Only Skin Deep: Revising the Secular Narrative through Circumcision
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This chapter addresses the question why male circumcision (MC) has been narrated as a bodily practice in ways that are different from female circumcision. Employing the recent German case on circumcision as the gateway to a broader transnational discussion, it posits that MC has been constructed as part and parcel of contemporary dominant secular narratives found within the particular context of North America and Western Europe, where it is framed as an accepted form of religious freedom. MC can be understood as generally falling under one of two camps: therapeutic circumcision and non-therapeutic circumcision. The chapter draws a theoretical framework that looks at how secular narratives can influence the way religious freedom is constructed. In many of the reactions to the Cologne ruling, religious freedom is mobilized to question attempts to challenge MC. The chapter examines how arguments on secularism can reveal issues that are further than only skin deep. Keywords: Cologne ruling; female circumcision; German case; male circumcision (MC); religious freedom; secular narratives
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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 teacher head, 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".