89–96, 99, 101, 103–4 Volpp, L. 8, 16–18, 22–4 veiling: and agency 91, 98–9, 100–4; and colonialism 94; and comparison with anorexia 2, 85, 92, 94, 97–100; and comparison with make-up 89, 91–3, 96–104; and comparison with fashion 3, 5, 86, 91, 95–104; and cultural essentialism 5, 16–17, 87–9; in Dutch context 90, 92; in French schools 88, 95; and figuration 97–9, 99–101, 109; and patriarchy 86, 93–5; and post-feminism 93, 95; and racism 94,

96; and resistance 89; and sexuality 92, 95 violence: and crimes of passion 2; domestic 2, 18, 22–4, 27, 88; dehumanising 46; and dowry murder 2, 18, 22–4; and embodied differentiation 29, 39, 83; epistemic 120, 128; gendered 28, 43, 74; and honour killing 2; sexual 36, 45, 98 Walker, A. 62 Walley, C. 80–1 war on terror 5, 87 Weil Davis, S. 15–16, 18, 21, 63, 65, 68–73, 75, 111 Western hegemony 5, 7, 79, 81 Western/non-Western distinction 72, 76–7, 109–10, 90, 96–7, 120–1 Wolf, N. 59, 97, 115 Women’s Caucus of the African Studies Association 64, 80 women’s suffrage movement 10 World Health Organisation 63 Yeg˘ enog˘ lo, M. 41–2 Zabus, C. 96 Zack, N. 37

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