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A CHILD IS BEING MUTILATED

Fantasies of Female Genital Mutilation Law

Juliet Rogers

It is the sad, defeated expression on [one little girl’s] face after her initiation, even more

than the photographs of her agony as the razor blade cuts, again and again, through the

tender innocent flesh, that makes me angriest. (Bone 1999, 19)

White men [and women] are saving brown women from brown men. (Spivak 1999, 284)

In 1993, two Eritrean girls living in Victoria were found to have been infibulated. This

made many people in Australia angry. This rage prompted Australian Attorney-General

Michael Lavarch to summon the Family Law Council (FLC)1 to research what was termed

‘female genital mutilation’. 2

In January 1994 the Council published Female Genital

Mutilation*A Discussion Paper dealing with issues pertaining to the practices, described by the Council, as ‘female genital mutilation’ or ‘FGM’ (FLC 1994a). The Council’s apparent

aim through this Discussion Paper was to generate discussion in Australian communities

on the topic, and to use this discussion to write a report to the Attorney-General. In June

1994, the Council produced Female Genital Mutilation*A Report to the Attorney-General. Included in this Report were the Council’s recommendations for legislation (FLC 1994b).

Both the Discussion Paper and the Report were published only in English, and community

groups, individuals, and government and health organisations were offered two months to

respond to the initial call for discussion.

The Report stated that it had received 64 responses from ‘government departments’

and ‘concerned doctors’, and 12 responses from ‘communities concerned’ (FLC 1994b,

62�63).3 Only one of the comments from the ‘communities concerned’ was documented in the Report.4 This came from the Eritrean Community in Australia (ECA), which stated that

the two months allocated to respond to the Discussion Paper ‘essentially prevented

adequate community consultation from taking place’ (FLC 1994b, 2).

In 1996, as recommended by the FLC in its Report, the Crimes Act 1958 (Vic) was

amended (adding ss. 32 and 33), thereby legislating the Crimes (Female Genital Mutilation)

Act 1996 (Vic). Similar legislation with similar ‘consultative’ mechanisms was enacted in

1996 in the United States (see Mendelsohn 2004, 1014�15) and Canada. England had previously developed the Female Circumcision Prohibition Act (UK) in 1985, but would

amend this in 2003 to the Female Genital Mutilation Act (UK), relying on a single research

paper and debate in parliament to suffice as ‘consultation’.5 Scotland would create the

Prohibition of Female Genital Mutilation Act 2005 (Scot) in response to a consultation that

documented no comments from migrant/relevant/concerned communities.

In 1990 the United Nations condemned female genital mutilation in the Convention

on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW).6 And, while the

1994 consultation was taking place in Australia, the United Nations facilitated the

International Population and Development Conference (IPDC) in Cairo, Egypt (see

Manderson 2004). At the IPDC the Egyptian government was challenged as to its lack

Australian Feminist Studies, Vol. 24, No. 60, June 2009 ISSN 0816-4649 print/ISSN 1465-3303 online/09/020181-14 – 2009 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/08164640902852407

of action concerning the practising of female genital mutilation in Egypt. A CNN

documentary was offered to the participants as evidence of the occurrence and ‘brutality’

of the practice. Commentators have described ‘a scene with a screaming little girl being

pinned down to the ground before being cut open’ (Tadros 1999, 16; Manderson 2004,

292).

The image of a child held down, her genitals cut with an unidentifiable piece of

metal and her protesting screams resounding off the walls of some mud hut, somewhere

in deepest, darkest Africa, constitute a Western imaginary of female genital mutilation. This

is the child’s plight and is thought to be the beginning of the woman’s pain and absence

of desire. This is the picture and the product of female genital mutilation. Something must

be done, a child is being mutilated!

Female genital mutilation, as the conjuncture of the image of a child being

mutilated, coupled with the encouraged silence of relevant communities and the

immanent speech of law, can be understood as the locus of a fantasy. A fantasy which

betrays the investment of the subject who can wield Western, or even Christian, law; a

fantasy of a sovereign subject that articulates with the right law, and of an-other subject* a mutilated subject*to whom the law needs to speak. This is, however, the liberal subject’s fantasy of female genital mutilation. It is not that the practices do not exist* certainly sometimes little girls are held down in Africa (and elsewhere)*but the singular monolithic production of this image as the crime female genital mutilation betrays a

further fantasy, a fantasy that one can avoid the cut. This is a fantasy that proscribes that

the other’s law is violent and prohibitive and that with some effort one can be on the right

side of the right law and thereby inflict the prohibition on another.

This fantasy was articulated, in respect to female genital mutilation in Australia,

through a statement made by Karen Kissane, a Senior Editor for The Age newspaper in

Melbourne. In December 1993 Kissane stated: ‘genital mutilation should be criminalised if

migrants are to get a clear message about how serious a practice it is’ (1993, 16). Kissane’s

comment demands that the law speaks to the practices of ‘genital mutilation’. Her

comment depicts the figures of fantasy that inhere in the ensuing strategies to eradicate

female genital mutilation in Australia. These strategies evoke the subject, the law, and

the migrant (other). These three figures are accompanied, in Kissane’s comment, by the

intersecting discourses of Australian nationalism, ‘law and order’s’ necessity, and the

inherent ignorance of the migrant.

The three figures of the law’s message, provided in Kissane’s statement, offer the co-

ordinates for this article and an entrée into understanding the instantiation of female

genital mutilation legislation in Victoria and across the English-speaking world. These

figures are: firstly, a criminalising address, an address that heralds prohibition; secondly,

the subject, as ‘migrant’ who requires the law’s clear message to prevent its committing

‘serious practices’; thirdly, the subject who understands this address ‘clearly’ and remains

on the sending side of law’s message. These are not new characters. The law, its belonging

to particular and invested people and institutions, and its requirement to promote

understanding in an-other have historically been recruited and rehearsed in the narratives

of colonial Australia, and much of the Western world. Instituting Western law on an

imagined empty, ignorant body is the fantastical trope of colonialism.

The concern of this article is not the cultural relativist or culturally sensitive approach

that an ethics of alterity argument about female circumcision might demand, nor how this

demand might be enacted in law. Many authors have tackled these concerns with varying

182 JULIET ROGERS

degrees of rigor and ethical engagement (see Boddy 1998, 2007; Shweder 2000;

Manderson 2004; Mendelsohn 2004; Ahmadu 2007; Hernlund and Shell-Duncan 2007).

The concern of this article is how the recruitment of law, its belonging to particular people

and its infliction on an-other was*and is still*particular, invested and arranged around fantasies of female genital mutilation as fantasies of a(nother) child being mutilated.

Fantasy

The existence of a fantasy becomes apparent in the particular and invested

characters of female genital mutilation law and through the unusual and substantial

absences apparent in its implementation. The instantiation of female genital mutilation

law was achieved without any evidence of the practices occurring in Australia; in the face

of community objection to the use of law as a method of ‘eradication’ (African Women’s

Working Group on Female Circumcision 1996); and despite the existence of research

performed by women from the ‘relevant communities’ (FLC 1994b, 4�7) which suggested that the implementation of legislation would be detrimental to achieving an eradication of

the practices (African Women’s Working Group on Female Circumcision 1996). This,

coupled with the uncritical citing of highly controversial and contested data about the

actual harm of the practices*with the employment of fictional stories to inform the public about the practices*and with the citing of unsolicited, inflammatory public comment in reports and research (Steer 1994; FLC 1994b, 36), indicates a more than tilted production

of this ‘thing’ called female genital mutilation and its apparent effects on little girls.

Female genital mutilation legislation, I argue, is based less on comprehensive

empirical evidence that determines its irrefutable factual status as a harm to little girls than

on an anxiety to do something, to say something to the imagined child being mutilated.

This image is a fantasy, usually singular and monolithic, usually dominating all other

evidence to the contrary. As Carla Obermeyer has noted, much of the research on female

genital mutilation is based on singular anecdote but is represented uncritically as scientific

research. As she says, ‘[d]espite their deficiencies, some of the published reports have

come to acquire an aura of dependability through repeated and uncritical citations’

(Obermeyer 1999, 92). It is not, therefore, that the image does not reflect what has

happened somewhere to someone, but that we can understand it as a fantasy because it

cleaves reality to a traumatic moment, re-membered in legal discourse, spoken as law and

congealed in this speech as fact.

The image is further remembered in the light of intersecting discourses of freedom,

choice and the possibility of a non-mutilated 7

subjectivity; in the context of a lack of

dialogue with the women who have researched, thought about and experienced the

practices. This remembering, and insistent resistance to knowledge to the contrary,

displays the qualities of an image which is deeply invested with the interests of those

imagining; an image that is invested with the promise of overcoming the pain of

someone’s mutilation. The definitive cleaving to the fantasy that demands law’s speech,

the hysterical rage and fetishising which accompanies this demand and the (almost

psychotic) lack of curiosity which allows it betray an anxiety in the one who demands. It is

this anxiety, I argue, that calls the liberal subject to adhere to the sending side of the law.

In this article, I will evoke the fantasy of female genital mutilation through the

examination of several iconic moments in the legal discourse on female genital mutilation

produced in, and of, the West. These moments are acts of speech, as the commentary on

A CHILD IS BEING MUTILATED 183

the legislating of the practices in Australia. They are complemented by imagery, legal

gesture and public comment in England, Canada, Scotland, the United States and mirrored

in conversations held in Egypt (if not with Egyptian representatives). These moments offer

the ‘truth’ of female genital mutilation as a coupling of an image of a child being mutilated

with the legal speech of female genital mutilation. This speech recruits the tropes of a

Western subjectivity that sports freedom, choice, desire and an agency defined by sexual

freedom, and frames the subject of mutilation as lacking in these capacities.

Part I interrogates the role of the clitoris in allocating desire and thereby agency to

the body in receipt. It is this missing flesh, so significant in Western constructions of

agency and authority, which demands that she is spoken to and for, but without it, she

cannot speak. In Part II, I examine how (in one incident of many) this construction served

to render Horn of African women in Victoria politically, socially and of course sexually

mutilated, and thereby unable to comment on the production of female genital mutilation

law. In Part III, I consider the sender and the fantasy of being on the sending side of law.

The imagined position of being on the sending side of law’s message, I argue, is similar to

the fantasies of Sigmund Freud’s patients who discussed a common childhood fantasy of

imagining another child being beaten (Freud 2001, 183�84). The position of imagining not being in receipt of the beating, in psychoanalytic terms, is the position of being loved. In

the terms of the fantasies of a child being mutilated, I will consider this as representative of

a hope of securing the love of the law.

Part I: In Receipt of Law

In the fantasies of female genital mutilation the quintessential loss, imagined as

incurred by the mutilated woman, is the loss of desire via the severing, cutting, removal of

the clitoris. The clitoris has taken on significance as the flesh of authority in the debates

largely because of its symbolic equation, in Western feminist discourses since the 1960s,

that have refracted women’s*and by extension the subject’s*capacity to desire through their genitals. Desire is defined by what the genital wants, and it is against the acquisition

of the object desired that the freedom of the subject is measured. To be without desire is

to require law’s message to both instantiate and organise the subject’s ‘libidinal economy’

(Spivak 1999, 261).

For Gayatri Spivak, the ‘brown woman’ (1999, 284) is often ‘curiously sewn together’

in ‘gender and development discourse’ but strangely always resembles the inhabitants of

the ‘exploiters’ side of the division of labour’ (1999, 265). Spivak’s ‘brown woman’ or the

‘third world woman’, discussed extensively in feminist literature, neo-liberal feminist

journalism8 and the ‘gender and development’ discourse that informs policy and practice

of global financial initiatives,9 is represented as requiring the ideological, educational and

fiduciary desires of the Western liberal subject. It is without these that her subjectivity is

rendered empty of choice and freedom.10

The body of the ‘brown woman’ woman, fantasised as needing to be saved from her

lack of neo-liberal freedoms, can be imagined in female genital mutilation discourse as

able to be re-sewn in ways that Western feminism could never do for its own lacking

subjects. It is as if feminism in this discourse succeeds on the presence or absence of the

clitoris. This is a configuration that mirrors Jacques Lacan’s discussion of the lack evinced in

the story of castration. The subject is fragmented, according to Lacan (1978, 166), but we

imagine it can be held together, whole, complete, known, through returning a little

184 JULIET ROGERS

piece*the objet petit a*to the lacking self (Lacan 1977).11 Liberalism’s fantasies of the whole, desiring individual gestures to the plight of the Lacanian subject and the curing of

female genital mutilation*through legislation or otherwise*is the image of a successful suturing for all. This is because the clitoris serves, in its representation in female genital

mutilation discourse, as the perfect objet petit a, the piece that will overcome an

ideological lack.

Represented as the particular affliction of the mutilated woman and resplendent

with all the narratives of choice, desire and individualism, the clitoris offers the

penultimate text for the fantastic liberation of woman’s desire. The clitoris, read in this

light, has become analogous with constructions of the penis as the object that harbours

the desire of the subject. As Janice Boddy suggests, both are marked by ‘‘‘presence’’

creativity, agency . . . which made this body part a powerful symbol of women’s

emancipation’ (Boddy 1998, 89). Both the penis and the clitoris are marked, in Boddy’s

terms, as the site of both sexual liberation and sexual control over one’s desire. They are

the location at which one is ‘present’ as an individual; the intersecting moment of what the

subject wants with its capacity to acquire it in the world beyond its body.

In the mode of the Lacanian subject, ‘woman does not exist’ because she cannot

capture all the symbols under the name ‘Woman’, but in the mode of female genital

mutilation discourse this configuration is imagined as overcome. The (re)capturing of the

clitoris is the symbolic acquisition of all that is Woman (Lacan 1975). Hosken performs this

anti-psychoanalytic move through her rendering of the clitoris as a site of fundamental

subjectivity*as sexual response*via its equation with a woman’s capacity to be woman. As an author (heavily relied upon by the FLC), Hosken confidently offers a monolithic

picture of the receptive capacity of women and girls experiencing female genital

mutilation when she writes:

many thousands of helpless young girls continue to be subject to these cruel operations

of sexual castration every year . . . We are able to teach those who cling to distorted

beliefs and damaging practices some better ways to cope with themselves, their lives,

reproduction and sexuality. We know that everyone on earth has the capacity to learn . . .

(Hosken 1982, 2)

The practices for Hosken are represented as injury, not only to the possibility of fulfilling

woman’s function as child bearer, reproducer, but to fulfilling her function as a subject

who can teach (rather than learn). Similar to Karen Kissane’s formula in respect to ‘law’s

message’, the mutilated woman is to be in receipt, and now we can understand this

condition of receipt to be intrinsically tied to her lack of desire, choice or indeed a clitoris.

The frequently cited opinions of Fran Hosken (1982) in anti-female-genital-

mutilation discourse highlight implicit and explicit arguments about the clitoris as the

universal site of desire and its potent necessity. In Hosken’s terms, the clitoris is universally

commensurable and intrinsic to subjectivity. Without it women, and girls, lose, for Hosken,

the very ‘the essence of the female personality’ (1982, 14). What remains of the mutilated

woman is only ‘the capacity to learn’ the lessons of Western feminism and indeed of law

(1982, 2).

The clitoris, as lost personality incurred through female genital mutilation, is thus the

specific item to be engaged in the production of the mutilated woman’s necessary receipt

of law. This is because the loss of the clitoris is contextualised through the fantasy of its

omnipotent function as teleologically necessary to the event ‘Woman’. The loss of the

A CHILD IS BEING MUTILATED 185

clitoris is a crime whose significance is assured in the representation of the lost flesh as the

conflation of essence, desire and the fundamental ingredient to fulfil the promise of

natural law (Douzinas 2000). Woman is not woman without this piece.

This articulates with Michel Foucault’s arguments on the focus on sexuality as

subjectivity in contemporary Western history (1978) that ‘the ‘‘truth’’ of the individual in

western societies has gradually been constructed around a libidinal economy of self’ (Kirby

1987, 43). Truth, in a capitalist economy of self, is precisely an ontological affiliation with

desire as the knowledge of what one wants. Gayatri Spivak takes this understanding

further in her suggestion that ‘invocations of ‘‘libidinal economy’’ and desire as the

determining interest . . . restore the category of the sovereign subject . . .’ (Spivak 1999,

261). In Spivak’s analysis, the necessity of a presence to desire*a libidinal economy* embodied in the clitoris, secures the ‘category of the sovereign subject’ as privileged in

both social and political discourse. In anti-FGM discourse what was lost can be restored

through invoking the promise of returning the sovereign subject to itself via the clitoris.

This fantasy of a sovereign self is the position of the non-mutilated against a construction

of the mutilated woman as lacking the essence of a sovereign subjectivity, or in the terms I

have been discussing as the essence of a desiring subjectivity.12

Part II: The Law’s Message

The representation of female genital mutilation as, in Hosken’s terms, ‘the loss of the

essence of the female personality’ (Hosken 1982, 14), locates the harm as an injury to a

teleological agenda for women. Seen in the ever-present context of the rarely challenged

legality of male circumcision,13 the assumption of harm defers insistently to two repeating

logics: that there is more ‘cut off’ in female genital mutilation, and that it impairs the

sexual desire of women. It is these intersecting discourses of teleological impairment and

trauma that form the basis of rationales for both legal intervention and the representation

of mutilated women as lesser political and social agents.

The first logic of substantive trauma to the flesh, in competition with practices such

as male circumcision, is addressed by Janice Boddy. She suggests that to be concerned

with ‘how much’ engages a capitalist system of equivalence (Boddy 1998). Simply, more

flesh equals more harm. Hosken, assertively engaging this economy, directly equates

female genital mutilation to castration rather than circumcision; the part for the whole. For

Hosken, the removal of the female essence is equivalent to the whole penis being

removed. This is both in terms of quantity and quality for Hosken. In Boddy’s terms, the

quality of the penis is its capacity to indicate presence, creativity and agency, which then

defers to the second logic of teleological impairment.

The import of the second logic recruits the discourse of injury. In legal texts such as

the ‘Crimes Act 1958’, ‘injury’ is ‘unconsciousness, hysteria, pain and any substantial

impairment of bodily function’. The link with hysteria gestures disturbingly to the feminine

hysteric of earlier centuries; both the truths of the hysteric and that of the mutilated

woman are delegitimated in the fashion of the mad (Foucault 1965, 1973; Herman 2001).

This would then lend weight to the status of female genital mutilation as an ‘injury’ to the

mutilated woman’s (in)capacity to speak, or, more accurately, to have her speech

recognised.

186 JULIET ROGERS

The representation of mutilated women in the mode of ‘mad’ women, besieged by

their biology and their emotions, is evident in a particular incident during the consultation

process in Victoria into female genital mutilation. In 1996 the African Women’s Working

Group (AWWG) was contracted by the Victorian Office of Women’s Affairs (OWA) to

produce a report on the impacts of the legislation on Horn of African communities. After

completion and submission of the report by the AWWG, the OWA released its own

‘Summary’ (1996). This was deemed inaccurate and inadequate by the AWWG because:

[the Summary] did not have adequate and sufficient information about the Legal

Education Project, as presented by the initial Project Report . . . [It] also makes some

inaccurate statements about the project. (AWWG 1996)

The criticisms of the Summary were presented to OWA representatives at a meeting in

October 1996. The OWA did not alter its Summary, and responded negatively to the

request to release the original report. Its justification for not releasing the report was that it

would implicate and thereby potentially harm the ‘individuals’ who made ‘personal

comments’ (OWA 1996).

The concern for the individuals who made ‘personal comments’ represents the

group as a collection of individuals, rather than as a professional body representing its

communities. That is, individuals who relate personally to the practices are without

foundational authority from which to claim expertise. Their language secures no symbolic

resonance with expert legal or medical evidence. Read against the presence of Woman

Lawyers Against Female Genital Mutilation*a group of (non-mutilated) lawyers who informed on the practices in a court case in 1993, and who were described as ‘friends of

the court’ (Pegler 1993, 1)*the positioning of the AWWG as a collection of individuals suggests that the experience of female genital mutilation renders the speaker not only

sexually but also politically and intellectually mutilated. It is the very injury to the ‘essence

of their personality’ that renders their comments personal, and without the authority of a

personality which is able to absorb and reproduce valid knowledge; indeed, for Hosken

they can only be taught.

The impossibility of the speech acts of ‘mutilated women’ being recognised in legal

discourse as legitimate ensures that the mutilated are represented as necessarily in receipt

of law’s message. Migrants who require law’s message are to be informed, not to inform

on the practices which they, in Kissane’s words, do not know are ‘serious’. The grouping of

the informants suggests those to whom the message is clear*clear to those who are ‘Against Female Genital Mutilation’*and assists in the constructed silence of ‘migrants’, thereby consolidating the image of the recipients of the law as victims of a serious

mutilation. The necessary corollary is that law’s speech is then required to return the

missing part.

Part III: The Sovereign Sender

The demand that law attend or speak to the practising of female genital mutilation,

or more precisely to the ‘migrant’, is a product of more than a concern with the mutilated

child. The aggressive construction of mutilated woman as in need of education, law and

the return of their clitoris, together with the denial of their opinions, researched and

A CHILD IS BEING MUTILATED 187

documented dissent and their presence in the debates suggests more than a desire to

save little girls. Indeed, the interest in the use of law to prohibit female genital mutilation

suggests that white men (and women) are invested in more than saving brown women

from brown men. It suggests that something is being disavowed in this gesture of

salvation.

The figure of a mutilated child resonates with Sigmund Freud’s discussion of his

patient’s accounts of imagining ‘a child is being beaten’. In the essay of the same name

(Freud 2001) Freud suggests that the imagination of a child being beaten*a common symptom in his patients*is not a fantasy which enables concern for the child, as we might expect, but a fantasy of the deferral of the parent’s displeasure onto another. The fantasy

enables another child somewhere to be taking the parent’s displeasure; s/he is being

beaten, while the child imagining this occurrence can be eternally, and only, loved. As

Freud suggests of the child’s recruitment of this image: ‘One soon learns that being

beaten, even if it does not hurt very much, signifies a deprivation of love and a humiliation’

(Freud 2001, 187). The necessary replacement of the parent’s possible displeasure onto

another child occurs in the face of the realisation that the parents do not give only love.

The displeasure is a metonymic affectation, if you like, for the parents’ prohibition; the ‘no’.

Parents do more than love, they prevent, discipline and prohibit. The parents make the

rules and mete out punishment for disobedience, but it is these rules*the ones which disallow the child’s pleasure*that are in contest in anti-female-genital-mutilation discourse.

In a submission responding to the FLC’s Female Genital Mutilation*A Discussion Paper, one commentator makes the trauma of parental prohibition evident when he states

that ‘the child has no say and is quite at the whims of parent, guardian or doctor . . . [this

is] repugnant and unacceptable for Australia’ (FLC 1994b, 17). The author believes,

evidently, that children should have a ‘say’, and not be at the ‘whims’ of the parent or

guardian. The ‘rights of the child’ discourse presented here seems to deny the necessity of

children, firstly and importantly, not getting all that they ‘say’ they want, and the

importance of parents making the rules. Parents can and need to assert a limiting ‘no’,

even if it is (mis)taken as displeasure or less love.

What is particularly ‘repugnant and unacceptable’ to this author seems that these

rules are a ‘whim’; the rules are, what we might call, arbitrary. The arbitrariness of the

authoritarian whim, in this configuration, is precisely a disavowal of the ‘say’ of the child.

What is ‘repugnant’ is then that the say does not influence the whim, or that the whim

does not go the child’s way. The irony of this author’s submission or ‘say’, being published

in the FLC’s Report, while so few members of ‘relevant communities’ have their ‘say’,

should not be overlooked and particularly because his statement refers specifically to

parental law. The ‘say’ implies a relation to what we might think of as the law of the

parent, guardian or doctor. This commentator is speaking to those who can exercise their

power ‘whimsically’ over him. That is, he is precisely having a ‘say’ in his conversation with

whimsical law.

Imagining one is in conversation with law, or agreeing with law’s whim, or imagining

one has a say, legitimates law as not whimsical. This is a necessary condition for

maintaining the fantasy of the democratic ‘Rule of Law’. In a pluralist nation, law must be

seen to be a product of having a ‘say’. Thus, in having a say about the repugnance or

unacceptability of female genital mutilation, a liberal subject can maintain a fantasy that

law is not whimsical. Or, ‘if law changes (whimsically or otherwise) it is a reflection of my

188 JULIET ROGERS

desire, of my say’. The say refers to the ‘whimsical’ experience of law’s advent as an anxiety

about who may get a beating, or conversely who may get love. The having a ‘say’, in order

to direct the whim, attempts an assurance of, and by, the subject of receiving the love of

the law. Law’s advent is thus not perceived as ‘repugnant and unacceptable’ if it articulates

with an imagination of consultation and an already existing framework of necessity, or ‘I

do not mind the law exercising prohibitions if it enables my desires, rather than preventing

them!’

The enabling of my desires is not always the case, however. Law both enables and

prevents me, ‘I am at law’s whim.’ In the FLC’s Report, another commentator, Louise M.

Steer*whose comments on female genital mutilation in the Sydney Morning Herald were recruited by the Council*indicates an assertive disavowal of her subjection to law’s prohibitive whim while perhaps betraying an anxiety about the violent displeasure, or

unloving capacity of law. Steer wrote:

In Australia, we are free of many malignant cultural practices endured elsewhere*such as the stoning of adulteresses . . . amputation of the hands of thieves, flogging and

caning, the death penalty, polygamy and polyandry, slavery and inherited bonded

servitude . . . If it is necessary to remind parents not to leave their children in locked cars

by enshrining this in legislation, why should we not use the same means to remind

parents to refrain from mutilating their children in the name of cultural practice? (Steer

1994, 5)

The letter, opening the ‘Strategies’ section of the Council’s Report, calls upon the reader to

consider female genital mutilation in relation to flogging, caning, the amputation of hands

and slavery. The relationship suggested by the FLC, via Steer, proposes a resemblance

between the practices which are already illegal in Australia and have profound historical

meanings associated with the supposed development of a Western subjectivity, Western

law, and the practices of female genital mutilation. This progress narrative gestures both

to a progression from a ‘malignant cultural’ past and from the law of a ‘malignant cultural’

other.

The images evoked offer the commonly iterated tropes of Sharia (Islamic Law) and

invoke the histories of a British colonial past: ‘flogging and caning’, a motif commonly

associated with the colonial imaginary of settler Australia and its convict past; the Civil War

narratives of the United States, ‘slavery and inherited bonded servitude’; and ‘the stoning

of adulteresses’ overcome by a progressive and compassionate Messiah (as opposed to a

‘barbaric’ Prophet). In Steer’s inclusion in the FLC’s Report, we see the image of the other’s

law overcome by the progress of Western civilisation.

The violence of Steer’s imagery is not to be underrated. The metonymic associations

of hands as clitoris, of flogging as cutting, of slavery as subjection offer an imagination of

amputation, flogging and slavery as violence represented as equal to that of female

genital mutilation. These are illegal practices in Australia/Britain and the United States;

although, importantly, the inclusion of the ‘death penalty’ is a notable equivocation about

law’s development in the West. The death penalty is a current whim of some liberal

sovereigns. The subject who imagines that these ‘malignant cultural practices’ are

elsewhere disavows both that these practices are a figure of its own cultural heritage

and contemporary condition. As with Australia’s colonial past, and certainly with that of an

England and United States that condoned slavery or flogging, and with the US cultural

present that speaks fluently of the need for administering capital punishment and

A CHILD IS BEING MUTILATED 189

legitimacy of information gained through torture,14 the law’s violence is hovering. It is

only, indeed precisely, law’s whim that is able to alter the condition of the liberal subject

before the law in contemporary times. The law’s whims (beatings and mutilations) that

Steer is pointing to are part of a Western cultural past that changed only because of law’s

whimsical capacity.

The liberal subject, who imagines itself to be on the sending side of law’s message,

rather than receiving its malignant mutilations, utilises both its say to direct the whim, and

its imagination that the other’s law is really violent in the form of female genital mutilation

to quell its own anxiety. The fantasy of another child being mutilated holds this in place.

Further, the recruitment of the law to save this child not only disavows the whim of the

law but secures the repetition of the image of a crime being committed elsewhere, on

another’s body. This imagination and call for law’s salvation is not innocuous or accidental,

however; indeed, in Freud’s terms it is sadistic. It evinces an attitude towards the child

imagined being beaten that must be accounted for in the psyche of the one imagining.

In Freud’s account of his patient’s fantasy, the imagining is spoken as: ‘My father is

beating the child whom I hate’ (Freud 2001, 185; emphasis in original). The hatred stems

from the need to represent the father’s displeasure*or we might say the law’s ‘whim’*as a force, which is directed upon another and is directed by the subject speaking; having a

say. At this point: ‘The idea of the father beating this hateful child is therefore an agreeable

one . . . It means my father does not love this other child. He loves only me’ (Freud 2001,

187; emphasis in original). The subject is imagining a child unloved, a child being

mutilated. This imagining takes place in the context of no evidence of the mutilation, a

wilful refusal to engage in dialogue, in curiosity, and a propensity to iterate an extremely

violent image that is usually a singular uncritical, unresearched, and insubstantial

anecdote. It is this effort that cannot be ignored.

The production of a child being mutilated as singular anecdote, repeated in imagery

and legend (Obermeyer 1999; Manderson 2004), is the imagination of the fate of the child

whom I hate. The recruitment of law, however, serves to sanction and sanctify this hate as

a benevolent gesture of care. It firstly defers the imagined possibility of beating and, while

this might be hard to accept of such humanitarian principled action, it also displays a

certain sadism towards the other child. In Lacan’s terms the reiteration of the images of

female genital mutilation evinces a type of ‘enjoyment’, a jouissance, that the subject

entertains through both their imagined alignment with the father/law and through the

constant imagining of the other child being beaten. What the patient/subject/anti-FGM

and pro-law advocate is left with is guilt.

Guilt and rage are siblings, and nowhere more so than in the narratives of

humanitarian intervention. The vulnerable other produces anger and resentment, some-

times in the same body, and sometimes at the same moment. Something must be done.

The invoking of legislation, of the law’s whim, serves to quell both these conditions. Its

production, particularly over the body of the recipient, means that those who agree can

align with what is deemed to be a rightful (sometimes righteous), caring intervention.

Somebody is being saved by the law, but it is perhaps not obvious who. The liberal subject

aligning with female genital mutilation law can disavow, from this position, their own

feelings of anger at the potential loss of law’s love, and their own confused feelings

towards the mutilated child and the mutilated women who are doubly mutilated through

the production of female genital mutilation law. This alignment might go part way to

explaining why the stories recounted are so vivid, so excitably and excruciatingly recited

190 JULIET ROGERS

and why accounts of female genital mutilation sell so well on airport shelves. It also might

explain why the demand for a special female genital mutilation law, and why such an

urgent timeframe that meant ‘effective consultation could not take place’.

Conclusion

The wager of this article is that contemporary discourse on and of female genital

mutilation can be understood as a fantasy and, in particular, as the fantasy of ‘a child being

beaten’ elaborated and analysed by Freud. I am not suggesting that something does not

happen*indeed, something even happens to little girls*but that that ‘something’ does not stand as empirically, universally irrefutable. What occurs is a collection of stories,

pictures and conversations that offer an assemblage to law’s imaginary. What occurs is

certainly ‘female genital mutilation’ but this phrase must not be thought of as a series of

words which accurately name an event. The name occurs a priori the event and the images

ply the phrase with legitimacy. What exceeds this legitimacy is the excitement apparent in

the calls for legislation and the rendition of the stories of a child being mutilated.

In Freud’s account of fantasies of ‘a child being beaten’ there is a point, for his

patients, in which ‘[t]he figure of the child who is producing the beating-phantasy no

longer itself appears in it’ (Freud 2001, 185�86). At this point the parent is established as directing the displeasure towards the other; the law takes over. The patient responds to

Freud’s questions about where s/he is in the fantasy with ‘I am probably looking on’ (Freud

2001, 186). The one looking on is imagining and demanding that the law address the

injury. The perpetrator requires law’s prohibition to understand the ‘seriousness’ of their

actions, but the one looking on struggles with the guilt of inflicting the law’s displeasure

onto another. For Freud, the fantasy of another child being beaten is far from

humanitarian; it is sadistic (Freud 2001, 186). From this position, the liberal subject

imagines itself securing law’s love, but the anxiety of this position demands law continue

speaking, continue disavowing the guilt, the fear of the whim and the fear of losing law’s

love. The continuing alignment with the sent speech of law is enshrined and assured in the

implementation of female genital mutilation legislation.

NOTES

1. For a description of the purview of the FLC, see its homepage (http://www.ag.gov.au/flc).

2. I will use the term ‘female genital mutilation’ or ‘FGM’ when referring to the event that

the law, or the Western discourses on ‘female genital mutilation’, means to describe. I will

use the term ‘female circumcision’ when referring to the practices described as such by

the communities who claim to, or are said to, practise them.

3. ‘Communities concerned’ or ‘relevant communities’ is the term used by the Family Law

Council. It is unclear as to who exactly they are referring to but it can be inferred that

they are describing migrant community groups, individuals or organisations who had

direct experience of the practices.

4. It is difficult to know whether the Ecumenical Migration Centre, which was cited several

times in the Report, is understood to be a concerned community as it consists of a

conglomeration of migrant workers and organisations, few of which*at the time*came from communities directly concerned with the practices.

A CHILD IS BEING MUTILATED 191

5. The Prohibition of Female Circumcision Act 1985 (UK) c 38 was amended to the Female

Genital Mutilation Act 2003 (UK) c 31. See Sleator (2003).

6. CEDAW (1990) states:

2. Violence against women shall be understood to encompass, but not limited to, the

following:

Physical, sexual and psychological violence occurring in the family, including battering,

sexual abuse of female children in the household, dowry related violence, marital rape,

female genital mutilation and other traditional practices harmful to women.

See also CEDAW Committee, General Comments, recommendation 14.

7. My use of the term ‘non-mutilated’ refers to the FLC’s description of women who have

not experienced the practice of female genital mutilation as ‘non-mutilated women’. See

FLC (1994b, 22, 23).

8. See specifically the work of Geraldine Brooks (1995).

9. Spivak’s reference to ‘Gender and Development’ discourses is throughout ‘Chapter 3:

History’ in Spivak (1999), particularly pp. 200, 252 and 259).

10. Liberation of brown women from brown men is a prominent victory in the war on terror.

In these representations, it is the body of the Muslim woman that requires liberation. The

cloth which covers her body*the burkha or hijab*hides her liberal identity in potentia. In 2002, The Age newspaper in Melbourne offered a front-page view of the marriage of

the ‘war on terror’ and ‘women’s liberation’ as the uncovering of the Muslim woman’s

body. As a testament to the success of Operation Afghani Freedom in 2002, Afghani

women were pronounced as liberated. Depicted on the front page of The Age was a

group of Afghanis in burkha but for one woman turning ‘unveiled’ to the camera. The

headline announces ‘A Liberated Kabul’ and the subheading read ‘shows the world a new

face’ (Meek 2001, 1). The world being the West, of course. The respective wars on areas of

the Middle East have enhanced the altruistic image and moral currency of Western

military intervention, through enlisting women’s liberation as a necessary component of

human rights. This component infuses the body of Muslim woman isomorphically with

the desires of the liberal subject and the empty flesh upon which these desires are

imagined. The Muslim woman has thus been represented as an empty vessel ripe for the

democracy, rights, education and financial incentives that a Western ‘coalition’ victory

will bring (Bone 2001, 3).

11. See especially Lacan (1977, 17�18, 76�77, 145�48, 244�76). 12. I have discussed the positioning of the mutilated against the non-mutilated in more

depth in Rogers (2003).

13. It is worth noting that a large number of letters to the editor in The Age emerging in

response to the articles on the ‘child abuse/infibulation’ case in 1993/1994 specifically

addressed the ‘harm’ of male circumcision. See Harford (1994, 61); Tropp (1994, 12).

14. See the United States’ Military Commissions Act of 2006. 10 USC (2006).

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Juliet Rogers is Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Melbourne. She has authored

articles on the legislation relating to female circumcision as well as on psychoanalytic

jurisprudence and political theories of democracy.

194 JULIET ROGERS