This leads us to reflect on the context of global power relations. The Northern hemisphere’s hegemonic position in the world gives it a monopoly, an ability to set the agenda, to formulate and decide the priority of problems to be settled in international political arenas. Western feminists have tended to act according to this power structure, and in their will to fight for the right of women in the Third World, have unreflexively reacted in paternalistic ways (Mohanty 1999). At the United Nation’s Second World Conference on Women in Copenhagen in 1980, for instance, Western feminists vexed women from Third World countries by debating on the quality of clitoral versus vaginal orgasm. Finally, representatives of the Southern hemisphere protested, pointing out that the acute problems concerning the majority of women of the Third World are lack of clean water and fuel, and high maternal and child mortality (Bexar 1997). This criticism persists today (cf. Mohanty 1999). I do not wish to belittle or ridicule the struggle of Western feminists, but to draw attention to the problems that arise when agendas and research questions are not analysed in relation to global power relations.
A telling case in point is the contemporary practice of partial clitoridectomy that some 2,000 infants per year are subjected to in the United States since they are born with ‘ambiguous genitalia’. Interestingly, people in the Western world have their own cultural reasons for trimming girls’ clitorises and in Africa people have their cultural reasons too. The difference is that in the West the excision has an aura of scientific credibility and is therefore not considered a mutilation. However, American women who have been operated on began in 1997 to lobby the American Congress to apply the federal ban on female genital mutilation to put an end to this surgery. They argued that the clitoral reduction serves no purpose beyond the cosmetic one and has left many of them with physical, sexual, and psychological problems (New Internationalist., April 1998; New York Times, May 13, 1997).