Originally defined as a public health problem, excision of the clitoris becomes the object of a policy of sexuality reparation in the years 2000. The genealogy of this new crime (sexual mutilations) and the emergence of a new handicap (sexuality without a clitoris) are explored in a postcolonial perspective that makes cognitive environments of « here » and « there » interact. A social norm framed within a ritual (excision) turns into a bodily anomaly (mutilation), or even a sexual anomaly (handicap). This article relates personal and sexual experiences of migrant women and of daughters of migrants from sub-Saharan Africa who live in France and have asked for a clitoral reconstruction in a French hospital. The trajectories of these two groups are studies in a globalization context that takes migratory dynamics into account : medicine dominates circulation of knowledge and materializes into a litigious justice that makes equality in gender models real through bodily and sexual repair.
Abstract
English
Author
Michela
Villani
Cite
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