Provincializing the clitoris

This contribution aims to broaden and nuance contemporary discussions of female genital mutilation/cutting and female genital cosmetic surgery (FGCS). In particular, we seek to reinvigorate debate which has tended to quickly default to a somewhat limited comparison of practices. We do so by shifting the analytical focus from practices, to one of the key entities in the comparison; that is, the clitoris. In focusing on the clitoris, we locate it in its historical and cultural specificity – including distinct sites of knowledge production - and thus ‘provincialize’ it. To do so, we track it across different domains of knowledge: starting with medicine, law, and feminism. These are domains in which the clitoris accrues specific meanings and where it is mobilized to underline distinctive truth claims. We add a fourth domain - ethnography - and draw on ethnographic examples to situate the clitoris in contexts that are usually absent from the production of medical and legal knowledge in the UK. In the final section we turn to FGCS. We draw on these four domains to address responses to FGCS which, we argue, have been shaped by these earlier narratives. In tracking the clitoris across these fields our aim is to unsettle both current modes of thinking and the medico-legal alliance where law and biomedicine each accept, often unexamined, the truth claims of the other.