Girls and Boys as Victims [Elektronisk resurs] Asymmetries and dynamics in European public discourses on genital modifications in children

• This paper starts with a discussion about the symmetrical aspects of circumcision of girls and circumcision of boys. In a brief overview of historical changes in the discourses on circumcision, especially regarding girls, we can see how a conceptual asymmetry was created through the activist claim, introduced in the early 1980s and prominent since then, that one of the phenomena, in whatever form, was to be labelled ‘mutilation’, the other ‘harmless’. The paper will further discuss later developments in the form of an activist movement (the genital integrity movement, intactivists) contending that also boys without decision-making capacity need to have legal protection against non-medical procedures that irreversibly change their genitals. Examples from the academic, medical, and political-legal fields in Europe will demonstrate a general trend in which the symmetries between circumcision of girls and boys are again being brought out, now within a children’s rights perspective. 

Ämnesord

Humanities and the Arts  (hsv)

Humaniora och konst  (hsv)

Genre

government publication  (marcgt)

Indexterm och SAB-rubrik

female circumcision

female genital cutting

female genital mutilation

male circumcision

genital modifications

discourse

legislation

activism