Session 7: Women, Mutilation and Ethnicity

Session 7: Women, Mutilation & Ethnicity
Chair: Randi DeBourg

Why do Battered Women Stay: The Time and Space of Intimate Violence
Marita Husso
University of Jyväskylä, Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy, Finland

In Finnish culture heterosexual relationship is usually understood as a union between two equal individuals. Finnish welfare state is also based on that ideology. However, violence in intimate relationships is a prevalent problem. According to the statistics one fifth of women have experienced violence or have been threatened with it by their present partners and half of divorced women have experienced violence in their previous relationships.
In this presentation I will approach violence experienced by Finnish women through their own narratives. I will point out how violence affects the gender relations and distorts one’s self conception as well as her relationships to others and her contact with reality, and breaks down the crucial boundaries of one’s humanity. We often ask why do women stay and why do women let the violence take place. However, the crucial questions are: what ties women to their homes and violent relationships, what makes it difficult to talk about intimate violence, and why is victimisation of violence interpreted as a sign of weakness and failure.
In this paper I will examine the interplay between ideology, institutionalisation, and microlevel construction of subjectivity. My analysis is linked to the phenomenology of the body, Michel Foucault’s view’s of discourse and Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection. According to the phenomenological approach, the sedimented past is constructed in relation to both cultural expectations and personal hopes and frustrations. Thus, we can understand women’s narratives of violence in relation to discursive practices, and individual and societal abjection of violence. In the case of violence, these sedimentations seem to be culturally destructive and explicitly violent. They maintain and perpetuate chains of violence between genders and pass them on from one generation to the next.

The Creative Writing of FGM as an Act of Violence and Human Rights Abuse
Tobe Levin
Collegiate professor, University of Maryland in Europe and J.W. Goethe Universität, Chair, FORWARD – Germany (against FGM) and Secretary, European Network against Harmful Traditional Practices, esp. FGM

Some campaigns to eliminate female genital mutilation have shown success, but the practice persists not only in inhospitable, even illegal environments, but is also spreading in certain parts of Africa into ethnic groups and classes where it had not been practiced before.
We know too that, for the past decades, the age at which girls undergo surgery has been decreasing and, thanks to research by Assitan Diallo, that the rituals once accompanying cutting have, in many instances, fallen by the wayside. Therefore, change is possible: but why does ablation of the clitoris itself continue with such stubborn ferocity? Why is this particular form of violence against women and girls so intractable, so obstinate?
Gerry Mackie has suggested that a model inspired by abandonment of Chinese foot-binding works well and characterizes the successful TOSTAN plan: public declarations, a critical mass within a marriage pool, and a movement. Where villages are concerned, well and good. But the problem we face concerns FGM as an urban phenomenon, an exported custom, and a habitual exercise recalcitrant to modernization. Where are complex approaches to the subject that neither minimize the devastation inflicted on females, nor over-simplifiy or remain outside practicing cultures?
Imaginative literature — novels, plays, docudrama, poetry, — supplement in inimitable ways the bulk of too often apologetic anthropological approaches. This presentation discusses two novels, Alice Walker’s Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992) and Fatou Keita’s Rebelle (1998), and two docudramas, Julia Pimsleur’s production for CAMS (Linda Weil-Curiel) Bintou in Paris (1994) and Alice Walker and Pratibha Parmar’s Warrior Marks (1993). “Diversity within Unity” is my principle of selection. All authors share an activist impulse: they write to spare females violence. Their differences, however, are inspiring. Walker, an African-American, imagines an African heroine voluntarily undergoing FGM as a (misplaced) patriotic gesture, the tragedy of her choice becoming clearer once she has emigrated. The heroine in Ivory Coast writer Fatou Keita’s work also emigrates but brings with her a passion for feminist organizing already exercised as opposition in her homeland — as the title “Rebel” suggests. Bintou in Paris, while continuing the migratory theme, presents protagonists unlikely to rebel because they are average – everyman, everywoman, and therefore representative of the group that understands cutting as self-evident, an ethnic distinction to be preserved but otherwise wholly unremarkable, to be taken for granted. Warrior Marks, not really a documentary but rather the story of a writer’s activism, confronts political agitation and indifference head-on, generating considerable controversy.

The paper discusses various manifestations of violence in the everyday life of ethnically mixed partnerships/families. Special emphasis is laid on the influence of wider socio-political changes (disintegration of former Yugoslavia, independence of Slovenia, new states that originated from former Yugoslavia, war in the Balkans, etc.) and the transfer of violence from the macro-social to the interpersonal level. More than a decade of significant social changes and new political demarcations have led to the involuntary transformation of ethnically mixed families from intranational into international. As a result, in addition to the common issues with which ethnically mixed families had to cope (mutual interlanguage and intercultural adaptations), additional partnership and family problems have emerged; e.g., temporary or permanent loss of contacts with families and relatives, the phenomenon of split loyalty to nationalities of children born in ethnically mixed families, increasing nationalism and xenophobia as factors accompanying the processes of the establishment and legitimacy of Slovene identity and of the differentiation from nations of the former common state, the emergence of family nationalism expressed by family members toward other family members considered to belong to another or “wrong” nationality, etc. As a consequence of their status shift and related phenomena, ethnically mixed families have to confront the need for the activation of new survival strategies and the re-establishment of normal and stable family or/and partnership life. The paper focuses on life stories and narratives provided by informants which are often overlooked in comparison with emphasized “important issues” (i.e. intergroup conflicts). The paper summarizes the main findings of three case studies of individuals with an exclusive experience of life in ethnically mixed families in the territory of Slovene Istra in the years 2000, 2001, and 2002.