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Current Sexual Health Reports
Published in: Current Sexual Health Reports 4/2019

01-12-2019 | Sociocultural Issues and Epidemiology (J Abdulcadir and C Johnson-Agbakwu, Section Editors)

What Constitutes Mutilation? A Concern With Anti-Female Genital Mutilation Laws in Australia and the Question of Natural Function

Author: Juliet B. Rogers

Published in: Current Sexual Health Reports | Issue 4/2019

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Abstract

Purpose of Review

In 2019, the highest court in Australia is deliberating on the question of what constitutes mutilation. This paper examines the arguments in the first case prosecuted using Female Genital Mutilation law in Australia and considers how the arguments have drawn on ideas of function and desire of women’s genitals as well as of women themselves. The brief writings on this case and on FGM law in Australia are discussed, particularly the work of Kennedy, Sullivan, Seuffert and Iribanes, and Gans.

Recent Findings

The paper finds that the ideas of genital function in the deliberations and judgments of this case rely on a problematic idea of the natural function of a woman and a presumption of the harm of female genital mutilation irrespective of alternative research, and rely on a singular document published in Australia in 1994 that did not include any engagement or opinions of people from the communities who practice circumcision or genital cutting in Australia.

Summary

The partial information relied on in Australian law about the practices of female genital cutting and the immediate presumption of harm in respect to any form of the practices means that future research and indeed legal opinion already presume that the practices are a mutilation.
Footnotes
1
In the same vein, under Australian Criminal law, an assault to different parts of the body will incur different charges and, in effect, constitute different crimes. A blow to the head may constitute grievous bodily harm while a blow to other parts of the body is simply assault (my thanks to John Sutton for illuminating the comparison).
 
2
My reference here is to the unifying idea of what a woman is or should be, as if there is one dominant understanding of woman that symbolizes and stands in for all women. Lacan J. Encore: the seminar of Jacques Lacan, book xx: on feminine sexuality: the limits of love and knowledge, 1972–1973. Alain Miller J. (ed). Fink B. (trans 1975) W.W. Norton & Company. 1998.
 
3
The complexities of the articulations of identity with body has been well articulated by Judith Butler in 1997 and Elizabeth Grosz who both captured the porous confusions of performativity as both inside and outside the body, one neither more natural than the other, thus helping with the understandings of culture in shaping the sense of identity through the many marks on and in the body. Kirby V. On the cutting edge: feminism and clitoridectomy. Australian Feminist Studies.1987; 5(2):35–55.
It is this marked body from which one can become dysmorphic from, and it is that dysmorphia which messes with a sense of what we call “mental health.”
 
4
This is, of course, the same argument that enables the exclusion of genital alterations for the purposes of gender modification in transgender people. Kelly F. Treating the transgendered child: the full court’s decision in re Jamie. Australian Journal of Family Law. 2014; 28(1):83–94.
 
5
The only exception is Victoria, where an adult woman may have her clitoral head removed. Crimes Act 1958 (Vic) ss 15. 32(2).
 
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Metadata
Title
What Constitutes Mutilation? A Concern With Anti-Female Genital Mutilation Laws in Australia and the Question of Natural Function
Author
Juliet B. Rogers
Publication date
01-12-2019
Publisher
Springer US
Published in
Current Sexual Health Reports / Issue 4/2019
Print ISSN: 1548-3584
Electronic ISSN: 1548-3592
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11930-019-00233-8

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