Response to Commentaries on “From the War on Terror to the Moral Crusade Against Female Genital Mutilation: Anti-Muslim Racism and Femonationalism in the United States”

I would like to begin my response by stating my position in this debate. I am a Swiss sociologist with Egyptian origins. While in my teenage years, I embraced the dominant discourse against female genital mutilation (FGM) in response to the history of FGM in my family, I soon began to wonder about the nature of the anti-FGM campaign in the immigration context, not only in terms of the discourses mobilized but also in terms of some of the actors involved. I therefore devoted my doctoral thesis to analyze Swiss public discourses on FGM and revealed how the radical right Swiss People's Party instrumentalized the Swiss federal ban on FGM to advance their anti-immigration agenda (Bader & Mottier, 2020). During my 18-month postdoctoral research stay at the sociology department at New York University (2019–2021), I observed that the phenomenon of conservative lawmakers engaging with feminist causes such as FGM for xenophobic and Islamophobic reasons—called “femonationalism” (Farris, 2017)—was not only happening on a large scale in the United States, especially after the 2017 Michigan criminal court case on FGM, but dated back to the first federal anti-FGM law of 1996 (Bader, 2022).

However, both studies of femonationalism in the United States and in-depth analyses of anti-FGM legislative developments in this domain are rare. Two reasons can explain this gap in the literature. First, scholars examining femonationalism primarily focus on the headscarf debate in European countries (e.g., Calderaro, 2022; Farris, 2017; Rahbari, 2020). Second, talking about xenophobia and anti-Muslim racism in association with the anti-FGM movement seems taboo. Yet, exploring this connection neither justifies FGM nor blames the anti-FGM campaign; it points out the problematic instrumentalization of a women's cause by xenophobic actors to discriminate against minorities. Admittedly, this may dampen the enthusiasm about anti-FGM laws; yet it addresses the central but neglected issue of femonationalism in the anti-FGM debate. My aim has thus been to highlight these gray areas of the anti-FGM movement that are overlooked in a political context where FGM is almost universally condemned.

I thank Claire Renzetti for publishing my postdoctoral research as a symposium piece for Violence Against Women and convincing Sarah Mohammedahmed Abbas, Abbie Shervinskie, Cari Jo Clark, Mariya Taher, and Yasmin Bootwala to engage in a dialog about recent U.S. legislative developments against FGM. I am delighted to comment on three insightful commentaries by U.S. public health scholars and anti-FGM advocates, some of whom are members of the Dawoodi Bohra community that found itself in the spotlight during the 2017 Michigan criminal court case. I will respond to the three main points raised in the commentaries and put them into dialog.

The Need for a Specific Ban

The first element that emerges from the three commentaries is the need for a specific anti-FGM law. First, Abbas et al. and Taher pointed out the United Nations’ call to introduce legislation as part of the international action plan to eradicate FGM. Second, Taher cited district attorneys in Massachusetts who had informed her that a specific law would circumvent the need to provide intent to harm as in child abuse statutes. Third, Abbas et al. and Taher argued that—when introduced in a comprehensive manner (which is seldom the case, as the commentators acknowledge)—a specific law can provide additional components for education and outreach. Fourth, Taher underlined that a specific law would clearly state the ban before pro-FGM groups who publicly condone some forms of FGM. Fifth, as Bootwala suggested, a law would extend the public debate further to other practices of genital modification for non-therapeutic reasons, such as male circumcision and surgery on intersex children.

I fully agree with all these arguments: My study does not question the usefulness of a specific anti-FGM law. By recalling previous convictions for FGM through general statutes (in Georgia, but also in European countries), my paper challenges the erroneous claim—often mobilized by conservatives as my quotes suggest—that FGM would not be punished, even be legal, in states without a specific law. Given that convictions are possible under current law, the question I explored was what conservatives would “gain” (Farris, 2017) in mobilizing such an argument. This is, I argue, where the term “symbolic politics” comes in: introducing such a law acts as a signal. In my view, this signal is not the same as that intended by the UN (i.e., introduce legislation to prevent FGM). In fact, I contend that a specific national ban amounts, for conservatives, to a nationalist assertion of moral and civilizational superiority of American (gender) democracy over immigrant populations singled out because of their culture, their faith and in sum, their (supposedly backward) Otherness.

To investigate conservatives’ motives behind this “signal,” we need to examine the instrumentalization of a cause—the introduction of laws banning FGM, as proposed by long-time advocates and survivors—to further their anti-immigration agenda.

The Multiplicity of Actors Involved in the Anti-FGM Movement

Taher and Bootwala rightly highlighted the multiplicity of the actors involved in the U.S. anti-FGM movement. Taher pointed out the remarkable work of women's rights advocates, FGM survivors, and supporting left-wing politicians. Bootwala named various actors who take part in public discourses on FGM, namely, the “media,” the “politicians,” “Islamophobic groups,” “women's rights advocates,” “Islamic extremists,” and “peaceful Muslims.”

Obviously, the anti-FGM campaign is not the exclusive preserve of the Republican party (GOP). Many actors on both sides of the political spectrum have worked to prevent and ban FGM. In contrast to the actors mentioned by Taher and Bootwala, I found the involvement of conservatives puzzling and wanted to find out why they mobilized en masse to pass a state anti-FGM law during and after 2017. My study reveals that out of the 27 state laws introduced between 2017 and 2020, 23 were sponsored either exclusively by conservatives or in a bipartisan fashion. By focusing solely on conservatives, I do not pretend that the GOP was the driving force behind all state anti-FGM laws since the 1990s, which would obviously be false. Rather, I want to shed light on a seeming paradox: how an openly anti-immigration party advocates the human rights of the same females it pushes in precarious living conditions because of restrictive social and migration policies and wishes to send back to the borders, especially if they are racialized migrants from low socio-economic backgrounds.

Interestingly, conservatives seem to have often played a decisive role in anti-FGM legislation. First, the 1996 FGM Act was introduced as an amendment to a Republican-authored anti-immigration law—the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act—, while the two previous Democratic initiatives calling for an FGM ban (Patricia Schroeder's and Harry Reid's) had been rejected (Bader, 2022). Second, Senate Bill 418—introduced in Georgia in 2005 following the first FGM case tried in a state criminal court (i.e., Khalid Adem's)—was first carried out by Nadine Thomas, an African American Democrat, yet was successfully adopted by the Republican-leading senate when Renee Unterman, a white Republican senator, sponsored the law after taking up Thomas’ seat as vice-chair of the Health and Human Services Committee (Steffen, 2011). These events thus suggest that the involvement of a right-wing party (the GOP like the Swiss People's Party) often seems necessary to pass anti-FGM legislation. However, even though conservatives have been engaged against FGM in the past, we only see a massive mobilization of Republican lawmakers as primary sponsors after the 2017 Michigan criminal court case.

Moreover, Taher highlighted the achievement of Jaha Dukureh who petitioned the Obama administration to take action against FGM. Indeed, I think that it is relevant that the petition was addressed to Barack Obama, a Democratic African American president, instead of Donald Trump, a white supremacist conservative who made the anti-immigrant rhetoric his winning formula. Likewise, I think it is likely that the immigrant communities affected by FGM would perceive the awareness-raising effect of the STOP FGM Act of 2020 differently had Obama signed it rather than Trump. Although the reception of this “signal” by immigrant communities and the consequences of Trump's signature requires further investigation, the Swiss case provides an illuminating example. As I show elsewhere (Bader, 2022; Bader & Mottier, 2020), the Swiss People's Party not only supported anti-FGM legislation, but also sponsored a law on the automatic deportation of “foreign criminals.” As a result, FGM has been listed as a crime for which convicted immigrants (i.e., parents) should be deported, as FGM is now prohibited in a specific federal law. It is questionable if children's best interests are at the core of political concerns if parents either lose custody of their children—as required in some U.S. state anti-FGM laws—or are deported (as required by Swiss law, unless the parents are naturalized). In countries where citizenship is transmitted by jus sanguinis such as in Switzerland, foreign children depend on their parents’ residency rights and are thus also threatened with deportation. This only increases the risk of younger sisters to be cut if they are brought back to their country of origin (Bader & Mottier, 2020). These considerations echo Khalid Adem's deportation during Trump's first year in office, despite serving his 10-year sentence. While Adem's story is complex and controversial for many reasons that I will not address here (see Steffen, 2011), the deportation of convicted parents of FGM (and possibly their children) reinforces the message that their actions are “foreign” and not compatible with a life in the United States. Deportation constitutes here a form of Othering and, thereby, a strategy of femonationalism by the host country.

To be clear, the concept of femonationalism helps to explain conservatives’ ambivalent position toward racialized immigrant women and girls, yet it does not describe anti-FGM actions in the United States in general. We need to acknowledge that some political actors instrumentalize the anti-FGM campaign for xenophobic purposes—and as Taher's own experience reveals, that testimonials of FGM survivors are used to stigmatize Muslim communities—because only by so doing can we anticipate and prevent counter-effects that may thwart the goals of a genuine anti-FGM campaign.

The Problematic Way in Which Words and Numbers Are Used to Depict FGM

The third element raised in the commentaries is the problematic way in which words and numbers are used to depict FGM in public debate. As Taher rightly observed, words such as “barbaric” are also used by immigrant practicing communities, not only by conservatives. Indeed, such vocabulary is mobilized by pro- and anti-FGM advocates to condemn and delegitimize (some or all) FGM practices. I argue, however, that the scope of the criticism conveyed by the term “barbaric” differs depending on whether one is a member of the culture concerned or an outsider. In fact, members of communities affected by FGM (including FGM survivors and women's rights advocates from those communities) do not mobilize such vocabulary to denigrate the culture and its people as a whole, but apply it to the practices of FGM. By contrast, white conservatives do not uphold this distinction between the practices and the group, and mobilize such vocabulary to reinforce racist preconceptions and legitimize anti-immigration measures—under the guise of joining an international cause.

We should also remember, as Abbas et al. and Bootwala highlighted, that the international anti-FGM campaign has roots in the colonial era. Thus, the internal mechanisms of femonationalism (i.e., stigmatization and prejudice through feminist arguments to serve the nation) are not new and remind us of the first bans established in African countries during colonization. The discourses to condemn FGM used by U.S. conservatives echo, for instance, how British colonizers considered FGM in Sudan, namely to be evidence of the “moral and economic backwardness” of the Sudanese people (Boddy, 2007, p. 6). As Canadian anthropologist Janice Boddy explains about the real motivations of former colonial anti-FGM campaigns in Sudan: “Beneath the rhetoric of indirect rule, beneath too the altruistic face of endeavors in education and health, lay a prosaic, utilitarian, and largely unexamined design to naturalize modernity and British (‘humanitarian’) ideals, thus to forge a new civil consensus through the subtle conversion of Sudanese bodies and minds. Salient to this project was the fertility of northern women, a potential to be tapped, amended, regulated, made more productive, all in service to the colonial state” (Boddy, 2007, p. 176). Nowadays, the discourses mobilized by conservatives find also legitimacy in contemporary visual representations of FGM in the Western media that reify old racist, indeed colonialist, portraits of African people (Bader, 2019).

In addition, the anti-FGM campaign (in the United States and elsewhere) suffers from an approximate description of FGM in the context of migration because quantifying the number of girls and women affected by or at risk of FGM remains challenging. The absence of reliable numbers—partly related to the sensitive nature of the topic, its illegality, and the body part concerned—makes it easy to instrumentalize FGM. Indeed, as mentioned by Abbas et al., contemporary estimations of the prevalence of FGM in diasporas continue to simply extrapolate that of the countries of origin. This method leads to significant biases: First, as stressed by Bootwala, it does not take into account thechanges in attitudes and the abandonment of the practice observed in many immigrant communities after they have settled in a country where FGM is no longer a social norm. Second, it encourages the generalization of FGM to an entire community on the sole basis of nationality, without taking into account the evolution of mentalities, sociodemographic differences, and the length of stay, among other things (see Johnsdotter & Essén, 2016; Vogt, Efferson, & Fehr, 2017).

A Call to Decolonize the Anti-FGM Debate

To conclude, the findings of my research and the many important elements highlighted in the commentaries invite further reflection on the political context in which anti-FGM legislation takes place. Should we (blindly) celebrate any legislative advances against FGM, without considering the “unholy alliances” (Farris, 2017) that have produced them, and without questioning the motivations of political actors who supported them? I argue that the repercussions of these laws on migration and asylum policies, as well as the various anecdotes reported in the commentaries of anti-Muslim racism in the public debate on FGM, should prevent us from adopting a naïve attitude. In fact, these repercussions urge us to reflect critically on how to decolonize the anti-FGM debate by focusing on the needs of children and challenging stereotypes, so as not to lose the hard-won advances in terms of education and outreach to prevent FGM.