Footnote1I refuse to call it “female circumcision,” I tell my students. It is “Female Genital Mutilation” (FGM). I want the word “mutilation” to be in the phrase as in my experience, it is the only word that captures the essence of what the refugee women, who have been cut, have shared with me. They describe it as something has been taken away from them, a part of them is forever lost, or their womanhood undermined. I ask myself why I resonate so strongly with the experience of these women, although I have not been mutilated myself. Or have I not?
As a woman raised in Iran until my teenage years, forced to wear the mandatory hijab from age 6, perhaps a part of me resonates with the experience of not having control over one’s body. Perhaps I understand what it means when the feminine part of you is cut out; the way my stature, my hair was forcefully removed. The way I was subjected to absolute submission to a patriarchal order I can only label as a gender apartheid (Kohan, Citation2022).
Or is this perhaps an even more universal experience for women under patriarchy that has globally been a norm rather than an exception for the majority of our human history? Do we feel a part of us has been cut out? Subjected to removal? Unrecognized and denied? Patriarchy often removes women as autonomous agents capable of making choices. Women are eliminated (ie. killed, raped, imprisoned) on the streets of Iran in their fight to reclaim their bodies. The right to education is taken away from girls in Afghanistan. Prepubescent girls are routinely denied the right to experience sexual pleasure in at least 38 countries. Reproductive choice is taken away from women in USA, undermining their control over their bodies. Perhaps one way or another, most women can relate to the mutilated bodies in Frida Kahlo’s paintings.
Of course the patriarchal order is not necessarily sustained by men. This is not related to one’s sex/gender, but to one’s adherence to a set of ideologies that promotes these values. Women can easily be the most important agents of patriarchy working hard to maintain the status quo and their own positions of power within the structure.
Just as societies in the Western world are still fighting for human rights, societies in the non-Western world are also fighting a similar fight. It is sometimes disheartening to see the Western feminists turn a blind toward the non-Western feminist movements for fear of discrediting another “culture” and repeating the saga of colonialism. The issue of “culture” is a complicated one that requires further contemplation in our work as clinicians, educators and activists. In working with refugees, a challenge for me has been to reconcile what I can identify as “culture” and what I see as a patriarchal structure that leads to practices such as FGM, that I cannot in good conscious defend having seen its disastrous consequences for little girls and women. Can we be culturally sensitive as clinicians while maintaining a general attitude against oppression and exploitation of girls/women?
Similarly the issue of mandatory hijab has been a complicated terrain to navigate for me as I attempt to stay respectful of women’s choices and rights without dismissing certain religious practices. If a woman chooses to cover her hair or body, it must be respected as an expression of her individual identity. Both my grandmothers in fact adhered to this traditional attire as a part of their faith. At the same time, if there is one thing relational psychoanalysis teaches us is that feeling violated, exploited, enslaved are universally not desired by human beings because we all need recognition of our subjectivity and we all need human connections based on mutual recognition.
I have been required to simultaneously hold two opposing attitudes in mind in approaching the issue of hijab and its object (i.e. the scarf/chador). An object that while loved as a symbol for some, including my own flesh and blood, has also been the object of my oppression. I have been required to see it both as an object of liberation (e.g. for my grandmothers and many Muslim women) and enslavement/elimination (e.g. for myself and many women in Iran). Indeed my grandmothers both taught me strength in their own ways and that strength was translated into my own reclaiming of my choices and my body for “before I’d be a slave, I’ll be buried in my grave and … be free.”
Woman. Life. Freedom.
Notes
1 Title of a painting by Frida Kahlo, based on a news report about a woman stabbed repeatedly by her boyfriend. Apparently in court the murderer claimed, “But I just give her a couple of little nips!” (www.Fridakahlo.org).