A Few Small Nips1

I refuse to call it “female circumcision,” I tell my students. It is “Female Genital Mutilation” (FGM). I want the word “mutilation” to be in the phrase as in my experience, it is the only word that captures the essence of what the refugee women, who have been cut, have shared with me. They describe it as something has been taken away from them, a part of them is forever lost, or their womanhood undermined. I ask myself why I resonate so strongly with the experience of these women, although I have not been mutilated myself. Or have I not?

As a woman raised in Iran until my teenage years, forced to wear the mandatory hijab from age 6, perhaps a part of me resonates with the experience of not having control over one’s body. Perhaps I understand what it means when the feminine part of you is cut out; the way my stature, my hair was forcefully removed. The way I was subjected to absolute submission to a patriarchal order I can only label as a gender apartheid (Kohan, 2022).

Or is this perhaps an even more universal experience for women under patriarchy that has globally been a norm rather than an exception for the majority of our human history? Do we feel a part of us has been cut out? Subjected to removal? Unrecognized and denied? Patriarchy often removes women as autonomous agents capable of making choices. Women are eliminated (ie. killed, raped, imprisoned) on the streets of Iran in their fight to reclaim their bodies. The right to education is taken away from girls in Afghanistan. Prepubescent girls are routinely denied the right to experience sexual pleasure in at least 38 countries. Reproductive choice is taken away from women in USA, undermining their control over their bodies. Perhaps one way or another, most women can relate to the mutilated bodies in Frida Kahlo’s paintings.

Of course the patriarchal order is not necessarily sustained by men. This is not related to one’s sex/gender, but to one’s adherence to a set of ideologies that promotes these values. Women