Law’s cut on the body of human rights

Law’s Cut on the Body of

Human Rights

Scenes of violence and incisions into the fl esh inform the demand for law. The

scene of little girls being held down in practices of female circumcision has

been a defi ning and defi nitive image that demands the attention of human

rights, and the intervention of law. But the investment in protecting women

and little girls from such a cut is not all that it seems. Law’s Cut on the Body of

Human Rights: Female Circumcision, Torture and Sacred Flesh considers how such

images come to inform law and the investment of advocates of law in the

imagination of this scene. Drawing on psychoanalytic and postcolonial theory,

and accompanying ideas in political theology, Juliet Rogers examines the

language, imagery and excitement that accompanies recent initiatives to

legislate against what is called ‘female genital mutilation’. The author

complements this examination with a consideration of the scene of torture

exposed in images from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. Rogers argues

that the modes of fascination and excitement that accompany scenes of torture

and female circumcision betray the fantasy of a political condition against

which the subject of liberal law is imagined; this is a subjectivity in a state

of non-mutilation, non-prohibition or, in a psychoanalytic idiom, non￾castration. To support the fantasy of this subject, the mutilated subject, the

author suggests, is rendered as fl esh cut from the democratic nation state,

deserving of only selective human rights, or none at all.

Juliet Rogers teaches criminology at the University of Melbourne.

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Law’s Cut on the Body

of Human Rights

Female circumcision, torture

and sacred flesh

Juliet Rogers

First published 2013

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

by Routledge

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

A GlassHouse Book

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2013 Juliet Rogers

The right of Juliet Rogers to be identifi ed as author of this material has

been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the

Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced

or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,

now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording,

or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in

writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or

registered trademarks, and are used only for identifi cation and

explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Rogers, Juliet.

Law’s cut and the body of human rights: female circumcision, torture, and

scared fl esh/Juliet Rogers.

pages cm

1. Female circumcision—Law and legislation. 2. Women—Legal status,

laws, etc. 3. Women’s rights. I. Title.

K3611.F45R64 2013

344.03’219816—dc23

2012050797

ISBN 978-0-415-66170-6 (hbk)

ISBN 978-0-203-51704-8 (ebk)

Typeset in Garamond

by Keystroke, Station Road, Codsall, Wolverhampton

Contents

Acknowledgments ix

1 Fantasies of the cut 1

2 The making of a fantasy - the image of female genital

mutilation 22

3 ‘I love you . . . I mutilate you’: the remnant of

the (mutilated) fl esh 47

4 The clear message of law 66

5 The vi olence of the Other’s law 86

6 The sacred fl esh of human rights 107

7 The torture of the good 125

8 Woman does not exist in human rights 140

References 154

Index 165

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For Michelle.

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Acknowledgments

My thanks to European University Institute and to Yale Law School for giving

me quiet thoughtful places to work on this manuscript, particularly to

Shana Jackson for fi nding me a place in the sun, and to Bo Burt, Dori Laub

and Francesco Francioni for their conversation.

This research was only made possible by the intellectual and political work

of the African Women’s Working Group in Victoria. Members of the group,

including Munira Mohamed, Munira Adam, Miriam Idris, Nikki Marshall

and Amna Maleken, generously shared with me the group’s documents and

discussions. Munira Mohamed’s ongoing encouragement and support assisted

me in continuing what was, at many times, a diffi cult issue to pursue

politically, intellectually and socially. My warmest thanks are also extended to

Amuna Abdella for her intellectual rigour together with her trust, friendship

and the introductions she offered me in this project. Chris Bayly also shared

with me her meticulous fi les of meetings and conversations that took place at

the time of the consultations into the application of ‘female genital mutilation

legislation’ in Australia. These documents were invaluable in directing and

legitimating this research. Some of the work I mention is ongoing and the

struggle against the violence of ‘female genital mutilation legislation’ is

being continued by Samia Baho, Mansura Dopico and Maria Dimopolous.

The work begun by Samia, Maskepe Sejoe and others through the Family and

Reproductive Rights Education Program in Victoria continues the debates

and, where possible, enables community dialogue. I am grateful for the

information these people have shared with me, their integrity, political

commitment and for their work in advance.

My thanks to my own students whose conversations and own projects have

infl uenced the work in this book, including Sahar Ghumkhor, Mohamad

Tabbaa, Hussein Mohamud, Felicity Grey and Diego Mendez. My warmest

thanks particularly to Sahar for her editorial rigour, inspirational conversation

in this area and her patience.

My love and thanks to Adam Driver, Anna Szorenyi, Steve Pukallus

and Surya Purekh for the conversations that got me on the right track in

the fi rst place. And to Judith Grbich, Ian Duncanson, Andrea Rhodes-

x Acknowledgments

Little – friends and teachers who have held my hands through this work for

some time now.

My warm thanks to Anne Orford for her insightful conversation through￾out the better parts of this research, and for her intellectual inspiration

and reminders of the maternal. My heartfelt gratitude goes to Peter Rush and

Alison Young for their friendship, inspiration and enduring support. And

particularly to Connal Parsley, Justin Clemens, Bill MacNeil, Maria

Aristodemou, Costas Douzinas and again to Peter and Alison, for their

conversation, comments and their sanction of the peculiarities of approaches

such as these.

My thanks always to Cara for her incredible generosity and love, and to

both she and Ed for their food, art work and smiles at the end of the day. If

only I could have written this book in Lego my absences would have been less.

Chapter 1

Fantasies of the cut

We must see right away how crude it is to accept the idea that, in the

ethical order itself, everything can be reduced to social constraint . . . as

if the fashion in which that constraint develops doesn’t in itself raise

a question . . .1

Scenes of torture and of female genital mutilation2

are imagined as scenes of

pain and of incisions into the fl esh. Both are scenes where someone is described

as being held down. Both are scenes where fl esh is manipulated, stressed or

cut and both are scenes that have attracted the specifi c attention of human

rights advocates, of domestic laws and of human rights doctrine. The fl esh of

the so-called ‘mutilated woman’3

is imagined to require protection from the

cut. And the fl esh of the tortured is often sacrifi ced to the fl esh of democratic

polis: The People. The value of the fl esh – how much can be cut and what

remains – is a measurement which employs doctrines of biomedicine, law,

human rights and political theology. Flesh is worth something in the domestic

and universal polis, but not all fl esh is equivalent, not all bodies are uncut, not

all humans are sacred.

The imaginations of female genital mutilation and of torture offer a way of

trying to understand the disparities in law’s attention and the modes through

1 Lacan (1992), 225.

2 I will use the term ‘female genital mutilation’ or ‘fgm’ when referring to the event that

the laws, or the western discourses on ‘female genital mutilation’, mean to describe. I will

use the term ‘female circumcision’ when referring to the practices described as such by the

communities who practice them. The terms ‘infi bulation’, ‘pharaonic circumcision’,

‘clitoridectomy’ and ‘sunna’ are also used to describe the practices in English-speaking

countries and I will use these terms where they function as helpful descriptions. I have not

used the names for the practices in the relevant languages because I am not describing the

practices in those contexts, but in the contexts of their perception in western discourse.

The practices are, of course, diverse, far more diverse than these names suggest, but I am

not talking about their diversity. I am talking about the fantasy of their sameness as the

monolithic practice ‘female genital mutilation’.

3 This is the term used by the Family Law Council in Family Law Council (1994b).

2 Law’s Cut on the Body of Human Rights

which law regulates life. The scenes are not the same – although female

genital mutilation is often described as ‘torture’ – and they attract very

different investments. Both practices evoke comment, but the violent outrage

against female genital mutilation is certainly disproportionate to the quiet,

and usually scholarly, objections to torture. About torture, the western subject

is arguably ambivalent; about female genital mutilation . . . we are (almost)

passionately united in a fi ght for the good, a fi ght, as Gayatri Chakravorty

Spivak has described, to ‘save brown women from brown men’.4

Subjects of

western democracy, who identify with the values of liberal law, are rarely

ambivalent about little (Muslim) girls being held down, while about the

holding down of brown (Muslim) men . . . we’re not so sure.

This book is a meditation on the scenes that have come to inspire law on

the practices imagined to be female genital mutilation, and on torture, im￾agined to be interrogation. It is an examination of the fantasies that underpin

these scenes as the political, legal and popular commentary on the practices

and their products. In this book I contest that every law comes with an image.

How else would we know what to constrain? Or why it need be constrained?

But these images are not self-evident representations of cultural or legal prac￾tices: they are scenes which provoke rage, pain and excitement, and they are

scenes which demand intervention, as the cut of law and the care of human

rights. These scenes are particular, invested and haunted by the ordinary anx￾ieties of subjects before law; anxieties that I will discuss as political and psy￾chological. These anxieties can be understood, in a psychoanalytic idiom, as

anxieties about castration, which are then heightened by the cuts of law: the

cutting off of the king’s head, the increased aggressions in democratic sover￾eigns (since 9/11), and even by the assertion of a universalism of human

rights. The particular representations of scenes of female genital mutilation

and torture alleviate some of these anxieties by turning the cuts toward

another, but these scenes also announce the possibility of the cut arriving on

the subject of liberal law. The scenes thus serve, like all scenes in a psychoana￾lytic idiom, to thwart castration, but these scenes are also legal scenes that

announce the cut as prohibitions and, sometimes, arbitrary incursions of law.

They are scenes which promote a demand for sovereign attention – as the

attention of liberal law – and they are scenes which serve to thwart and

announce law’s cut: announcing a very violent cut, indeed.

There is a familiar scene of what is termed female genital mutilation. It is

of a child held down, her legs parted, she is screaming while she is being cut

with an unidentifi able piece of metal. This image is familiar because it is

repeated. It is not easily forgotten for this repetition and for its disturbing

motifs: the pain of a child, the loss of innocence and the loss of desire. It is the

image presented as the justifi cation and imperative for action on female

4 Spivak (1999), 284–7.

Fantasies of the cut 3

genital mutilation and, like most images presented as violence, it is effective.

More than that, it is seductive. It seduces us into believing the constraint is

required, the prohibition is necessary. Something is being done, someone

must be stopped – a child is being mutilated.

The call of mutilation is the call to law. The call to apply the law is not all

that it seems, however. This is not simply a statement about the political

investments and excitements that infi ltrate and inform the processes of law’s

production. These exist, and they infl uence process and product, often in

equal measure. The constraint of law, when accompanied by the images of

violence, such as those that accompany initiatives to legislate against female

genital mutilation, betray investments in the violence itself, or more precisely,

in the scene of violence: the scene of the little girl being held down. This

scene, I suggest in this book, is only part of the story. Just as the military and

legal rationales for contemporary scenes of torture – in Abu Ghraib,

Guantanamo Bay, and in black sites we can only imagine – are only parts of

the story of why torture is accepted in liberal societies.

The stories of legitimation that surround the prohibition of female genital

mutilation and the lack of objection to contemporary practices of torture

offer insight into the ambivalences of a legal subject before liberal law. These

are ambivalences about where and when the cut can and will arrive, about

who deserves the cut and about what will protect the subject from the

sovereign’s displeasure. The stories of torture and female circumcision embody

these ambivalences and are therefore not as simple as the books on airport

shelves,5

as the legal and political rhetoric would suggest. These are stories of

confusion and doubt about, what I discuss in this book as, the freedom from

the cut, as a freedom from the mutilations and prohibitions of law. Specifi cally

these are stories that are less about the necessity of anti-fgm law or indeed the

necessity of torturing the terrorist, and are more about the fear of law’s

mutilation of the imagined sovereignty of the democratic subject before

liberal law.

The confusions about the mutilations of the liberal subject, in the case of

stories of female genital mutilation, are soothed with an image of the violence

done to little girls. Similarly, the confusions about the reality of torture’s

potential cutting of the liberal subject are foreclosed by the imagination of

the violence of the terrorist – his inherent badness – and the urgency of the

‘ticking time bomb’. Both these scenes present the viewer with a scene of

cutting that exemplifi es the reality of law’s capacity to cut, if not now, then

later; if not later, then elsewhere. But in the rubric of cosmopolitanism and

progress, in the context of a universalism of law and human rights, in the

condition of a demand for the universalism of the human, these cuts represent

the possibility and potentiality of mutilations before law for everyone. And

5 I am gesturing to works such as Dirie (1998).

4 Law’s Cut on the Body of Human Rights

these cuts must be reckoned with. This book is a discussion of the means and

methods applied to this reckoning as the aggressions and fantasies that

accompany the fear of law’s cut. This book is therefore a story of violence and

a story of loss.

The fantasy of female genital mutilation

The story of female genital mutilation is represented in liberal discussions of

law and violence as a story of loss. This is less the story of the practices of

female circumcision, clitoridectomy, circumcision, sunna – or the many other

practices that have no English names – as it is the story of the subject, or

subjects, imagining the loss. From this perspective it is not self-evident as to

what loss means. The stories of legislating against these practices in countries

such as England, Australia, Scotland, Ireland, Italy, the United States and

Egypt are infused with notions of what loss is: as the loss of desire, the loss of

innocence and the loss of the freedoms of a little girl. This story of loss is a

political story, a legal story and a psychoanalytic story, that is, it is a story

where a number of images convene to produce law as an effort to produce a

self-evidence to loss, and an effort to stem the loss announced by an invocation

of law’s prohibition. The story of female genital mutilation is therefore no

innocuous story: someone is being held down, someone is being prohibited

and someone is being cut. But the answers to who this someone is, and who is

performing the cut, are not so clear, however. The story of legislating against

female genital mutilation is a story of questions, precisely the kind of ques￾tions which are diffi cult to ask when presented with images of screaming

children, walls covered with blood, and uncaring perpetrators. In this book

I suggest that the answers to questions are not as obvious as anti-fgm

advocates would have us believe, and they are the very ordinary questions

which not only need to accompany initiatives to legislate against female

genital mutilation, but need to accompany all law.

The fantasy of female genital mutilation which promotes law’s intervention

is well illustrated in dubious and not so dubious research, documentaries,

best-selling autobiographies, consultation papers, public documents, and in

the commentary in most seminars and classrooms dealing with law, human

rights and gender in the West. This fantasy is perhaps never quite so well

illustrated than in the photographic essay The Day Kadi Lost a Part of Her Life.

6

This is a text published internationally and cited as a very important anti￾female genital mutilation text.7

It is a beautifully photographed coffee table

book,8

readily consumed through its black and white glossy pages.

6 Manresa and Ramos Rioja (1998).

7 Bone (1999), 19; Kissane (1993), 16; Manresa and Ramos Rioja (1998).

8 See Szorenyi (2006) for discussions of the coffee table book as humanitarian porn.