Female Circumcision and Clitoridectomy in the United States: A History of a Medical Treatment

Abstract

Sarah Rodriguez's cultural history of clitoral surgeries in the United States describes the construction of sexual deviancy in women and efforts to conform their bodies to heterosexual norms from the mid-nineteenth century until the 1980s. Framing her account is the claim that interventions on the clitoris were fundamentally shaped by gendered expectations surrounding female sexuality and the female body. Surgeries on the clitoris during this period were thus a product of the enduring dominance of heterosexual and penetrative sex in American society as the legitimate model for women's sexual pleasure, and reflected the attempts of physicians, family members, partners, and women themselves to conform their bodies to such a model. Drawing on anatomy and gynecology texts, medical publications, and other communications by physicians over this 150-year period, Rodriguez identifies a spectrum of four clitoral surgeries: cleansing to remove smegma, the separation of adhesions between the clitoris and the clitoral hood, removal of the clitoral hood (circumcision), and the full excision of the clitoris (clitoridectomy). In line with her goal of framing the perspective of physicians within “a larger cultural history of the changing perceptions of female sexuality” (10), Rodriguez also references popular and psychoanalytic literature on marriage, sexuality and pleasure, and devotes a chapter of the book to describing the popular and feminist politics of the clitoris during the 1960s and 1970s. Thus while the primary sources for the book are presented in an exhaustive account of the published and public views of physicians on clitoral surgery, this medical history is embedded within a broader cultural framing that emphasizes the dynamic interaction between cultural, medical, and other expert knowledge of women's bodies.