Fantasies of 'female genital mutilation' : flesh, law and freedom through psychoanalysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1996 the Crimes (Female Genital Mutilation) Act was passed in Victoria, Australia. The consultation with migrant communities, affected by the practices, was almost non-existent. The methods of the consultation, the implementation of the legislation and the use of the term "female genital mutilation" were objected to by the migrant communities. This objection and implementation mirrored similar legislative initiatives and similar methods of implementation in the United States, Canada, Scotland, England and Egypt. This thesis is an analysis of the speech on, and against, female genital mutilation. The analysis explores the texture of this speech, understood as a particular and invested arrangement of fantasy. This fantasy concerns the relation between the liberal subject and the sovereign. The relation is parsed in terms of the economic, the psychoanalytic and the political. These are the three idioms through which fantasies, of female genital mutilation emerge in contemporary times as a fantasy of flesh cut and the possibility of free speech. The thesis has four parts. In the first part it explores fantasies of subjectivity understood as the constitution of a mutilated woman against a fantasy of a non-mutilated liberal subject (as a postcolonial concern). The context for the exploration is firstly the emergence of the above mentioned Crimes (Female Genital Mutilation) Act 1996, and secondly its relations to the formation of the modern liberal subject (Rousseau, Hobbes, Schmitt and Freud). In Part B the thesis explores economies of flesh. First and foremost the economy is staged as a relation between the subject and the sovereign. This relation is figured as a tension between a fantasy of circumcision and a fantasy of mutilation. The psychoanalytic theories of Lacan and the political theories of Agamben are called to aid this exploration. In Part C the thesis discusses the politics of freedom articulated in sovereign democratic politics. Here the thesis moves from its focus on female genital mutilation legislation and places it in the contemporary politics of the `war on terror', evocations of national community and the problematics of a cultural pluralism. These are understood in terms of the differential orientations to loss (of freedom and speech)'; known as melancholia, psychosis and mourning. Mourning is the concern of Part D. In doing so the thesis returns to the speech on and against female genital mutilation and their invocations of human rights. The limits is figured in this part by reference to the protest of an African woman who says `I am not mutilated.' The figure of this woman returns us to the dialectic of flesh and speech that this thesis has argued embodies western fantasies of female genital mutilation. What is lost, but returns to haunt the liberal subject, imagining itself sovereign, is the possibility of freedom and an authorised loss of speech, in a democratic politics worthy of the name.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.038 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".