The Twilight of Cutting : African Activism and Life after NGOs / Saida Hodzic.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hodzic, Saida, Author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Female genital mutilation--Political aspects--Ghana.

Female genital mutilation.

Female genital mutilation--Ghana--Prevention.

Non-governmental organizations--Social aspects--Ghana.

Non-governmental organizations.

Feminism--Ghana.

Feminism.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (415 pages)

Place of Publication:

Berkeley, CA : University of California Press, [2016]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

The last three decades have witnessed a proliferation of nongovernmental organizations engaging in new campaigns to end the practice of female genital cutting across Africa. These campaigns have in turn spurred new institutions, discourses, and political projects, bringing about unexpected social transformations, both intended and unintended. Consequently, cutting is waning across the continent. At the same time, these endings are misrecognized and disavowed by public and scholarly discourses across the political spectrum. What does it mean to say that while cutting is ending, the Western discourse surrounding it is on the rise? And what kind of a feminist anthropology is needed in such a moment? The Twilight of Cutting examines these and other questions from the vantage point of Ghanaian feminist and reproductive health NGOs that have organized campaigns against cutting for over thirty years. The book looks at these NGOs not as solutions but as sites of "problematization." The purpose of understanding these Ghanaian campaigns, their transnational and regional encounters, and the forms of governmentality they produce is not to charge them with providing answers to the question, how do we end cutting? Instead, it is to account for their work, their historicity, the life worlds and subjectivities they engender, and the modes of reflection, imminent critique, and opposition they set in motion.

Contents:

Frontmatter

CONTENTS

Preface: Coming to Questions

Introduction: Governmentality against Itself

1. Colonial Reason, Sensibility, and the Ethnographic Style

2. Making Harmful Traditional Practices

3. When Cutting Did and Did Not End

4. Mistaken by Design: Biopolitics in Practice

5. Blood Loss and Slow Harm in Times of Scarcity

6. The Feminist Fetish: Legal Advocacy

7. Against Sovereign Violence

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Acronyms

Notes

References

Index

Notes:

Previously issued in print: 2016.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 24. Apr 2020)

ISBN:

9780520965577

0520965574

OCLC:

957077664