Remnants of mutilation in anti-FGM law in Australia - a reply to ‘The prosecution of Dawoodi Bohra women’ by Richard Shweder

Abstract

This article examines the absence of discussion about male circumcision in the first legal case against female circumcision in Australia, the Vaziri and Magennis case of 2015, 2018 and 2019, where the High Court of Australia prosecuted three people for practising female circumcision. It engages with the work of Rick Shweder on this case, arguing that what powerfully informs legal cases on this topic in Australia is less anthropological or medical evidence, than antifemale genital mutilation advocacy in the forms of literature and activism. These forms of anti-female genital mutilation discourse, the article argues, obscure the obvious comparison between male circumcision – as a ritual or ceremony that results in the production of a man as a man of God or of the nation – and female circumcision, which is understood as a mutilation. In lieu of the missed comparison, the result of this representation in legal and fictional texts is a rendering of the woman as unable to authorise her own agency, that is, as a remnant of mutilation, a rendering that is far from accurate.Key messagesLegal deliberations on female circumcision would benefit from comparison with the significance of male circumcision.Legal deliberations on female circumcision need to be informed by evidence from circumcised women and less by anti-female genital mutilation activism, which is curated for popular consumption.Positioning circumcised women as mutilated women denies the significant and informed voices of circumcised women who do not experience the practices as mutilation.