Review essay: Women's struggles for equality, power and voice in Africa and the Middle East

Gruenbaum, Ellen. The Female Circumcision Controversy: An Anthropological Perspective. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001. 235 pp.

Green, December. Gender Violence in Africa: African Women's Responses. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, London: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1999. 291 pp.

Joseph, Suad and Susan Slyomovics, (eds.). Women and Power in the Middle East. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001. 230 pp.

In an allegedly "post-feminist" era, the last two decades of feminist thought and scholarship have produced such a wealth of challenging ideas and diverse perspectives that any notion of feminism as anachronistic is surely mistaken. One burgeoning arena of feminist scholarship includes analyses of women's movements. Authors Gruenbaum and Green, and editors Joseph and Slyomovics present three accounts of African and Middle Eastern women's struggles for equality, power and voice that contribute significantly to our understanding of the breadth of form and meaning that such movements have acquired over the past decade. Women have invoked both well integrated, centralized struggles that call upon formal political structures, as well as informal, decentralized strategies to overcome gender oppression.

One of the most important contributions that the books make both individually and collectively is to challenge the assumption that women across different societies share interests by virtue of their sex. Instead, they demonstrate that women's positions in their social and cultural environments - shaped race, class, sexuality, nationality, ethnicity, family structure, religion, and other variables - produce vastly distinct and often contradictory ideals and values. The authors draw attention to the kinds of questions that feminist scholars must ask to determine the contours of women's struggles: What goals are African and Middle Eastern women pursuing to improve their lives? How do they aim to achieve their goals and what are the obstacles in their way? What channels exist to support and inspire individual women to take action and to group together with other women? What factors prevent women from working together? What are the dynamics of cultural, regional and national histories that shape the stories women tell about their lives and experiences - and the stories they tell of others that they work with and against? How do women envision their futures, the participation of women in their societies and the treatment of women both by men and by other women? As each author underscores, a true Global Sisterhood will emerge out of cross-cultural dialogues that attend to these questions.1

The Female Circumcision Controversy: An Anthropological Perspective, by Ellen Gruenbaum is one of the most successful efforts to date to portray the multiple beliefs, values and norms that shape the varied practices that are collectively referred to as female circumcision (pp. 3-4). Gruenbaum focuses on Sudan where she has conducted anthropological fieldwork since 1974. The rich, ethnographic texture of her examples draws readers into the lives of the women and men she has encountered in her research, permitting us to travel vicariously along with her, undergoing a transformative experience that usually comes only from actual immersion in another cultural reality. Gruenbaum achieves a rare accomplishment, narrowing the gap between the self and other, so that at the end of her text, attentive readers can no longer talk about female circumcision in the singular and would be hard pressed to discuss the issue as an abstraction, removed from any empathetic understanding about why family members continue to subject their little girls to these operations.

In approaching the controversies swirling around female circumcision practices, Gruenbaum sets forth the main elements of her polemic in her introduction, arguing that female circumcision should stop, but will only do so when culturally and economically relevant alternatives are possible. The book has three reoccurring themes: (1) what are women's own explanations for why they perform female circumcision on their daughters? (2) What are the cultural norms and values, and the economic and political realities that contribute to the perpetuation of the practice that offer both possibilities and limitations for change? And (3) How should the answers to questions one and two affect the way that cultural outsiders think about the practice and structure their own desire to participate in the process of change?

Gruenbaum transports readers into Abdal Galil village where she witnesses, through the anthropological process of participant-observation, the circumcision of two girls, whose pain during the operations is mitigated by anesthesia, and the joyous celebration that ensues as friends and relations drop by the household, bringing gifts and singing praises of the girls' courage (pp. 54-- 59). She explores the many meanings attributed to the operation, including aesthetic preferences for the circumcised vulva, debates over the attribution of religious sanctioning and challenges to the accepted notion that circumcision is a rite of passage from childhood to adulthood, given the young ages of girls involved (p. 70).