Mamasa Camara

Gates Cambridge International Scholarship

The Political Economy of Female Circumcision

Supervisor: Professor Adam Branch (Department of Politics and International Studies)

Abstract:

My dissertation will explore the complex and often hidden politics that permeate the intersection of international and national discourses, institutions, and relations of power around the practice of Female Genital Cutting (FGC) in the Gambia. It will do so through a critical engagement with several waves of transnational feminist thought and activism around African women, as well as through a careful historical accounting of the place of FGC in the formation and transformation of the Gambian state. I will endeavor to show that the politics of FGC defy simple categorization in the terms provided by neo-colonial, post-colonial, or feminist critique, and need to be approached instead from a multi-sited and multi-scaler inquiry into what it means for African women’s bodies and lives to be defined as “mutilated.”