The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World (21 page)

G
oing into the 1995 international women’s conference in Beijing, the global feminist movement seemed to have the wind at its back, but there were reasons to fear disaster. Politically, China was as perverse a location as Bucharest had been for the 1974 population conference. One UN official defended the decision to hold the conference there by arguing that it could help speed reform, saying, “[C]ountries can be shamed into changing.”
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Despite such hopes, the Chinese government had no intention of allowing the kind of raucous activism that had prevailed in Cairo. At its behest NGOs representing Taiwanese and Tibetan women were denied UN accreditation. The NGO forum itself, which drew more than thirty thousand women, was exiled to a muddy, unfinished compound an hour from the conference site, making it impossible for activists to lobby their country’s delegates as they had in Cairo. Human Rights Watch published a pamphlet designed to aid attendees detained by the police.
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Meanwhile, just months before the start of the conference, Harry Wu, a Chinese-born dissident who spent nineteen years in prison camps before emigrating to America, was arrested as he tried to enter China and charged with spying and stealing state secrets. There was outrage in the United States. Democratic congresswoman Nancy Pelosi urged Hillary Clinton to skip the conference in protest, writing, “[T]he presence of the First Lady in Beijing would be a boost to the repressive Chinese regime and a setback for those brave dissidents who speak out for freedom.”
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Equally appalled by Chinese atrocities and by feminism, Republicans attacked the entire event. “American interests would be best served if the Administration politely withdrew from a conference that is shaping up as an unsanctioned festival of anti-family, anti-American sentiment,” said Texas senator Phil Gramm.
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New Jersey congressman Chris Smith tried to cut off funding for the U.S. delegation. America’s evangelical Christian right, largely absent at Cairo, bestirred itself, mounting what the
Washington Post
called “[a]n unprecedented campaign to assert their agenda internationally by making their voices heard at the Beijing meeting.” James Dobson, the influential leader of Focus on the Family, sent out two million copies of a letter describing the event as “the most radical, atheistic and anti-family crusade in the history of the world.”
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In the end Harry Wu was deported to the United States just days before the conference began, clearing the way for Hillary Clinton to attend. The speech she gave turned out to be one of the high points of her tenure as first lady. It was both a ringing endorsement of the goals of the international women’s movement and, as the
New York Times
reported,
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the most forceful denunciation of China’s human rights abuses ever delivered by an American official on Chinese soil.

It is a violation of human rights when babies are denied food, or drowned, or suffocated, or their spines broken, simply because they are born girls. It is a violation of human rights when women and girls are sold into the slavery of prostitution....It is a violation of human rights when a leading cause of death worldwide among women ages fourteen to forty-four is the violence they are subjected to in their own homes by their own relatives.... It is a violation of human rights when women are denied the right to plan their own families, and that includes being forced to have abortions or being sterilized against their will. If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference, let it be that human rights are women’s rights....And women’s rights are human rights, once and for all.

Her speech lasted twenty-one minutes. When she finished there was a brief pause as the translations concluded. Then, wrote Carl Bernstein, “suddenly there was something approaching pandemonium as hundreds in the hall leaped to their feet and began a long-standing ovation for the first lady.... Her speech became front-page news around the world, noted (in countries where its message was consistent with cultural and governmental principles) for its power and eloquence.”
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It “may have been her finest moment in public life,” said the
New York Times
.
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China’s
People’s Daily
was less enthusiastic. It accorded her a mere one line, buried on page two: “The American Mrs. Hillary Clinton also spoke at the conference.”
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Feminists around the world were feeling victorious. By the end of Beijing, wrote Sonia Corrêa, “[w]e were exhausted but exhilarated. The achievements had been outstanding. So outstanding that, looking back, I dare say that most of us went back home in a sort of Platonic dream mood in which perfection of form and language is mistaken for reality.”
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Reality, disappointing and complex, would soon reassert itself. The language of the UN, while attempting to create new norms, glossed over deep, roiling controversies in many member states. Country leaders may have signed on to CEDAW, Cairo, and Beijing, but on the ground vast numbers of people rejected the very notion of women’s equality. UN documents spoke both of ensuring equal rights for men and women and of respecting traditional cultures, never acknowledging that those two goals could be in direct conflict.

Charges of cultural imperialism were bound to arise, and not just from the expected quarters. Once again arguments against outside interference would bend the left and right edges of the political spectrum toward each other, as camps on both sides challenged the universal assumptions of global feminism.

For the moment, though, global feminism was triumphant, and the consequences for both national laws and individual lives would be real and lasting. If you looked hard enough you could trace a line between the high-level negotiations at Cairo and Beijing and a young Masai girl spared circumcision and early marriage and kept in school in Kenya. There would be backlashes and setbacks, but also glimpses of the better world that’s possible when girls and women are able to slip the fetters that bind them.

CHAPTER 5:
RIGHTS VERSUS RITES

O
n October 6, 2007, two women, both of whom had been circumcised in Africa, met in the conference room of a small foundation on Fifth Avenue in New York City for a highly unusual debate. It was the fourth annual Day of Zero Tolerance Against Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting, an occasion for events across the globe dedicated to abolishing the practice. Put together by the Bronx-based Sauti Yetu Center for African Women, the New York gathering was much smaller than those taking place in Washington, D.C., London, and other capitals. It drew about thirty women, half of them African immigrants from countries including Senegal, Sudan, and Kenya, where female circumcision is common. Several of them were shocked to realize that, unlike parallel events in other cities, this one wasn’t so much a discussion about how female circumcision can be eradicated as about whether it
should
be.

The custom of cutting off all or part of girls’ external genitalia—deeply ingrained in large swaths of Africa and parts of Asia and the Middle East—obviously has its defenders, as evidenced by how tenaciously it has endured in the face of a global campaign to eliminate it. Indeed, as the anthropologist Richard Shweder argued in a much discussed 2003 paper, “it is a noteworthy fact that in at least seven African nations 80-90% of the popular vote would probably vote against any policy or law that criminalizes the practice of genital modification for either boys or girls.”
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Yet apologists for female circumcision don’t interact much with the global women’s movement, which is generally no more inclined to debate the merits of the practice than it is to ponder the upside of rape or wife beating.

That’s what made the Sauti Yetu event so unique, and so charged. At first glance the two speakers seemed to symbolize the dichotomy between modernity and tradition, cosmopolitanism and cultural authenticity. Fuambai Ahmadu, the American-born daughter of a Sierra Leonean family, wore knee-high leather boots under a stylish rust-colored skirt, and her long hair was pulled back in a sleek, low ponytail. A postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago with a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics, she looked younger than her forty years. Beside her was Grace Mose, regal in a red African tunic, matching skirt, and head wrap. Her perfect English was deeply accented by her native Kenya, where she had grown up in an Abagusii village in the country’s southwest. It was easy to imagine her as a champion of the line of midwives who’ve made their living cutting girls since the beginning of recorded history, women who are now being jailed in some countries for practicing a trade that once brought them money and pride.

But it wasn’t that simple. Ahmadu, not Mose, is the high-profile defender of female circumcision and the role it can play in inducting African girls into their societies. “My sitting here is a perfect example that female initiation can have a place in a global society,” she insisted. “I don’t see that initiation is somehow an impediment to girls’ development.” Circumcision and all that it represents in her culture, she said, “is an important source of my social identity. It’s what links me with my mother, my grandmothers, my aunts, my female ancestors. It celebrates our history, our connection.” As she spoke, Mose, a fervent campaigner against the practice, glared at her, outraged. Unruffled, Ahmadu continued, arguing that in Sierra Leone, “female circumcision is empowering.”

Toward the end a Senegalese woman, incensed by Ahmadu, stood up and said, “I really feel very frustrated seeing an African sister defending female genital mutilation.” A few people applauded. She herself, she said, had not been cut, and saw the practice as indefensible. “There is one thing we have to clarify. We have used here the term ‘female circumcision,’ which is a term that I do not like at all. Because it puts together two things that are totally different. We [should] talk about female
mutilation
. Why? When we circumcise a boy, that is
skin
that is cut off. Now when a female is, I’ll say, excised, that is the whole part that is taken out. That is completely different!” As she spoke, Mose passed around a book titled
Female Genital Mutilation,
open to a photo of a circumcised woman with a huge demoid cyst protruding from her vagina like the crown of a baby’s head.

Ahmadu had been calm and poised all evening, but there was an undercurrent of controlled anger in her voice as she responded. “I am glad that you referred to me as sister. I believe that we are both sisters,” she said. “In Senegal, in Gambia, in my country, Sierra Leone, there are words that we can use, as circumcised women, against uncircumcised women that are
very
insulting and very nasty and very offensive.” Comparing these slurs to the word “mutilation,” she continued, “I may be different from you and I am excised, but I am
not mutilated
. Just like I will not accept anybody calling me by the ‘N’ word to define my racial identity, I will not have anybody call me by the ‘M’ word to define my social identity, my gender identity.”

A
hmadu sees herself as speaking for African women who value female genital cutting but are shut out of the rarified realms of international civil society. “The anti-FGM activists have access to the media, and they have enormous resources, so they’re able to influence the media in such a way that most of the women who support the practice cannot,” she told me later that evening. “Even if they did, a lot of them are illiterate, so they can’t even speak the necessary language, and they cannot respond to charges of backwardness and barbarity.”

A global sophisticate, Ahmadu is an unlikely tribune for their voices, but she’s also a symbol of the issue’s complexity. Female genital cutting doesn’t just pit traditionalists against modernists. It highlights a conflict between the Enlightenment universalism enshrined in so many United Nations documents and the positions held by
both
cultural conservatives and postmodern relativists. Recondite as this may seem, it’s a conflict of far more than academic interest, because it gets to the heart of questions underlying the global battle for reproductive rights.

Like international debates over family planning and women’s empowerment, the controversy over genital cutting is about who has the right to intervene in the sexual practices of others, about absolute standards and the prerogatives of culture. In the campaign to eradicate female circumcision, a powerful alliance of rich country donors and poor country activists are telling traditional societies that they must change for the sake of their girls. They are trying to eliminate a practice that causes many women incalculable agony but that millions value deeply, in part for its role in warding off sexual chaos. International institutions are pressuring national governments to supersede the child-rearing decisions of families, and thus protect girls from harmful traditions. The power of global norms to shape individual destiny is being tested on a massive scale.

Because the terms—female genital mutilation, or cutting, or circumcision—are so contested, it’s best to be as clear as possible about what’s at stake. The World Health Organization classifies four primary types of what it calls female genital mutilation (FGM), although they tend to overlap. Type I, which in its very mildest forms can be analogous to male circumcision, involves everything from the cutting of the prepuce of the clitoris to a full clitoridectomy. Type II, common in Egypt and central Africa, is the excision of the clitoris and the inner labia. Type III, infibulation, is the removal of most or all of the external genitalia, and the stitching or suturing together of the cut flesh over the vaginal opening, with a small aperture—sometimes a mere pinhole—for urination and menstruation. A woman must be literally ripped open by her husband, an excruciating process that often takes several attempts. It is practiced almost exclusively by Muslims and is performed in Sudan, Somalia, northeastern Kenya, Eritrea, parts of Mali, and in a small section of northern Nigeria.
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Type IV includes a miscellany of less common practices, including stretching the labia or clitoris or putting caustic substances into the vagina in order to tighten or narrow it.
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