Imalah ’s Reviews > Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption > Status Update
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"In her essay “Who Defines ‘Mutilation’?” Courtney Smith challenges the “hegemony of Western feminist discourse” surrounding female genital cutting (FGC) by conducting an analysis of what a group of Senegalese women thought about breast implantation versus what a group of American women thought of FGC. The comparison is directed at pointing out how much cultural frames influence our judgment of various practices (a
— May 16, 2026 10:51AM
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Imalah ’s Previous Updates
Imalah
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As theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak pointed out in her analysis of sati, the British saw highlighting and then abolishing the practice as part of their civilizing mission in India; they would “save” the native women. In contrast, Hindu men alleged that the women wanted to die. Thus two patriarchal systems, with white men on one side and Brown men on the other, erased the woman and there is “no space in which the
— May 15, 2026 08:57AM
Imalah
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"White colonizers manufactured similar moral panic in response to the practice of “sati,” or as Europeans called it, widow-immolation. (In Sanskrit, “sati” refers to the woman who dies, not the ritual, but because I am primarily referring to European accounts I will use “sati” to mean the ritual.) The rite—which was not strictly a religious practice—involves a Brahmin widow casting herself on her husband’s funeral py
— May 15, 2026 08:47AM
Imalah
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"The HRW definition does not prescribe that honor killing is specific to people of color. That is an implicit white assumption. A label of honor killing would never be attached to any of the thousands of white-on-white cases of intimate-partner violence. It is the presence of a Black or Brown male perpetrator that fosters the idea that a crime is determined by the cultural or religious identity of those involved."
— May 15, 2026 02:17AM
Imalah
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"If my husband, who is of Pakistani origin but had spent his entire life in the United States, were to have killed me, it would automatically have been called an act of “honor killing,” because both of us were Muslim."
— May 15, 2026 02:03AM
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May 16, 2026 10:53AM
(and not toward creating equivalence between a harmful practice carried out on minors versus one that is usually chosen by adult women). As Smith describes it, both groups were a bit confounded by each other’s choices, American interviewees seeing FGC as a “castration of women” and an effort to “keep them down,” and Senegalese women saying about breast implantation that “no man would want his wife to do that.” But there were also women in both groups who could see the other’s perspective. One
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American interviewee observes, “When I think about it, plastic surgery is kind of similar to genital cutting. Sort of like, you are cutting your body to fit a mold, to define who you are through physical attributes. A lot of women who are older get botox—they want to be attractive and beautiful and young again. Who told you that that is how to do it?” 30 Similarly, a Mandinka woman interviewed in Douba in Senegal said, “In Senegal, excision is similar to breast implantation because something is changed or taken away from the woman in both of them.” Even more interesting was the statement of a development worker who was engaged in spreading information about the adverse health consequences of FGC who said, “If there are health consequences, there are health consequences. There aren’t Western consequences and African consequences and there aren’t American women and African women. There are just women whose bodies are being transformed.”
