SPECIAL ISSUE: INTIMACY

Winter 1998
Volume 24, Number 2

In Western Europe and the United States, public anxieties about cultural diversity and national identity are often expressed at the tip of the clitoris. In the late 1990s, an economically depressed and politically terrorized France could not agree on the grounds for excluding from the nation the North African diaspora living there but could, at least initially, agree on the necessity of outlawing the "'genital mutilations'" some in this community inflict on its young girls.1 In 1996, the U.S. Congress outlawed clitoridectomies and directed U.S. representatives to the World Bank and other international financial institutions to withhold billions of dollars in aid to twenty-eight African countries if they did not sponsor education programs aimed at eradicating the practice.2 A putatively pro-diversity President signed this bill in a national "postÐcivil rights" context in which "most Americans believe themselves and the nation to be opposed to racism and in favor of a multiracial, multiethnic pluralism."3 In 1997 some members of the Illinois legislature proposed a bill that would stiffen this federal legislature in the state. The urgency they expressed, which suggested that the Midwest was in the grip of a clitoridectomy epidemic, was perhaps rather more motivated by their anxiety that urban areas like Chicago were haunted by the black Muslim movement.4 In France and the United States, state officials and public figures struggled to maintain a utopian image of a national culture against the pressure of transnational migration and internal ethnic divisions by holding up this clipped bundle of nerves to public scrutiny as the limit of a "civilized" nation's tolerance of its internal cultural diversity.

[...]

This is the nerve ending this essay seeks to understand: how the state uses a multicultural imaginary to solve the problems that capital, (post)colonialism, and human diasporas pose to national identity in the late twentieth century. And, more specifically, it seeks to understand how these state multicultural discourses, apparatuses, and imaginaries defuse struggles for liberation waged against the modern liberal state and recuperate these struggles as moments in which the future of the nation and its core institutions and values are ensured rather than shaken.

1. Celia W. Dugger, "Tug of Taboos: African Genital Rite vs. U.S. Law," New York Times, 28 Dec. 1996, p. A1. The same article notes that France used already existing legislation prohibiting violence against children to outlaw the practice of clitoridectomy. The French state's discipline of a North African practice has an uncanny relationship to its past war in Algeria and to its present-day political relationship with Algeria. The New York Times, for example, noted, "The war has at times come to bear an uncanny resemblance to the war of Algeria's independence. Then, too, the guerrillas, Algeria's National Liberation Front, used methods of startling savagery--including disembowelment, decapitation and the mutilation of genitals--to shatter the middle ground in society. Then, too, the authorities, represented by the French Army, responded with torture and indiscriminate killing. Then, too, the war spilled over into France, dividing its society and destroying the Fourth Republic" (Roger Cohen, "Troubled Tie: France Hears Alarming Echoes of Colonial Past from Algeria," New York Times, 6 Dec. 1996, p. A12).

2. The legislation was sponsored by Representatives Pat Schroeder (D-Colorado) and Harry Reid (D-Nevada) as part of the Immigration Act. See Dugger, "Genital Mutilation Is Outlawed," New York Times, 12 Oct. 1996, p. A27 and Sharon Lerner, "Rite or Wrong?" The Village Voice, 26 Mar.Ð1 Apr. 1997, pp. 44Ð46.

3. Christopher Newfield and Avery F. Gordon, "Multiculturalism's Unfinished Business," in Mapping Multiculturalism, ed. Gordon and Newfield (Minneapolis, 1996), p. 77.

4. A social geography of the practice is emerging in the mass media. The New York Times, for instance, educates the public on the regions where women are at the greatest risk thus: "New York and Newark are among the metropolitan areas where the largest number of these at-risk girls and women live" (Dugger, "Genital Mutilation Is Outlawed," p. A27).

Elizabeth A. Povinelli is associate professor in the deparment of anthoropology at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Labor's Lot: The Power, History, and Culture of Aboriginal Action (1993). She is currently working on a study of Australian multiculturalism and indigenous sexuality and citizenship.