Genital Culture: Exploring the Cultural Importance of Genital Surgery in the West
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In “Feminism Versus Multiculturalism”, Leti Volpp argues that Western conceptions of third-world culture as uniquely oppressive to women work to conceal the ways that Western culture itself also promotes patriarchal and normative practices that can be dangerous and degrading to women. In this paper, I will take up this argument by demonstrating how Western discourse vilifies cultures that engage in female genital mutilation (FGM) without realizing how the Western practices of intersex surgery and cosmetic vaginal surgery are also culturally imbued practices that can be seen as forms of genital mutilation. The assumed importance of genital surgery for intersex infants as well as the rising popularity of cosmetic surgery for women’s genitals exemplify the importance placed on gender distinction though genital appearance in our culture. Genital surgeries such as these are tied to the idealized conception of the gender binary that exists in Western culture. Despite the reality that genitals, especially the vagina, vary widely in appearance (size, shape, colour), the belief that there are norms of genital appearance that need to be adhered to for females and males continues to be propagated within Western culture. Suzanne Kessler’s work on intersex surgeries and Virginia Braun’s work on the growing popularity of cosmetic genital surgeries both illustrate how these norms are acted upon through genital surgery. This paper will perform an in-depth examination of these trends to reveal the similarities between Western genital surgeries and FGM by exposing how Western cultural values also regulate the female body.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".