I’ve been thinking this week about the Ghana ‘Family Values’ draft Bill and its clause 23 which would “assist” (their word) parents in securing surgery for a child with variation in sex characteristics. Considering the amount of evidence out there on the danger of such surgery on children – the story of David Reimer is the classic here – and the arbitrary nature of defining sex at birth by deciding a penis is too small or a clitoris is too large, this is really not a good idea. Making it look like “assistance” or “support” is simply smoke and mirrors.
This is one of those areas where my historical work and my Christian identity overlap: I spoke on ‘The Church and the clitoris’ at a meeting of the Church of England’s College of Bishops and I did a talk based on this for HeartEdge at the beginning of 2021. The Torygraph later suggested this title was the C of E “lunging for relevance”; er, hello, this wasn’t an official utterance of the C of E – it’s my title and I am not sponsored by the C of E – and while we’re at it, why is the church’s attitude to the female body and its history of supporting clitoridectomy somehow not relevant?
Clitoridectomy is one variant of the wider category currently called Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) or Female Genital Excision (FGE); the word ‘excision’ is sometimes preferred, to emphasise that those who carry it out are not consciously wishing to inflict harm. All these types of surgery can be covered by the simple term ‘cutting’. In February 2020, the World Health Organization estimated that over 200 million women and girls alive at that time had been ‘cut’, mostly in parts of Africa, the Middle East and Asia, but it isn’t something that is restricted in terms of geography or of history. There is now a strong worldwide movement against any form of cutting but, in countries where this is still done, it is often (although not always) women who carry out these surgeries, and other women who ask for them to be performed on their daughters (although that can be because they think this is necessary if the girl is to make a good marriage). In 1950s Kenya, when the colonial authorities tried to stop such a practice among the Kikuyu, some girls went into the forest to circumcise themselves. What we call it reflects wider debates, formerly stimulated by colonialism and now by immigration, on whether these practices are simply about trying to maintain a traditional custom, and whether some societies have the right to forbid customary practices in others. Where does respect for other people’s traditions end? Is evidence of physical damage – of severe bleeding, infections, danger in childbirth and urinary retention – enough for other societies to intervene?
That’s relevant to the discussion at the moment of the Ghanaian bill, and to whether the Anglican Church in Ghana supports the bill’s proposals. Are we, as the Church of England, allowed to comment on clitoridectomy in another part of the Anglican Communion? The last collective utterance of the Anglican Communion was in 1998 at the Lambeth Conference, when a report entitled Called to Full Humanity condemned FGM as “sinful in any context”. So, how can it now be acceptable in children whose clitoris appears ‘too large’ to those looking at their bodies?
I’m currently writing something about the history of the clitoris, in the course of which I encountered Princess Marie Bonaparte (1882-1962), Napoleon I’s great-grandniece who married Prince George of Greece. Let’s just say that their sexual compatibility was not good: on their wedding night in 1907, he apologised to her, “I hate it as much as you do. But we must do it if we want children.” In the twentieth century, the clitoris was seen as powerful but its power was acceptable if harnessed within heterosexual marriage.
Earlier in her life, Marie Bonaparte had wanted to study medicine but her family had forbidden it. Yet in 1924, in the journal Bruxelles Médical, she published a survey of 243 women under the pseudonym A.E. Narjani: ‘Considérations sur les causes anatomiques de la frigidité chez la femme.’ The results showed that women whose clitoris and vaginal introitus were over 2.5 cm apart found it difficult to come from vaginal sex; these she labelled the ‘téléclitoridiennes’, women of the distant clitoris. She asked her doctor to refer her to Freud, writing to him in person before finally seeing him in person in Vienna for the first of several periods of intensive analysis in 1925. They remained close; it was allegedly to her that Freud directed his famous question, “My God, what does woman want?”, and when the Nazis occupied Vienna in 1938, Bonaparte was responsible for bringing Freud to London. She went on to become a psychoanalyst herself, in 1951 publishing De la sexualité de la femme.
Under Freud’s influence, Bonaparte regarded the clitoris as a ‘masculine’ part and saw powerful women like herself as ‘phallic’; she also speculated as to whether all women were bisexual, with the clitoris as their male part and the vagina the female part. While she embraced Freud’s insistence that mature, properly feminine, women have vaginal orgasms, she thought that it was possible for a woman to enjoy both vaginal and clitoral stimulation. For her clitoris to be properly stimulated during penis-in-vagina sex, however, it needed to be in a place where such sex could reach it. While Freud thought that psychotherapy rather than surgery was the answer to all her problems, she believed that this only applied to desire: for pleasure, surgery was the answer. So, in 1927, she went through the first of three operations by the surgeon Josef Halban, aimed at moving her clitoris nearer to the vaginal introitus by cutting the ligament which attaches it to the mons pubis.
Whatever we think about Bonaparte’s surgical explorations of her body, the timing is interesting. Clitoridectomy was an issue for the British colonial government in Africa, part of a wider debate between ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’. Nationalists could insist on the importance of maintaining customs, including this one, while reformists – supported by the Protestant missions – challenged the practice as barbaric. In Kenya, it was the nationalist ethnic group, the Kikuyu (Gikuyu), who carried out ‘cutting’ in order to “delineate right from wrong, purity from impurity, insiders from outsiders”, as the Kikuyu Central Association put it: they favoured a particularly dramatic version in which the clitoris was completely or partially removed along with the labia minora and sections of the labia majora. This was part of a fuller initiation performed just before the age of marriage, in which girls were not only circumcised but also taught their roles as women in society, making this “a degree for going from childhood to womanhood”. This contrasts with cultures which practise it today, where it is often carried out on under-fives: not even at primary school, let alone taking a degree in becoming a woman. In such cultures, it is seen as an occasion for celebration; Ellen Gruenbaum described going to her first female circumcision party in Sudan in the 1970s.
It was in the late 1920s, when Bonaparte was undergoing surgery, that the Kikuyu practice was first described in the UK press. In 1935, at the invitation of her friend the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, Bonaparte paid for Jomo Kenyatta, then in political exile, to visit her in Paris. He shared with her a pamphlet he had written on clitoridectomy among his people; he believed clitoridectomy held together the nation. The issue for colonial governments confronting these practices was not one of female pleasure – that was rarely mentioned – but they did consider the possible effects of the surgery on conception, pregnancy and birth.
It may seem odd for someone who wants to explore women’s sexuality to have their own site of pleasure operated on. For Marie Bonaparte, this wasn’t an issue. Her work in countries where clitoridectomy was practised was never about condemning the operation; on the contrary, she saw it as a useful point of comparison with European women who were, in her view, frigid. In a reversal of the long-established Western myths of the enlarged clitorises of the women of Africa and the Arab world, she saw these parts of the world as having special sexual wisdom which more ‘civilised’ countries had lost, and she wondered if experiencing clitoridectomy had helped them become more focused on the potential of the vagina. As stated in 1934, her ideal would be the clitoris and vagina working in “harmonious collaboration” and, anticipating current feminist views that there are many other parts of the body which give pleasure, she also mentioned the importance to pleasure of caresses “of the whole body”.
So: history matters. For Marie Bonaparte, holding to an idealised version of how ‘primitive’ wisdom could transform the lives of the West. For Kenyan politicians glorifying dangerous surgeries as essential to their rejection of the West, and their identification of ‘insiders’. For those in Ghana who are promoting “family values” by wanting clitoridectomy on children. All of these are examples of how women’s bodies have been used to make statements on national identity.
Mistaking histories 
