Gendered and Racialised Epistemological Injustice in FGM-safeguarding

Abstract

This paper explores FGM-safeguarding in the UK through a decolonial lens. Based on an analysis of the development of law and policy relating to ‘Female Genital Mutilation’ in the UK alongside data collected in focus groups with people of ethnic Somali heritage living in Bristol, we argue that the current legislation and policies, as well as their delivery, are steeped in colonial Othering. We demonstrate that legislative and policy approaches operate through a gendered and generational binary in which non-White mothers are othered as migrants (regardless of citizenship status) for whom anachronistic culture is deemed determinative, whilst their daughters are claimed as British. In this construction, ‘FGM’ operates as the symbolic marker that designates un/belonging: the uncircumcised girl is rescuable and claimed as ‘one of us’, whilst the circumcised mother is considered a mutilated political subject for whom belonging is foreclosed.