Female Genital Cutting and the “Medical Gaze” in Southeast Asia

Abstract

This article discusses female genital cutting (FGC) in Southeast Asia in the context of the increasing medical control over the female body. It questions and evaluates medicine’s role in controlling women’s bodies through informing and underpinning the public health policies enforced them. Using a cultural studies methodology of text analysis, we have focused on the specific discourses on FGC in Southeast Asia. There were three findings in the study. Firstly, although overt state medical control over FGC does not appear to exist in Southeast Asia, the medical gaze has been adopted and perpetuated by the religious community in their resolutions. Secondly, we contend that whether they are promoting FGC or attempting to stop it, medical practitioners are equally/similarly involved in objectifying the female genitalia, and sharing what the well-known French theorist, Michel Foucault termed “the medical gaze.” Either way, they are implicitly contributing to medical control over the female body. Our third focus regards how local people view FGC. We found that local people had initially thought that FGC functioned as a mark of religious identity, but to a large extent they eventually came to adopt the same medical gaze as that of the European ideology of their colonizers. In this respect Southeast Asia presents an interesting example of a site of negotiation and contestation between the local traditional views of FGC based on custom or religion, and global discourses on FGC.