Symbolic narratives of rites of passage: unsuspending female circumcision

This paper examines how narrativizations of female circumcision are underwritten by the colonial impetus for regulation and eradication beholden to a disposition that demands the legibility of African femininity. I think with monstrosity as an analytic that haunts discourses of female circumcision through an examination of Finnish photojournalist Meeri Koutaniemi, whose depictions of female circumcision among the Maasai people in Narok, Kenya, repeat a familiar vision in which African corporeality collapses the subject/object status. In light of this, I consider female circumcision as a rite of passage that evades straightforward signification with mutilation and gendered oppression.