Picturing female circumcision and female genital cosmetic surgery: a visual framing analysis of Swiss newspapers, 1983–2015

ABSTRACT

This article investigates how both the similarities and differences between female circumcision and female genital cosmetic surgery are suggested through images. A visual framing analysis of 278 photographs, published in Swiss newspapers between 1983 and 2015, reveals that three major visual themes—procedure, instrument and people—can be found in both female circumcision and female genital cosmetic surgery, whereas a fourth one—protest—recurs only in depictions of female circumcision. Through these themes, female circumcision is depicted as the product of a “primitive” society, and female genital cosmetic surgery the product of a science-oriented one. I argue that this discrepancy is produced through an intense focus on the medicalisation of female genital cosmetic surgery, which is absent in the visual narratives of female circumcision. I will demonstrate that this culminates in a discourse according to which female genital shaping is problematic only if not performed under medical conditions as defined by Swiss society. The corollary to this is a shifting of the object of criticism from what is done, to how it is done, thereby preventing the conflation of female genital cosmetic surgery with the World Health Organization’s definition of “female genital mutilation” (FGM).

KEYWORDS:

• Female circumcision
• female genital cosmetic surgery
• visual framing
• visual stereotypes
• images

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Véronique Mottier, Sara Johnsdotter, Birgitta Essén, Edmée Ballif and the two anonymous reviewers, for their critical review of earlier drafts. I am also grateful to Alexandre Paturel and Ariane Ducor for proofreading this paper, and to Patrick Toggweiler for providing information about the work of journalists. Last but not least, I would like to thank the newspapers, photo agencies and photographers who gave me permission to reproduce their photographs in this article, as well as the Institute of Social Sciences at the University of Lausanne who covered the fees of this reproduction.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. These are L’Express-l’Impartial (Neuchâtel) and Le Nouvelliste (Valais), both French-speaking newspapers.

2. The French-speaking broadsheets are: 24 Heures, Le Temps, Tribune de Genève. The German-speaking broadsheets are: Aargauer Zeitung, Basellandschaftliche Zeitung, Basler Zeitung, Berner Zeitung, Bündner Tagblatt, Der Bund, Die Südostschweiz, Neue Luzerner Zeitung, Neue Zürcher Zeitung and Neue Zürcher Zeitung am Sonntag, Oltner Tagblatt, Solothurner Zeitung, St. Galler Tagblatt, Tages Anzeiger and SonntagsZeitung, Zofinger Tagblatt. Tabloids are: Blick and SonntagsBlick (German-speaking), Le Matin and Le Matin Dimanche (French-speaking).

3. The few articles published in Italian (third Swiss national language) had no press photographs, and were thus excluded from the corpus.

4. The captions are originally in French or German and have been translated for ease of reading.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dina Bader

Dina Bader is a research fellow at the Swiss Forum for Migration and Population Studies at the University of Neuchâtel. She has a PhD in Social Sciences from the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Her publications include Nationalisme sexuel: le cas de l’excision et de la chirurgie esthétique génitale dans les discours d’experts en Suisse (2016, Swiss Journal of Sociology) and When Right-Wing Actors Take Sides With Deportees. A Typology of Anti-Deportation Protests (2018, Social Movement Studies, with Johanna Probst). E-mail: [email protected]