The Sovereignty of the Body: How Far Is Culture Allowed to Go?

Liberal democracies and international law commit themselves to pluralism, tolerance and cultural autonomy. They also commit themselves to universal human rights. Most of the time those two commitments sit beside each other without trouble. Sometimes they don't.

The relativist position is that moral values and social practices are the products of particular histories and places. No culture stands on neutral ground, so none is entitled to judge another, and imposing an outside standard is a form of imperialism wearing the clothes of concern. The universalist position is that human beings hold certain rights simply by being human, and that some harms are grave enough to be stopped wherever they happen.

Argued at that altitude, neither side can win. So take a practice where the disagreement has consequences. Female genital mutilation covers the partial or total removal of the external female genitalia, or other injury to those organs for reasons that are not medical. It is defended as culture. It is prosecuted as assault. Whatever else it is, it is the place where the question has to be answered: how far is culture allowed to go?

What the practice does

Nobody who practises FGM believes they are committing an atrocity. That is the first thing to understand about it, and the hardest.

In communities where it is common, the cut is a rite of passage and a long established social norm. It is tied to the control of female sexuality, used to secure virginity before marriage and fidelity after it by suppressing desire. It is also tied to honour. Families conform out of fear of stigma, of exclusion, and of the damage refusal does to a daughter's marriageability. The cut becomes a precondition of womanhood and respectability, which means a mother who declines is not seen as protecting her child.

FGM has no medical benefits. What it has is a list of harms. The immediate ones are severe pain, haemorrhage, shock, infection, urinary retention, and sometimes death. The lasting ones are chronic infection, painful menstruation, painful intercourse, complications in childbirth and a raised risk of newborn death. The psychological damage is documented too: lasting trauma, depression and anxiety at rates well above those of women who have not been cut.

And the practice is adapting. More and more, parents bring their daughters to doctors, nurses and midwives rather than to traditional cutters, on the assumption that a trained hand makes it safer. In Egypt most girls under fourteen have been cut by medical staff, against a small minority of older women. Nothing about what is done to them has changed. What has changed is that it now arrives with clinical authority behind it.

What a life requires

Martha Nussbaum argues that there are requirements for a life of human dignity that hold across cultures, and she sets them out as a list of basic capabilities. A society is just only if it secures a minimum of each of them for every citizen.

FGM fails at least three.

It shortens lives and sometimes ends them, which is the capability of life itself. It causes lasting illness, which is bodily health. And it destroys what Nussbaum calls bodily integrity: "having one's bodily boundaries treated as sovereign... being secure against assault, domestic violence, and having choice in matters of reproduction and sexual satisfaction."

That last one is where the weight sits. The procedure permanently alters a child's body without her consent, and takes away her capacity for sexual function without pain before she is old enough to know she had it. A person who might have been an agent of choice is reduced to a damaged object.

Culture, read this way, goes too far when it dismantles the things a decent human life is assembled from.

Protection, and restriction

Will Kymlicka is a liberal defender of minority group rights, which makes the limit he draws more useful than an opponent's would be. Multicultural Citizenship (1995) turns on a distinction between two things a cultural group might ask for.

The first is protection from outside: the claim a minority makes against the dominant society around it, to keep its identity, language and resources from being swallowed. Liberal theory supports this readily, because it shields minorities from being outvoted out of existence.

The second is restriction from inside: the claim a group makes to limit the liberties of its own members in the name of tradition, purity or cohesion. Here Kymlicka's answer is no. A culture may defend its borders against erosion. It has no authority to oppress or physically alter the people within them to enforce conformity.

FGM is an internal restriction of the most literal kind. It uses physical modification and social fear to restrict girls' bodily autonomy in the service of a hierarchy that was in place long before any of them were born. On Kymlicka's terms it cannot be accommodated, because the rights of the group never outrank the rights of the individuals the group is made of.

Behind the door

Susan Moller Okin put the question to multiculturalism directly in her 1999 essay, Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?

Her charge against Kymlicka, and against multicultural theory generally, is that it looks in the wrong place. Defences of group rights concentrate on the public and the large scale, on language laws, land rights and political representation, and they stop at the front door. Behind that door is where gender is taught, where control is exercised, and where FGM actually happens.

Her observations are uncomfortable and difficult to argue with. Most cultures are deeply patriarchal, and a good many treat the control of women by men not as an incidental feature but as one of their aims. A great deal of what any tradition concerns itself with is marriage, raising children and control of the female body. So when a state grants a group autonomy to preserve its traditions, it often hands the men who dominate that group the means to carry on as before, now with the state's blessing and out of view.

Culture is not a single harmonious thing. It is contested, and somebody inside it always has more power to define it than somebody else. Protect culture without asking who holds that power, and what has been protected is the power of dominant men to mutilate girls who have not agreed to it.

Change from inside

None of this licenses a campaign of moral correction aimed at other people's societies. The evidence points the other way. The changes that hold are the ones a community arrives at itself.

Theology has turned out to be part of the work. Many people who practise FGM believe it is religiously required of them. It is not, and the religious institutions with the standing to say so have said so in public. That carries further than any outside condemnation could, because it lifts the obligation without asking anyone to give up their faith.

The rest is conversation, and it is slow. When traditional leaders, grandmothers and fathers talk openly about what the practice does, communities move toward abandoning it, and they tend to do it collectively rather than one household at a time. Thousands have made public declarations replacing the cut with alternative rites of passage that leave the girl intact.

For women already cut, there is reconstructive surgery, which exposes the undamaged part of the clitoris beneath the scar tissue and restores sensation. A study of survivors in Sweden who underwent it found mixed results. Some were disappointed. The majority reported less pain, improved sexual pleasure, and a restored sense of self. What comes through the interviews is that the surgery was doing something the clinical account does not capture. As one survivor put it:

The possibility of having a choice is very important, it feels like I can regain the power over my body.

Where the line falls

Cultural diversity is worth defending. It gives people meaning, language and somewhere to belong, and a society that flattens it is poorer for it. But culture is not sovereign. It is a human creation, still being made, and it remains answerable to the people living inside it.

The line falls where four things are true at once:

• the practice causes documented, severe and irreversible harm;
• it is imposed on children who cannot consent;
• it works as an internal restriction, designed to suppress the liberties of the group's own members,

women in particular;

• and it operates in a private sphere that public justice does not reach.

When all four hold, culture has gone too far.

The body belongs to the person living in it, and that claim comes before anything a tradition can claim over it. The work worth supporting is the work communities are already doing to dismantle these restrictions from within, so that the next generation of girls inherits everything else their culture has to give them, and keeps their bodies as well.

Suggestions

• Desert Flower (2009), directed by Sherry Hormann. Waris Dirie's memoir of being cut as a child in Somalia, of walking out of a forced marriage, and of what she built afterwards, with Liya Kebede in the lead. Hormann keeps the film on the practice rather than on the modelling career it is usually sold on.

Sources

• Nussbaum, Martha C. (2000). Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach. Cambridge University Press.
• Kymlicka, Will (1995). Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights. Oxford University Press.
• Okin, Susan Moller (1999). Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? Princeton University Press.
• Female genital mutilation. World Health Organization. Definitions, health complications, and the trend toward medicalisation.
• Jordal, Malin et al. (2021). The benefits and disappointments following clitoral reconstruction after female genital cutting: a qualitative interview study from Sweden. PLOS ONE.