The Feminist Fetish

In the wake of the Constitution of 1992, Ghana criminalized cutting not once, but twice. In chapters 6 and 7, which should be read in conjunction, I investigate the intimate relationship between violence and law by analyzing, respectively the associated efforts to reform and enforce the law against cutting. Chapter 6, The Feminist Fetish: Legal Advocacy illuminates how GAWW’s advocacy for more severe legislation functions as an early instantiation of “zero tolerance to FGM” logic. I attend to Ghanaian advocates’ reckoning with both the power of law and the tensions within feminist liberalism, namely, those between protection and punishment, and freedom and violence.

Making Harmful Traditional Practices

Chapter 2, Making Harmful Traditional Practices, examines the Ghanaian problematization of cutting as a “harmful traditional practice,” and contextualizes it within governance discourses and policies that conceptualize poverty in northern Ghana as an effect of harmful traditions. It shows that the codification of harmful traditions is embedded in the larger frameworks of modernization and development that have shifted over time. The national discourse of harmful traditions is the primary mode of problematizing northern poverty; it draws on neoliberal technologies of recognizing scarcity while shifting the responsibility for it to northern Ghanaians and their traditions. I suggest that anti-cutting campaigns employ this notion to mediate the fraught relationship between Ghana’s North and South and the place of the North in the Ghanaian polity. I suggest that the public embrace of this problematization results from the construction of northern Ghana as a counterpoint to southern civilization and modernity and a site for displacing national lack, shame, and disorder.

Against Sovereign Violence

Chapter 7, Against Sovereign Violence reveals that the collusion between feminism and sovereign violence is contested even when it seemingly wins the day, and that NGO workers and civil servants themselves turn “against the state” (Clastres 1989) in form of what I refer to as “governmentality against itself.” By way of an ethnography of the arrest, trial, imprisonment, and pardon of two circumcisers, I show that civil servants and NGO workers’ participation in law enforcement eventually brings the fetishization of law into crisis and leads to a disidentification, not only from sovereign violence but also from the imperial order of things.

Introduction

Introduction: Governmentality Against Itself lays out the book’s overarching arguments and analytical contributions to anthropology and feminist theory. Rather than debating how “we” as Western subjects should think about cutting, this book attends to the political concerns and ethical dilemmas of Ghanaian and other African women and men who are most engaged in and affected by the efforts to end and regulate cutting. It addresses two questions: Are efforts to end female genital cutting a problem, and if so, what kind of a problem are they and for whom? For whom is the ending of cutting a problem and why? I redefine answers to these two questions from the perspectives of Ghanaian lifeworlds rather than liberal debates about FGM. In Ghana, cutting has been ending in many districts, and dramatically so in areas where sustained, decades-long campaigns have taken place. The waning of cutting has been accompanied by critical responses to the colonial order of things and its afterlives in the liberal governance of everyday life. These critiques are voiced not in public protests or debates but in a different key: in indirect speech and in practices of living. They gather their force from sensibilities (that is entanglements of thought, affect, and habitus) formed at the interstices of social and governmental logics, and in consonance with tacit principles on which society is built, such as the ethics of relationality and mutual responsibility.

Colonial Reason, Sensibility, and the Ethnographic Style

Chapter 1, Colonial Reason, Sensibility, and the Ethnographic Style analyzes the colonial history of efforts to regulate and criminalize cutting in northern Ghana in order to examine the durable traces they left on the present and to expand and retool postcolonial feminist analysis. I want to account for the forms of power-knowledge, affect, and ordering of the world and desires to change it that stretch from colonialism to the present. I show that imperial interventions entailed anti-colonial opposition from within by regional officers posted in what is today northern Ghana whose politics were shaped by a white man’s burden to protect the natives from other white men and women. By examining the larger British governance of northern Ghana, we are able to see how violence and dispossession were enmeshed with the feminist will to knowledge, anthropological taxonomies, and benevolent appreciation of cultural difference and its codification for purposes of securing colonial rule.

Epilogue

The Epilogue returns to the politics of knowledge about cutting that disavows its endings – not only in Ghana, but across the African continent and in the global North. Having shown that debates about knowledge have practical consequences, I point to the scholarly and political work that lies ahead.

Blood Loss and Slow Harm in Times of Scarcity

For women who have stopped cutting, the success of interventions against cutting in northern Ghana is also an index of a troubled economy and consequent bodily vulnerability and precarity. Chapter 5, Cutting in Times in Scarcity: Blood Loss and Slow Harm after NGOs, recasts the aftermath of governmental achievements in light of the perspectives of rural women in the Bongo district targeted by NGO and state interventions. Taking their concerns about lack of blood as a starting point, I explore how they problematize harm and make sense of the end of cutting. Cutting is now seen as unworthy of blood loss, and as a critical event that generates a lifelong susceptibility to illness. Cutting had to stop, they say, given how the struggles of the contemporary moment have meant that women can no longer afford to lose blood. Furthermore, while NGOs and the state seek to isolate cutting in a hermetically-sealed world of rural northern Ghanaians who resist change, these women link the end of cutting to national and pan-African concerns and idioms, joining a chorus of voices that criticize national blood shortages and emphasize the associated failures of biopolitical care.

Mistaken by Design

Turning to practices of persuasion as techniques of governance, Chapter 4, Mistaken by Design: Biopolitics in Practice, examines how RHI addresses rural publics in the Upper East region. Through an ethnography of public health educational film screenings, I try to understand how RHI’s work is persuasive even though it eschews translation and mobilizes misrepresentations. Rather than interpreting these as indicators of a lack of knowledge or tying them to failure, I suggest that they constitute deliberate, tactical refusals of translation. Medical anthropologists tend to emphasize and critique what is said in public health and development interventions, and how it is said, but I want suggest that what is done and how power is materialized matters much more. My analysis of the place of knowledge in NGO interventions shows that NGOs like RHI know how to make knowledge matter, but also recognize that more than knowledge is needed for the production of authority. Claims about the harms of cutting become “true” when presented in visual spectacles that materialize governmental power and set the conditions and constraints on which knowledge about reproduction, health, and society is socially productive.

When Cutting Did and Did Not End

Chapter 3, When Cutting Did and Did Not End, examines how it is that the discourse of FGM lives on, despite the demise of cutting. Although cutting is on the wane in Ghana, the discourse of its “intractability” is used to produce suspect citizens and to legitimate punitive rationality and “Zero Tolerance” campaigns and legislation. This chapter shows how social science “evidence” is mobilized to support truth claims that rural communities “resist” anti-cutting campaigns and continue to practice cutting “underground.” It also refracts the endings of cutting through the lens of nostalgia: former circumcisers long for the ancestral benevolence that cutting secured for them, and uncut Ghanaians bemoan the disappearance of the traditional patriarchal values they believe cutting upheld.