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How pro-orgasm intentions in anti-FGM campaigns backfire
Malmö högskola, Faculty of Health and Society (HS).ORCID iD: 0000-0002-7625-5873
2008 (English)Conference paper, Oral presentation with published abstract (Other academic)
Abstract [en]

Somali young women in Sweden, some of them circumcised, have to deal with national campaigns condemning ‘female genital mutilation’ and the public message that they are ‘sexually mutilated’ and deprived of their ability to enjoy sex and experience orgasm. Some of these young women arrived in Sweden already circumcised and the public view of how FGC has had a devastating effect on their sexuality is their only source of information. Thus, these young Swedish Somali women have to make their sexual débuts in lack of knowledge about the potential of their own sexuality. A previous study among Eritreans and Ethiopians in Sweden showed that many women are firmly convinced that female circumcision – generally clitoridectomy – had ruined their possibilities to have a truly enjoyable sexual life, despite the fact that they reported being orgasmic and had prior to migration classified their sexual life as ‘normal’. These feelings of loss and distress seemed to stem from anti-FGM-campaigns in Sweden. Here I want to discuss the implications of unfounded allegations of deprived sexual abilities used in the moral crusade to abolish FGM, especially in the light of recent research showing that orgasmic pleasure and satisfaction are related more to cognitive and affective than sensory aspects.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2008.
Keywords [en]
FGC, female circumcision, orgasm, politics
National Category
Social Sciences
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:mau:diva-10542Local ID: 9256OAI: oai:DiVA.org:mau-10542DiVA, id: diva2:1407585
Conference
American Anthropological Association, San Fransisco CA (2008)
Available from: 2020-02-29 Created: 2020-02-29 Last updated: 2022-06-27Bibliographically approved

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Johnsdotter, Sara

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  • ieee
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  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
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  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf