Gender, culture, and criminal justice. On female genital cutting

Abstract

Cultural practices connoted with ethnic “others” and prosecuted as crimes bring new challenges to legislators and judicial systems. While they put forth a tension between culture and liberal universalism, the reaction to them is also vulnerable to the pitfalls induced by simple dichotomies, such as culture/individuals, relativism/universalism, cultural difference/women’s rights. Complexifying such dichotomies, I will focus on these pitfalls in the case of female genital cutting and the specific criminalization of those known as Female Genital Mutilation. I will examine in particular the inequalities they mask, the paradoxes they generate, and their possible counterproductive effects.