A better understanding of FGC is needed greatly in places like the European Union and the United States where some refugees and immigrants from Africa have brought the traditions of FGC with them. Since the mid-1990s with an influx of publicity, growing awareness and public condemnation of the practice has led to the passage of legislation criminalizing FGC in 24 African countries and 12 industrialized countries (WHO 2013). Some women who refuse to be cut have been able to successfully seek asylum or have avoided deportation by maintaining that they have fled their home countries in order to avoid the operation. However, efforts to protect women and girls can backfire when immigrant or refugee mothers in the United States, for example, seek
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She writes that “nothing…had adequately prepared me for what I was to witness” when she observed her first operation but nevertheless adds that “as time passed in the village and understanding deepened I came to regard this form of female circumcision in a very different light” (1997). Although both boys and girls undergo circumcision, female circumcision is required to make a girl marriageable, making it possible for her to use her one great gift, fertility (Boddy 1997). Boddy found that preserving chastity and curbing a female’s sexual desire made the most sense in rural northern Sudan: where a woman and her family’s honor depend upon the woman’s (lack of) sexual conduct (1997). Infibulation guarantees virginity when a girl marries for the first time and although there is a lot of suffering involved, it does have cultural …show more content…
This idea means that with their husbands they are now eligible to establish a new lineage branch by giving birth to sons. Women who become “mothers of men” are more than just simple sexual partners or the husband’s servants and can obtain high status in the village with their name remembered in village ancestry histories (Gruenbaum 2001). For the women of Hoyfriyat, Boddy insists that infibulation is an “assertive symbolic act.” The experience infibulation creates, as well as other traditional practices teaches girls to associate pure, clean and smooth female bodies with the heat and pain that accompanies infibulation, thereby accomplishing a meaningful effect. These experiences become associated with the chief purpose the village women strive for—to become “mothers of men”—with the lesson being taught to them repeatedly (1997). By employing a culturally relativistic approach in her research, Boddy illustrates how the meanings correlated with female infibulation are reinforced by many different aspects of everyday life. The girls, who grow up, marry, and bear children in Hofriyat come to consider and understand that although
She writes that “nothing…had adequately prepared me for what I was to witness” when she observed her first operation but nevertheless adds that “as time passed in the village and understanding deepened I came to regard this form of female circumcision in a very different light” (1997). Although both boys and girls undergo circumcision, female circumcision is required to make a girl marriageable, making it possible for her to use her one great gift, fertility (Boddy 1997). Boddy found that preserving chastity and curbing a female’s sexual desire made the most sense in rural northern Sudan: where a woman and her family’s honor depend upon the woman’s (lack of) sexual conduct (1997). Infibulation guarantees virginity when a girl marries for the first time and although there is a lot of suffering involved, it does have cultural …show more content…
This idea means that with their husbands they are now eligible to establish a new lineage branch by giving birth to sons. Women who become “mothers of men” are more than just simple sexual partners or the husband’s servants and can obtain high status in the village with their name remembered in village ancestry histories (Gruenbaum 2001). For the women of Hoyfriyat, Boddy insists that infibulation is an “assertive symbolic act.” The experience infibulation creates, as well as other traditional practices teaches girls to associate pure, clean and smooth female bodies with the heat and pain that accompanies infibulation, thereby accomplishing a meaningful effect. These experiences become associated with the chief purpose the village women strive for—to become “mothers of men”—with the lesson being taught to them repeatedly (1997). By employing a culturally relativistic approach in her research, Boddy illustrates how the meanings correlated with female infibulation are reinforced by many different aspects of everyday life. The girls, who grow up, marry, and bear children in Hofriyat come to consider and understand that although