Desempeño retrorreflejante en la lluvia 1 Resumen

The greatest fear with regard to not cutting one’s daughters that has been expressed to me was that an un-excised girl might not be able to control her sexual desire when she reached a certain age. This might tempt her to sleep with a man before marriage. In Pulaar it was said ‘o waawa fadde gorko makko’ – ‘she cannot wait for her husband’ or ‘o waawa jogaade hoore makko’ – ‘she cannot control herself’. In French people tended to use the expression ‘elle ne peut pas controller ces pulsions sexuelles’ – ‘she cannot control her sex-drive’. Considering that virginity upon marriage is extremely important to the Futanke, and a family’s honour and social standing are contingent upon their daughters’ virginity, this is seen as a serious threat.

In Seedo Sebbe, a village where the majority of women had decided to stop practising excision, I interviewed a middle-aged woman called Juulde Mbaye, who was opposed to a collective ‘abandonment’ of the practice. Even though the option of not practising had become the subject of open discussion between families, Juulde, like many other women, considered excision important for the following reasons:

If a girl is not excised, her clitoris will continue growing, like the girl’s body is growing as well and that will weaken the rest of her apparatus. […] When an excised girl’s husband is not there, she will not look for another man to sleep with. If the clitoris is not cut, the girl will not be able to rest still. She will not be able to sit and wait for her husband. We are not for the abandonment of excision. It is a good thing.

Since the desertification of the 1970s, it has become increasingly difficult for people to live from subsistence farming and herding. Men search for paid labour in urban areas and abroad where they hope to be paid higher salaries. Many women I met had husbands working in Mauritania, Ivory Coast, Central Africa, Gabon, as well as European countries and the US.77 Juulde emphasises the importance of two things with regard to excision: first, a girl cannot wait for her husband while he is away working.

Second, she brings up the notion of the ‘weakening of the girl’s apparatus’. I frequently came across this belief in comments suggesting that an excised girl is physically stronger – her life force goes into her physical and moral strength, turning the body’s power into ‘aptitude’ (Foucault 1975) as a socially appropriate woman who performs her duties in the household well, rather than the development of her sex organs and sexual desire, which could potentially become dangerous. It could also be argued that Juulde is using ‘the weakening of the apparatus’ in a metaphoric sense to describe an un-excised girl’s incapacity to control herself, which signifies physical, mental and moral weakness. The image of an un-excised girl not being able to ‘sit still’ was also frequently used. It conveys the idea that she is waiting restlessly for her husband to satisfy her sexual desire and lacks the patience (muñal) an excised girl possesses.

Similar images of a girl being tempted to commit adultery when her husband is away were expressed to me by Hawa, a close female informant of mine in Bito:

Excision is practised when girls are babies. It is practised so that when the girl has grown up, if her husband needs to emigrate she will be able to wait for him. She will be able to go without sleeping with a man for a long time.

Another lady explained the importance of the practice to me in a village where many other women had abandoned it:

G: We have practised excision since the generations of our grandmothers. If you hear people say that it is a practice that needs to be done, it is because if a woman’s husband travels to France or to the US she cannot stay without a man for more than two months. An excised woman can wait for her husband for years.

S: Aren’t there excised women who look for men as well? G: Yes there are but without excision it would be worse. (Gedda Sy, in Semme)

In both comments, excision is seen to help women to wait for their husbands and to control their sexual desire. These women’s views are those of mothers who want their daughters to be socially successful in a society where the domestic sphere is associated with women as reproducers while men are charged with the responsibility of producing income to support their families. The spheres of production and reproduction are strongly gendered. But even beyond social recognition through marriage to a man who is ‘successful’, it makes mothers proud and happy to see that their daughters are able to contain their desires and devote their lives to their husbands, in-laws and children.

To what extent can these women’s views be seen as a result of male oppression over women as Hosken (1982) suggested? Strathern (1988: 26) stipulates that feminism’s theoretical concerns focus upon the extent to which women suffer from systematic social injustice because of their sex. As the practice of female circumcision has been under sharp scrutiny from feminist scholars who suggest that it is a result of inequality in gender relations, I briefly assess how my ethnographic data corresponds to some feminist academic notions of inequality and gender relations.