Racism, Feminism, and the Issue of FGE
| February 13th, 2008 | Crossposted from The Blog and the BulletPlain(s)feminist blogs about Female Genital Excision (FGE), also known as Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), and the issue of white Western feminists focusing more on the brutalities against women in Third World countries than in the Western world:
There seems to be no way to get a certain segment of the feminist population to understand that it is possible both to oppose practices like FGE and still seek to use respectful terminology. This is perceived as attempting to “whitewash” (an interesting phrase, since we’re talking about mostly White women slinging racist slurs as mostly Black women) the issue. In fact, on several occasions when this issue has come up, it has progressed in the following way:
February 13th, 2008 at 1:32 pm
I think it’s sad that so much political debate is becoming centered around people using emotionally-charged language to discuss an issue. People flinging around words that may or may not be technically true, but still are obviously intended to incite anger.
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April 10th, 2009 at 9:28 am
Public Radio International’s “The World” program broadcast a story about Michelle Goldberg’s book The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World. The book includes, among other things, an account of a debate between opponents of female genital “cutting” and an African American woman who, as an adult, returned to her ancestral homeland to have the procedure performed on herself as a gesture of cultural solidarity.
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