Female genital mutilation (FGM) is the ritual cutting or removal of some or all of the vulva. The practice is found in some countries of Africa, Asia and the Middle East, and within their respective diasporas. As of 2023, UNICEF estimates that "at least 200 million girls... in 31 countries", including Indonesia, Iraq, Yemen, and 27 African countries including Egypt—had been subjected to one or more types of female genital mutilation.
Genital modifications are forms of body modifications applied to the human sexual organs, such as piercings, circumcision, or labiaplasty.
Infibulation is the ritual removal of the external female genitalia and the suturing of the vulva, a practice found mainly in northeastern Africa, particularly in Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Sudan. The World Health Organization refers to the procedure as Type III female genital mutilation. Infibulation can also refer to placing a clasp through the foreskin in men.
Feminist anthropology is a four-field approach to anthropology that seeks to transform research findings, anthropological hiring practices, and the scholarly production of knowledge, using insights from feminist theory. Simultaneously, feminist anthropology challenges essentialist feminist theories developed in Europe and America. While feminists practiced cultural anthropology since its inception, it was not until the 1970s that feminist anthropology was formally recognized as a subdiscipline of anthropology. Since then, it has developed its own subsection of the American Anthropological Association – the Association for Feminist Anthropology – and its own publication, Feminist Anthropology. Their former journal Voices is now defunct.
Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies is a graduate-student run, peer-reviewed academic journal published at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). It was established by the UCLA African Activist Association in 1970 and named after the Swahili word for comprehension, understanding, or being. The journal is published three times a year and is available from the University of California's eScholarship website. It describes itself as the "oldest student-run journal of Africanist scholarship."
There is a widespread view among practitioners of female genital mutilation (FGM) that it is a religious requirement, although prevalence rates often vary according to geography and ethnic group. There is an ongoing debate about the extent to which the practice's continuation is influenced by custom, social pressure, lack of health-care information, and the position of women in society. The procedures confer no health benefits and can lead to serious health problems.
Research Action and Information Network for the Bodily Integrity of Women is an international non-governmental organisation working to eliminate female circumcision and female genital mutilation.
Nahid Toubia is a Sudanese surgeon and women's health rights activist, specializing in research into female genital mutilation.
Female genital mutilation (FGM), also known as female genital cutting (FGC), female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) and female circumcision, is practiced in 30 countries in western, eastern, and north-eastern Africa, in parts of the Middle East and Asia, and within some immigrant communities in Europe, North America and Australia. The WHO defines the practice as "all procedures that involve partial or total removal of the external female genitalia, or other injury to the female genital organs for non-medical reasons."
Suad Joseph received her doctorate in Anthropology from Columbia University in 1975. Dr. Joseph is Professor of Anthropology and Women and Gender Studies at the University of California, Davis and in 2009 was President of the Middle East Studies Association of North America. Her research addresses issues of gender; families, children, and youth; sociology of the family; and selfhood, citizenship, and the state in the Middle East, with a focus on her native Lebanon. Her earlier work focused on the politicization of religion in Lebanon. Joseph is the founder of the Middle East Research Group in Anthropology, the founder and coordinator of the Arab Families Working Group, the founder of the Association for Middle East Women's Studies, the general editor of the Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures, and the founding director of the Middle East/South Asian Studies Program at the University of California at Davis. She is also the founder and facilitator of a six-university consortium of the American University of Beirut, American University in Cairo, Lebanese American University, University of California at Davis, and Birzeit University Consortium.
Sudan is a developing nation that faces many challenges in regard to gender inequality. Freedom House gave Sudan the lowest possible ranking among repressive regimes during 2012. South Sudan received a slightly higher rating but it was also rated as "not free". In the 2013 report of 2012 data, Sudan ranks 171st out of 186 countries on the Human Development Index (HDI). Sudan also is one of very few countries that are not a signatory on the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).
Ellen Gruenbaum is an American anthropologist. A specialist in researching medical practices that are based on a society’s culture.
Janice Boddy is a Canadian anthropologist. As Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto, Boddy specializes in medical anthropology, religion, gender issues, and colonialism in Sudan and the Middle East. She is the author or co-author of Wombs and Alien Spirits (1990), Aman: The Story of a Somali Girl (1995), and Civilizing Women: British Crusades in Colonial Sudan (2007).
Malak Hifni Nasif was an Egyptian feminist who contributed greatly to the intellectual and political discourse on the advancement of Egyptian women in the early 20th century.
The Babiker Bedri Scientific Association for Women's Studies was formed in Sudan in 1979 after a symposium in February that year, "The Changing Status of Women in Sudan", at Ahfad University for Women in Omdurman. Open to educated women from Sudan, the association's early aims were to set up welfare and education programmes for women in the White Nile and Red Sea states, and to end female genital mutilation, which has a high prevalence in Sudan. Asma El Dareer was one of the association's presidents.
Female genital mutilation (FGM) is highly prevalent in Sudan. According to a 2014 Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS), 86.6 percent of women aged 15–49 in Sudan reported living with FGM, and said that 31.5 percent of their daughters had been cut. The most common FGM procedure in that country is Type III (infibulation); the 2014 survey found that 77 percent of respondents had experienced Type III.
Lilian Margaret Passmore Sanderson was an English teacher and educationalist who became known for her research on female genital mutilation, particularly in Sudan. She was the author of Against the Mutilation of Women: The Struggle Against Unnecessary Suffering (1981) and Female Genital Mutilation, Excision and Infibulation: A Bibliography (1986).
Rose Oldfield Hayes was an American anthropologist at the State University of New York, Buffalo. After doing fieldwork in Sudan in 1970 interviewing women who had been infibulated, Hayes wrote the first scholarly paper on female genital mutilation (FGM) that used that term, and the first to incorporate information from the women themselves. Published in American Ethnologist in 1975, the paper represented an important step forward in understanding the practice.
Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf is a Sudanese ethnographer and is Professor of Anthropology at Georgetown University in Qatar.
Judith E. Tucker is a professor of history at Georgetown University. She was the editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Middle East Studies from 2004 until 2009. She is a past president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America
