Juliet Rogers - Laws Cut on the Body of Human Rights: Female Circumcision, Torture and Sacred Flesh

Law's Cut on the Body of Human Rights

Scenes of violence and incisions into the flesh inform the demand for law. The scene of little girls being held down in practices of female circumcision has been a defining and definitive image that demands the attention of human rights, and the intervention of law. But the investment in protecting women and little girls from such a cut is not all that it seems. Law's Cut on the Body of Human Rights: Female Circumcision, Torture and Sacred Flesh considers how such images come to inform law and the investment of advocates of law in the imagination of this scene. Drawing on psychoanalytic and postcolonial theory, and accompanying ideas in political theology, Juliet Rogers examines the language, imagery and excitement that accompanies recent initiatives to legislate against what is called female genital mutilation. The author complements this examination with a consideration of the scene of torture exposed in images from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. Rogers argues that the modes of fascination and excitement that accompany scenes of torture and female circumcision betray the fantasy of a political condition against which the subject of liberal law is imagined; this is a subjectivity in a state of non-mutilation, non-prohibition or, in a psychoanalytic idiom, non-castration. To support the fantasy of this subject, the mutilated subject, the author suggests, is rendered as flesh cut from the democratic nation state, deserving of only selective human rights, or none at all.

Juliet Rogers teaches criminology at the University of Melbourne.

Law's Cut on the Body of Human Rights

Female circumcision, torture and sacred flesh

Juliet Rogers

First published 2013
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
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A GlassHouse Book
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2013 Juliet Rogers

The right of Juliet Rogers to be identified as author of this material has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Rogers, Juliet
Law's cut and the body of human rights:female circumcision, torture, and scared flesh/Juliet Rogers

pages cm

I. Female circumcisionLaw and legislation. 2. WomenLegal status, laws, etc. 3. Women's rights. I. Title.

K361 1.F45R64 2013

344.03219816dc23

2012050797

ISBN: 978-0-415-66170-6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-51704-8 (ebk)

Typeset in Garamond
by Keystroke, Station Road, Codsall, Wolverhampton

For Michelle.

My thanks to European University Institute and to Yale Law School for giving me quiet thoughtful places to work on this manuscript, particularly to Shana Jackson for finding me a place in the sun, and to Bo Burt, Dori Laub and Francesco Francioni for their conversation.

This research was only made possible by the intellectual and political work of the African Women's Working Group in Victoria. Members of the group, including Munira Mohamed, Munira Adam, Miriam Idris, Nikki Marshall and Amna Maleken, generously shared with me the group's documents and discussions. Munira Mohamed's ongoing encouragement and support assisted me in continuing what was, at many times, a difficult issue to pursue politically, intellectually and socially. My warmest thanks are also extended to Amuna Abdella for her intellectual rigour together with her trust, friendship and the introductions she offered me in this project. Chris Bayly also shared with me her meticulous files of meetings and conversations that took place at the time of the consultations into the application of female genital mutilation legislation in Australia. These documents were invaluable in directing and legitimating this research. Some of the work I mention is ongoing and the struggle against the violence of female genital mutilation legislation is being continued by Samia Baho, Mansura Dopico and Maria Dimopolous. The work begun by Samia, Maskepe Sejoe and others through the Family and Reproductive Rights Education Program in Victoria continues the debates and, where possible, enables community dialogue. I am grateful for the information these people have shared with me, their integrity, political commitment and for their work in advance.

My thanks to my own students whose conversations and own projects have influenced the work in this book, including Sahar Ghumkhor, Mohamad Tabbaa, Hussein Mohamud, Felicity Grey and Diego Mendez. My warmest thanks particularly to Sahar for her editorial rigour, inspirational conversation in this area and her patience.

My love and thanks to Adam Driver, Anna Szorenyi, Steve Pukallus and Surya Purekh for the conversations that got me on the right track in the first place. And to Judith Grbich, Ian Duncanson, Andrea Rhodes-Little friends and teachers who have held my hands through this work for some time now.

My warm thanks to Anne Orford for her insightful conversation throughout the better parts of this research, and for her intellectual inspiration and reminders of the maternal. My heartfelt gratitude goes to Peter Rush and Alison Young for their friendship, inspiration and enduring support. And particularly to Connal Parsley, Justin Clemens, Bill MacNeil, Maria Aristodemou, Costas Douzinas and again to Peter and Alison, for their conversation, comments and their sanction of the peculiarities of approaches such as these.

My thanks always to Cara for her incredible generosity and love, and to both she and Ed for their food, art work and smiles at the end of the day. If only I could have written this book in Lego my absences would have been less.

We must see right away how crude it is to accept the idea that, in the ethical order itself, everything can be reduced to social constraint as if the fashion in which that constraint develops doesn't in itself raise a question

Scenes of torture and of female genital mutilation is imagined to require protection from the cut. And the flesh of the tortured is often sacrificed to the flesh of democratic polis: The People. The value of the flesh how much can be cut and what remains is a measurement which employs doctrines of biomedicine, law, human rights and political theology. Flesh is worth something in the domestic and universal polis , but not all flesh is equivalent, not all bodies are uncut, not all humans are sacred.

The imaginations of female genital mutilation and of torture offer a way of trying to understand the disparities in law's attention and the modes through Subjects of western democracy, who identify with the values of liberal law, are rarely ambivalent about little (Muslim) girls being held down, while about the holding down of brown (Muslim) men we're not so sure.