THE ROUTLEDGE INTERNATIONAL HANDBOOK OF HARMFUL CULTURAL PRACTICES (HB 2023)

This handbook looks at cross-cultural work on harmful cultural practices considered gendered forms of abuse of women. These include female genital mutilation (FGM), virginity testing, hymenoplasty, and genital cosmetic surgery.
Bringing together comparative perspectives, intersectionality, and interdisciplinarity, it uses feminist methodology and mixed methods, with ethnography of central importance, to provide holistic, grounded theorizing within a framework of transformative research. Taking female genital mutilation, a topical, contested practice, and making it a heuristic reference for related procedures makes the case for global action based on understanding the complexity of harmful cultural practices that are contextually differentiated and experienced in intersectional ways. But because this phenomenon is enshrouded in matters of sensitivity and prejudice, narratives of suffering are muted and even suppressed, are dismissed as indigenous ritual, or become ammunition for racist organizing. Such conflicted and often opaque debates obstruct clear vision of the scale of both problem and solution.

Divided into six parts:

• Discourses and Epistemological Fault Lines
• FGM and Related Patriarchal Inscriptions
• Gender and Genitalia
• Female Bodies and Body Politics: Economics, Law, Medicine, Public Health, and Human Rights
• Placing Engagement, Innovation, Impact, Care
• Words and Texts to Shatter Silence

Comprised of 24 newly written chapters from experts around the world, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of nursing, social work, and allied health more broadly, as well as sociology, gender studies, and postcolonial studies.

Maria Jaschok is Senior Research Associate of Contemporary China Studies in the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies. Professor Jaschok’s research interests are in the areas of religion, gender, and agency; gendered constructions of memory; feminist aural ethnography; and marginality and identity. Since 1994, her research in central China has become increasingly focused on the historical intersections of Islam, gender, and spatial identity.

U. H. Ruhina Jesmin, PhD, Professor, English Discipline, Khulna University, Bangladesh, has been teaching literature since 2012. She publishes research articles and book reviews in indexed journals, including the Web of Science and Scopus, among others, and reviews journal articles for Taylor & Francis. Her research mostly focuses on African American literature, Alice Walker’s novels, FGM in memoir and fiction, and intersections of race, gender, and sexuality studies.

Tobe Levin von Gleichen, PhD, has been, since 1977, an international scholar and activist against female genital mutilation. She was a visiting research fellow with IGS, Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford, 2014–2016. Since 2006, she has been an associate of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Harvard University. In 2009, she launched UnCUT/VOICES Press specializing in books on FGM, and cofounded FORWARD (in Germany) in 1998.

Comfort Momoh, MBE, is FGM Consultant/Public Health Specialist with extensive experience of holistic, women-centered care and 35 years’ experience working for the National Health Service (NHS). Dr Momoh researches women’s health and campaigns with vehemence against domestic violence, for women’s and children’s rights, and to eradicate FGM. In 2008, she was honored for her expertise and dedication by HRH Queen Elizabeth II, who made her a Member of the British Empire (MBE), and by Middlesex University, who awarded her an honorary doctorate.