'I Love You...I Mutilate You': The Capture of Flesh and the Word in 'Female Genital Mutilation' Law
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... (Lacan, 1992 [1960], 225) We must see right away that the desire to institute social constraint, and the fashion in which this is initiated and legitimated, raises a question as to the desire of the advocate of such constraint. In the text that is female genital mutilation, any call to the institution of law betrays itself as not so self evident in its altruism, but raises a question as to the desire of the anti-female genital mutilation (fgm) advocate. In this article I discuss the fantasising that accompanies anti-female genital mutilation advocacy and the passions that inspire the calls to law. I argue that the aggressive fantasising of female genital mutilation as a 'barbaric' and 'sadistic' practice, and the accompanying refusal to engage with the commentary of women who are circumcised and with the research which counters much anti-fgm rhetoric, betrays a horror of castration in the 'non-mutilated' subject. This horror is played out in discussions of the animation of the flesh of the 'mutilated woman' and in a liberal politico-legal terrain in which the sovereign comes to function as an Other who can restore the lost fresh to the horrified advocate. Advocating for anti-fgm law in this light becomes an alignment with the sovereign's law and the sovereign's language; in this form such 'social constraint' functions as the salve to castration.