Abstract

The author presents a critique of the presentation of Female Circumcision as occasioned by the work of Alice Walker and Parthiba Pamar’s film Warrior Marks, Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexual Blinding of Women. The discussion focuses on North East Africa (with references to female circumcision by Western physicians in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries). In the African context, the author observes, the operation is implemented almost exclusively by eIder women who regard the ritual as an important affirmation of one generation of women’s authority over another. The practice will not be successfully eradicated, she argues, without a strategy that offers alternative possibilities of authority between older and younger generations of women in societies where it is practiced.