In this chapter we contrast the male circumcision debate with activists’ work that connects HIV/AIDS to questions of historically specific patterns of colonialism, apartheid, capitalism and a global economy with its powerful pharmaceutical cor­porations. HIV activists have to deal with the Western constructions of ‘African AIDS’ on the one hand, and the realities of HIV/AIDS […]

The theoretical frame of reference within which the analysis is conducted draws from postcolonial feminist theory (Mohanty 1991; Spivak 1988) and feminist de­constructive readings of AIDS. According to Paula Treichler (1999) AIDS should be viewed as constructed through language—in particular through the discourses of medicine and science. This construction according to her is ‘true’ or […]

The material for this study consists of articles in medical journals, primarily journals like the Lancet and British Medical Journal that popularize and debate re­search findings and health care policy, but also journals of stricter academic style reporting research and findings.[71] We deliberately blur the difference between me­dia texts and scientific texts. Medicine, as no […]

Katarina Jungar and Elina Oinas Introduction Ever since the global panic around HIV/AIDS started, Africa has been repre­sented in extremely catastrophic terms as the lost continent (Patton 1997). There is now growing attention to the fact that young women (and babies) are the major HIV risk group in Africa (UNAIDS/99.2, UNAIDS/99.16E). In both research literature […]

Understood in its cultural context, excision among the Jola in southern Senegal is about much more than girls’ clitorises. The practice is carried out so that a girl can pray and be part of the women’s secret society, to acquire the practical, theoretical, A Reflection on the Cultural Meanings of Female Circumcision and corporeally ‘magical’ […]

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 […]

This understanding of sexuality and the self is not universal, but a specific Euro-American culture model. By reacting according to this model, Westerners commonly draw conclusions that give rise to misleading implications of female circumcision. An illustrative example can be drawn from an advert found in a Swedish newspaper. Instead of ‘Seminar on female genital […]

Female circumcision has not always aroused the intense emotions we see in the West today. The first pressure on the World Health Organization (WHO) for ac- A Reflection on the Cultural Meanings of Female Circumcision tion came in 1958. A year later, the WHO stated in a resolution that female cir­cumcision is of a socio-cultural […]

The discrepancy between the Western and the Jola understanding of female cir­cumcision is striking. In considering the custom from an emic, or inner, point of view, the common Western stereotyped representations of those people that practise female circumcision are immediately challenged. We need to pose the question: if they are not reflected in ethnographic and […]

clitoridectomy. In talking with men who had experienced sex with both excised and non-excised women, they usually could not tell if it made a difference. The cultural construction of sexuality From a contemporary Western point of view, it is difficult to conceive of female sexuality when parts or all of the outer genitalia are missing. […]