Abstract
The Twilight of Cutting: African Activism and Life after NGOs is an unsettling feminist ethnography that traces the movements of three objects: the endings of female genital cutting in Ghana, their relationship to anti-cutting campaigns and the forms of governance they instantiate, and the role anthropology and feminism have played in this governance since colonial rule. It makes the case that the three objects must be studied together: namely, that we need to understand the practice of female genital cutting alongside its endings; that cutting does not exist outside of anti-cutting campaigns; and that anti-cutting campaigns are entangled with both feminism and anthropology and do not exist outside them. It invites the reader to encounter the life worlds of Ghanaian women who have experienced female genital cutting and invested themselves in ending it, as well as Ghanaian activists and civil servants who worked to bring about this change and in so doing, reckoned with their own complicity with injurious forms of governance.
Recommended Citation
Hodzic, Saida
(2022)
"Perhaps Discomfort is the Answer: Refusing Liberal Feminism and Imperial Cartographies of Thinking/Feeling,"
Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies: Vol. 23:
Iss.
1, Article 19.
Available at:
https://digitalcommons.cortland.edu/wagadu/vol23/iss1/19
Included in
African History Commons, History of Gender Commons, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies Commons, Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies Commons, Women's Studies Commons