Female Circumcision - Another Case of Monolithizing the Subaltern?

Female Circumcision

  Among the vital and sensitive issues concerning African women’s rights and bodies are marriage, polygamy, inheritance, education, and female circumcision. The wide disparity in the local testimonies, not to mention the discrepancy between local testimonies and Western representations, puzzles both non-African scholars and laymen. This paper brings to light diverse perspectives on and responses to the thorny issue of female circumcision by delving into related interviews and documents, and then moves on to pointing out what kind of pitfalls an outsider’s understanding and representation of the African women"s issues may fall into. The premise of this paper is that the Western representations of and discourses on the so-called victim group could easily deal to the object of their rescue mission a blow as fatal as the "evils" from which they intend to rescue the victim. It is the reason why Western feminists" and scholars" critical engagement in the "harmful traditional practice" is not always welcomed by the victim group. Although Gayatri Spivak alerted us to the voicelessness of the subaltern, this paper goes further and issues another warning against monolithizing the subaltern, pointing out the fact that the members of the subaltern are neither "equally" voiceless nor unanimous in their opinions. The conclusion of this paper is that due to the wide gap and inconsistency in the realities of African women, one needs to be wary of generalization in dealing with other cultures and to pay attention to whom the local sources of information speak for.