“Pay no attention to The Man behind the curtain” – The Wizard of Oz
This week, I am informed by Sullivan, we are dealing with the body as it is constituted in the plural sense: the tensions that hold the body of flesh, the body politic and bodies of knowledge together in a relational model of inclusion, exclusion and taboo. Consider, perhaps, the way one’s vision might blur if you spin too fast/have too many vodkas/experience a rage blackout and a single figure breaks apart into several, shimmering smudges. If that’s not working for you, Grosz (respect) puts it rather concisely when she says “there is no body as such: only bodies” (Grosz, 1994).
When we consider the way ‘FGM’ practices have been shaped by legal and medical discourse in Australia, we see how these bodies have become firmly situated in a narrow cultural imaginary. Nowhere is this more manifest than in the emergence of an unequivocal double standard that condemns all genital surgeries and cultural practices cast under the ‘FGM/FGC’ bracket (associated with the non-white body), while on the other defending ‘corrective’ surgeries performed on intersex children and those requested by labiaplasty patients in the name of a liberal western value framework. This hypocritical take on agency, consent and bodily discipline reveals the culturally and historically specific assumptions and exclusions made by the practice of what Sullivan calls “white optics” that reinforces dominant ideology by stating a purported truth regarding the moral validity of one practice (and its accompanying set of values) which leans on the invalidity & inhumanity of another.
Legal and medical discourse have long been effective ways of solidifying the invisibility of these double-standards by maintaining the appearance of objectivity through an authoritative “voice of reason” that goes relatively unquestioned. Simply by casting the issue of ‘FGM’ (a clearly culturally situated practice) within Australian legislation while exempting other practices that fit a similar description conceals a pretty unambiguous value judgement about how far human rights extend, and who they protect.
We know by now that this power/discourse stuff is a sticky business (thanks Foucault), but what of alternative, supposedly critical discourses such as feminism? Sullivan talks of the tendencies within this sphere to condemn ‘FGM’ as an ultimately disempowering, patriarchal and inhumane practice. Ironically, this seems to cut across a whole bunch of corporeal and autonomous realities experienced by non-western women in favour of holding up what the “ideal” looks like – a notion that feels downright counteractive to any worthwhile strand of feminism. Sullivan’s article reinforces the fact that existing feminist commentary on this matter must continue to push back at legislative language, the pathologisation of non-white bodies and post-colonial human rights discourses in order to create a space for systematically Othered bodies that isn’t heavily laden with pre-judgement. If we do not turn the critical lens on white optics, the bodies of non-white women become the literal site of border patrolling processes which render some practices & the bodies concerned highly visible and others neutralised in their individually “chosen” self-constructions.
Grosz, E 1994. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Sullivan, N. 2007. ‘“The Price to Pay for our Common Good”: Genital Modification and the Somatechnologies of Cultural (In)Difference’, Social Semiotics, 17:3, pp. 395-409.
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