Tori Amos once sang, "Now, you've cut out the flute from the throat of the loon."
A rather famous line (truncated in the title of this column) from the last Harry Potter book and the lyric from Amos' "Blood Roses" together provide a suitable frame for this column to the issue of female genital mutilation (FGM). Amos' metaphoric line might express the victim's sentiments, while the shock and outrage of Mrs. Weasley in the face of violence about to be enacted upon her daughter could perhaps typify a Western reaction to hearing that FGM occurs in, you know, the primitive areas of the world. (I'm not really sure where they are, but perhaps Miss Teen South Carolina could buy you a map.)
In this column, I want to expand the universality of the hot-button term by excising the modifier "female," for it has perhaps left out the minority population of intersex people (previously known as hermaphrodites) from the support of public outcry. Addressing an issue requires consciousness of the problem. Though hard to believe, genital mutilation has been happening in the United States for quite some time. Of course, the prominent discourse has not framed the repeated medical procedures as such, in part due to ignorance and to avoid the acknowledgement of the infringement of human rights. Throughout the decades, doctors faced with intersex babies have gone ahead to surgically fashion a proper external genital expression of a certain gender for said babies because the cultural concept of a gender binary requires that everyone fit within a male-female schema. The circumstances in which doctors perform the procedure differ in terms of safety and rationale, but don't let that praise of our supposed modernity suppress the potency of the truth.
Before I go further, I want to stress that I do not aim nor mean to equate these two practices, but rather, I hope to use the relative notoriety of one to promote awareness of a related, underreported occurrence. While FGM shocks Westerners, the genital mutilation that happens right under our noses receives almost no attention. Having said this, I'd like to redirect our attention back to the decisions doctors have historically made to focus on the idea of a two-gender system. Held as natural, the binary system obviously does not allow for ambiguous bodies to exist untouched. The surgeries, claimed necessary, have ultimately served to harness the power of nature and nurture to create acceptable bodies that fall more easily into the category of male or female. It seems that nature's destabilization of the societal norm played a role in instigating immediate medical responses that seek to fix what is deemed "unnatural."
The debate concerning what constitutes natural takes place in the artificial realm of societal discourse; that is to say, our own notions and preconceptions shape and determine what is allowed within nature, rather than creating new paradigms based on observations of nature. Thus, the phenotypic variation of our bodies does not always meld beautifully into our own imagination of what is "natural," and therefore, doctors function as the mediatory tools to manufacture nature into embodying a socially acceptable mold. In this way, human bodies become sites of mutilation — I use this word to emphasize the forced change away from the natural product — even in our progressive, modern nation.
I admit that though this type of treatment has happened in the past, that is not to say the modern treatment of intersex babies occurs in the same fashion, in terms of whether doctors now allow these individuals agency, access to information and frankness — all of which were previously neglected in medical history. Of course, if that is the case, other situations may exist in which this type of approach is abandoned for the sake of society's two genders. But hopefully, I have helped the cause by highlighting the power of linguistic framing in demonizing or endorsing certain acts.
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Elisha Sum is a junior majoring in English and French. He can be reached at Elisha.Sum@tufts.edu.
