The persistence of practices of ‘female circumcision’ and their encoded cultural undergirding raise critical issues of systemic injustice in the body politics cross-culturally.

This event will explore the following topics:

• What weaknesses have come to obstruct efforts to end female genital mutilation?
• How have governments’ mis/management of the pandemic exacerbated existing fault-lines of gender precarity?
• How has progress in challenging and abolishing FGM practices been vitiated by widely applied government policies and measures that embrace lockdowns of large parts of public government services, curfews, household quarantine and mandatory individual isolation?
• How has opposition among members of minority communities in western societies – when it comes to governments’ FGM policies, deeply felt subtexts of prejudice and popular scapegoating – been appropriated and instrumentalized to serve populist exclusionary aims that demonize entire marginalized cultures?
• What does the failure of enforcement of anti-FGM legislation uncover about political will, identity politics, the hierarchy of suffering and about inter-/national feminist ambivalences?

Keynote

Keynote by Leyla Hussein OBE

Panel

Mariya Taher, Ghada Khan, Julia Antonova, Habiba Al-Hinai and Chiara Cosentino

To register your place, please visit Eventbrite.