Pedwell, Carolyn - Weaving Relational Webs

8/18/2019 Pedwell, Carolyn - Weaving Relational Webs

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Weaving relational webs

Theorizing cultural difference and embodied practice TF

Carolyn Pedwell Gender Institute, London School of Economics

Feminist Theory Copyright 2008 ©SAGE Publications

(Los Angeles, London,New Delhi, and

Singapore)vol. 9(1): 87–107.

1464–7001DOI: 10.1177/1464700107086365

http://fty.sagepub.com

Abstract Through illustrating the similarities between embodiedpractices rooted in different cultural contexts (such as ‘African’ femalegenital cutting and ‘Western’ cosmetic surgery), feminist theorists seekto reveal the instability of essentialist binaries which distinguishvarious groups as culturally, ethnically and morally ‘different’. Theyalso aim to query how the term ‘culture’ is employed differentially onthe basis of embodied axes such as race and nation. However, inemphasizing overarching commonalities between practices, feministcross-cultural comparisons risk collapsing into economies of samenessthat elide the complex relations of power through which such practices

have been constituted. They can also fix the imagined subjects of thesepractices in troubling ways. Using the ubiquitous ‘African’ femalegenital cutting and ‘Western’ cosmetic surgery binary as an example,this article explores the difference it might make to address culturallyessentialist constructions of embodied practice with a focus onrelationality rather than commonality. As a means to reorient feministcross-cultural approaches which depend on assertions of similarity orsameness, it argues for the theoretical and pedagogical utility of thinking through relational webs.

keywords cosmetic surgery, cross-cultural comparison, cultural essentialism, female genital cutting, relationality

Highlighting commonalities between gendered practices rooted in diver-gent cultural and geopolitical contexts has become increasingly prevalentwithin feminist literatures. For example, linking contemporary Africanpractices of female genital cutting (FGC)1 and 19th-century Americanclitoridectomies, Isabelle Gunning argues that ‘the practice of reconstruct-

ing female genitalia through surgery is a universal one that crosses cultural boundaries’ (1991: 211, emphasis added). Similarly, from Mervat Nasser’sperspective, both Muslim veiling and anorexia respond to ‘conflictingcultural messages and contradictory cultural expectations’ experienced bywomen globally (1999: 407). Sheila Jeffreys argues, moreover, that beautypractices prevalent in the West such as make-up, dieting and cosmetic

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surgery should be understood as ‘harmful cultural practices’ comparableto procedures typically thought of as non-Western, such as FGC and veiling(2005).2 While intended to serve different political agendas, these cross-cultural linkings are all articulated through a concern to counter culturalessentialism – the production of culture-specific generalizations that

depend on totalizing categories such as ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’, ‘Firstworld’ and ‘Third world’ or ‘the West’ and ‘the Muslim world’ (Narayan,1998). From the pervasive ‘us/them’ rhetoric employed to ‘legitimize’ the‘War on Terror’, to the ubiquitous media representations of ‘the veil’ as asign of Muslim women’s ‘backwardness, subordination, and oppression’(El Guindi, 1999: 3), culturally essentialist discourse is widespread withinthe contemporary socio-politico sphere. Cultural essentialism has alsopervaded feminist theory and practice (Narayan, 1997, 1998; Honig, 1999;Volpp, 2000; Phillips, 2007).

Through illustrating the ways in which particular gendered practicesinvolve similar bodily procedures, motivations and rationales, thesefeminist cross-cultural comparisons seek to reveal the constructedness andinstability of the essentialist and imperializing self/other binaries whichdistinguish various groups as culturally, ethnically and morally ‘differ-ent’.3 They also aim to encourage critical thinking about the geopoliticalrelations of power through which such practices are represented and(re)produced and query how the term ‘culture’ is employed differentiallyon the basis of embodied axes such as race and nation. There are, however,

several potentially problematic effects associated with constructinggendered embodied practices as ‘similar’ or ‘equivalent’. In emphasizingoverarching commonalities between practices, cross-cultural comparisonsrisk collapsing into economies of sameness that elide the complex relationsof power through which such practices have been constituted. It is alsoclear that gendered claims to cross-cultural ‘sameness’ can easily slip intoessentialist articulations of cultural, ethnic or racial ‘difference’. Further-more, in fetishizing the imagined subjects of particular embodied practicesas objects, these texts can cover over (rather than address) the intersec-tional processes and relations of power and antagonism through whichsuch practices and figures have been (re)constituted. However, as I haveconsidered these problems in depth elsewhere (Pedwell, 2007, forthcom-ing), the majority of the article concentrates on developing a relational approach to theorizing the links between embodied practices rooted indifferent cultural contexts. Using the example of the ubiquitous ‘African’FGC and ‘Western’ cosmetic surgery binary4 to trace some of the social andpolitical processes through which such practices have been (re)producedin and through one another , I seek to illustrate the difference it might maketo address culturally essentialist constructions of embodied practice with

a focus on relationality rather than commonality. As a means to reorientfeminist cross-cultural approaches that depend on assertions of similarityor sameness, I argue for the theoretical and pedagogical utility of thinkingthrough relational webs.

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Cross-cultural comparisons and critiques

The cross-cultural comparison most commonly made by feminist theoristsin the service of anti-cultural essentialism is that between ‘African’ femalegenital cutting (FGC) and ‘Western’ body modification practices. For

example, Gunning (1991) argues that although FGC has been represented by Western commentators as a ‘barbaric’ and ‘patriarchal’ cultural practiceof ‘the other’, female circumcision is ‘part of our own history’ (p. 211).Circumcisions performed on American and English women as a ‘cure’ formental illness in the 19th century, she suggests, were explained by ‘thesame kind of rationales’ as African practices of FGC are today, such as a

belief in their health benefits (pp. 203, 218). These practices should thus be seen not as essentially different but rather as cultural ‘analogues’(p. 205). Similarly, Simone Weil Davis (2002) suggests that many of thereasons African women give for undergoing FGC are analogous to thosearticulated by Western women who undergo cosmetic labiaplasty, includ-ing ‘beautification, transcendence of shame and desire to conform’ (p. 23).Euro-American and African genital reshaping procedures should therefore

be conceptualized on a ‘continuum’, rather than measured by ‘differentyardsticks’ (p. 21).5 Another salient comparison made is between Muslimveiling and anorexia (and/or other practices understood to be linked to theWestern beauty system) (Wolf, 1990). Nasser (1999) argues, for instance,that while veiling may appear ‘completely different, if not alien to theanorexic position’, it is necessary to examine their commonalities as a

means ‘to go beyond the traditional Orientalist definition and perceptionof the veil and to depart from the Western static vision of women of theOrient’ (p. 408). Both embodied practices function as forms of problem-solving which, in the absence of real power or control, help women copewith the competing demands of ambitious professional goals and pressureto maintain a traditional female identity.6 In this vein, Jeffreys (2005)argues that, although veiling and make-up are often seen as opposites, theyare in fact analogous in that both mark women as subordinate, revealingtheir ‘lack of entitlement’ in patriarchal cultures (p. 38).7

These comparative cross-cultural approaches clearly differ in a numberof ways, as do the social locations, theoretical perspectives and politicalagendas of the feminist theorists who make them. For example, Jeffreysworks from a radical feminist position to link FGC, veiling, and ‘Western’

beauty practices through a notion of common gendered oppression. Forher, the label of ‘harmful cultural practices’ usefully emphasizes ‘thatculture can enforce and that women and girls are not free agents able topick up and choose’ (2005: 34). By contrast, Weil Davis applies a criticalfeminist framework to resist representing women as ‘undifferentiated

victims’ (2002: 27). She is interested in investigating the complex issues of ‘agency’ and ‘consent’ surrounding ‘African’ FGC practices and ‘Western’ body modifications. Yet, without wanting to flatten these differences, itseems significant that these theorists all frame their cross-cultural compari-sons as a means to interrogate and disrupt cultural essentialism. Oneprimary way in which cultural essentialism is promoted is through the

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construction of binary articulations of ‘difference’. As many feminist andpostcolonial theorists have recognized, culturally essentialist (and indeedany) binaries always imply a relation of power. Rather than indicating an‘A or B’ relationship, binaries more specifically designate a hierarchical ‘Aor not-A’ association. The logic and effect of culture-based binary struc-

tures is to overvalue one pole (usually ‘the West’) while disparaging theother (usually the ‘non-West’). Such dualisms consistently function toexaggerate differences between groups while effacing differences withinand to emphasize separation and opposition while suppressing similarityand overlap. Furthermore, through constructing various cultural groupsand practices as fundamentally and hierarchically distinct, culturallyessentialist discourses often reify ethnocentric and racialized notions of cultural difference (Mohanty, 1991; Brah, 1996; Narayan, 1997, 1998;Volpp, 2000).

Drawing cross-cultural parallels between gendered practices which havegenerally not been associated, or have been routinely posed as opposi-tional, can be an important technique to interrogate essentialist deploy-ments of cultural difference, race and nation. Utilized alongside carefulanalysis that illustrates the heterogeneity and fluidity in practices withinall cultural groups, such comparisons can trouble rigid, culturally imperi-alist dualisms, which can be shown to be human constructs, developed anddeployed for political ends (Narayan, 1998). More specifically, theseapproaches can disrupt the widespread perception that practices of FGC

are fundamentally different from other body altering procedures andsituate the potential health risks associated with FGC in the context of similar risks linked to other body modifications (Sheldon and Wilkinson,1998; Njambi, 2004). Comparative constructions of veiling and anorexiaand/or ‘Western’ fashion and beauty practices can highlight the ways inwhich women’s and girls’ bodies regularly function across cultural contexts as carriers for wider political, cultural, economic and nationalis-tic imperatives and the surfaces on to which political positions are etched(McClintock, 1995; Narayan, 1998). Moreover, analysis of the genderedoppression involved in beauty practices prevalent in Western industrialcontexts interrogates simplistic (and ethnocentric) notions of personalchoice and individual agency and emphasizes that ‘the personal is politi-cal’. Careful, theoretically well-informed, cross-cultural feminist work canalso play an important role in constructing bases for inter-cultural or trans-national political alliances and activism. Alexander and Mohanty (1997)argue, for instance, that cross-cultural feminist endeavours can produce ashared sense of ‘engagement based on empathy and on a vision of justicefor everyone’ (p. xlii). Theorizing links between differently locatedembodied practices can therefore be an important feminist technique

grounding political interventions at both local and transnational levels.

Thinking relationally

When considering how to address culturally essentialist constructions of embodied practice, what difference would it make to focus on relationality





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rather than commonality? In this section, I develop the contours of arelational approach which traces the ways in which particular culturalpractices have been constructed historically in and through one another.Employing the ubiquitous (Euro-American) binary of ‘African’ femalegenital cutting and ‘Western’ cosmetic surgery as an example, my approach

focuses on teasing out the constitutive connections (rather than common-alities) that link such practices and their imagined subjects. Unlikecommonality, the concept of connection does not imply the ‘sameness’ or‘equivalence’ of particular practices, subjectivities or experiences but,rather, points to the ways in which such discursive-material entities areentangled and interdependent. As such, a relational approach may enabletheorizing of social, historical and cultural links along with disjunctureswithout reifying essential distinctions or disavowing the possibility of common ground. It may also provide feminist thinkers with a valuable

pedagogical tool for interrogating and mutually engaging with some of theenduring social investments, assumptions and relations of power thatunderscore salient essentialist constructions of gendered and racializedcultural difference.

One starting point from which to launch a relational analysis is toidentify a particularly salient culturally essentialist binary of embodiedpractices, the imagined subjects it constructs and the key assumptions itrelies on and reproduces. It is important to underscore that I use the term‘imagined subjects’ to refer to particular categories of representation, which

must be distinguished from ‘embodied, situated, historical subjects withvarying and diverse personal or collective biographies and social orienta-tions’ (Brah, 1996: 131). In the case of the FGC/cosmetic surgery binary,the two key (racialized) imagined subjects it constitutes and contrasts arethe ‘victim of female genital mutilation’ and ‘cosmetic surgery consumer’.While the former is invariably coded as ‘black’ and ‘African’, the latter is(almost) always coded as ‘white’ and ‘Western’. These codings of race andgeopolitical locale are then attached problematically to ideas about cultureand agency. While the ‘victim of female genital mutilation’ is assumed to

be oppressed by her culture, the ‘cosmetic surgery consumer’ is seen eitherto be operating outside the realm of culture or actively negotiating flexiblecultural norms.

At this point, some feminist advocates of commonality-based cross-cultural approaches have responded by replacing this essentialist binarywith overarching constructions of gendered similarity. In seeking to pursuea relational approach, however, I want to resist the temptation to substi-tute problematic ‘difference’ with problematic ‘sameness’ and insteadcontinue to tease out and interrogate each point of assumed (racializedcultural) difference the binary articulates. We might, for example, investi-

gate the historical construction of ‘black’ and ‘white’ as morally andaesthetically invested ‘opposites’. We could examine how, through suchracialized constructions, particular notions of gender, sexuality and nationhave been mobilized to mark black African female bodies as abnormal,grotesque, diseased, libidinous and overly sexualized against constructionsof white, Western femininity as ideal, classical, pure, uncontaminated,





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virtuous and chaste (Carby, 1987; Roberts, 1994; Hall, 1995; Ahmed, 2002;Morgan, 2005; Holliday and Sanchez Taylor, 2006). We might then inves-tigate how such divergent constructions of ‘black African’ and ‘whiteWestern’ femininity and sexuality were both reified and disrupted by colo-nialist discourses which established African female genital cutting as a

‘backward’, ‘patriarchal’ cultural practice requiring eradication: somescientific documents and travel logs depicted African women’s ‘overdevel-oped genitalia’ and ‘heightened sexual instincts’ (in comparison withwhite, European women’s) as a legitimate ‘rationale’ for FGC (Gollaher,2000),8 thus reifying constructions of black African women’s ‘abnormal’sexuality and/or their over-sexualized ‘nature’. Other discourses, however,such as those produced by missionaries and colonial officials, constructedAfrican women as the downtrodden and de-sexualized victims of barbarictraditional practices which had to be put to an end, ideally through native

Africans’ exposure to the more ‘modern’, ‘enlightened’ and ‘humane’ waysof their colonizers (Boyle, 2002; Njambi, 2004).

We could, furthermore, consider how, while critical in drawing inter-national attention to FGC, Western feminist efforts to eradicate such prac-tices in the 1970s and 1980s extended colonial representations of Africanwomen as oppressed ‘victims’ (see, for example, Daly, 1978; Hosken, 1981).They also galvanized a significant shift from images of African women asstereotypically over-sexualized to constructions of African women asessentially de-sexualized.9 In this context, images of ‘African women’ as

helpless, mutilated and ‘robbed of their sexuality’ were, in part, necessaryto reciprocally constitute Western feminists as their potential saviours. Butindigenous and diasporic African, Middle Eastern and Asian women’scampaigns against practices of FGC have been long-standing within anumber of different national and cultural contexts.10 Often more attunedto the local specificities of particular forms of FGC, such discourses have,in many cases, produced less homogenizing and ethnocentric depictionsof FGC and the communities which practice such procedures, includingmore complex representations of women’s sexuality (see, for example,Toubia, 1988; Obiora, 2000). These initiatives, however, have not obtainedanywhere near the level of financial and institutional support, nor themedia airtime, that Western-based programmes have (Boyle, 2002). Assuch, their potentially more nuanced and contextualized portrayals havenot infiltrated public consciousness (in the West) to the same degree as the‘attention-grabbing horror stories’ produced by Western media and ‘gener-alised theories of patriarchal domination’ offered by early (and some later)feminist critics (Meyers, 2000: 471).11

Where African and Arab women’s engagements with FGC may haveinformed the FGC/cosmetic surgery binary more significantly is in reinforc-

ing an image of the ‘consumerist Western woman’ as a highly sexualizedsubject. In an article comparing the health risks facing Sudanese womenwith those encountered by Western women, for instance, Nahid Toubia(1988) portrays women in the capitalist and ‘consumerist’ West asconstantly being made to fill the role of ‘seductress’ and to ‘see themselvesas objects of pleasure’ (p. 99). The contemporary Euro-American





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FGC/cosmetic surgery binary now depicts the African ‘victim of femalegenital mutilation’ as wholly unsexualized against constructions of theWestern ‘cosmetic surgery consumer’ as actively choosing to increase hersexual desirability and pleasure through procedures such as labiaplasty or

breast augmentation. However, traces of the historic sexualization and

fetishization of black African female bodies remain and are revealedthrough Westerners’ often voyeuristic and prurient interest in images of circumcised girls and women (Mungai in Weil Davis, 2002: 19).12

Rather than folding these binary (A and not-A) figures in on one another,a relational approach allows us to theorize the two imagined subjects asconceptually and materially intertwined. Through tracing the ways inwhich the ‘cosmetic surgery consumer’ and the ‘victim of female genitalmutilation’ have been constructed in and through one another withinspecific contexts and relations of power, we can illustrate how each is

implicated with and dependent on the other for meaning. From thisrelational perspective it is not possible to separate the two figures throughthe imposition of rigid boundaries (as culturally essentialist constructionsdo) or to collapse one into the other (as commonality-based comparisonsdo) because they remain constitutively intermeshed. This first stage of relational tracing (while crucial) is not, however, a sufficient end point.13

Clearly, the ‘cosmetic surgery consumer’ and the ‘victim of female genitalmutilation’ are contingent and cannot be seen as insulated from all otherembodied constructions and historical and cultural traces. They are not

related only to each other and constructed exclusively through each other but, rather, are historically, subjectively and materially linked to a host of other embodied ‘selves’ and ‘others’ (Ahmed, 2000). As such, we needmeans of representing and theorizing relationality as complex andmultiple. If we widen our field of analysis and imagine the binary inquestion as existing within a relational web of other binary relations, wecan think about the relationships between particular embodied practicesand their imagined subjects from a starting point of multiplicity.14 AsMorwenna Griffiths points out, webs are ‘intricate, involved, interlaced,with each part entangled with the rest and dependent on it’ (Griffiths, 1995:2). Within a relational web, the ‘victim of female genital mutilation’ andthe ‘cosmetic surgery consumer’ (or ‘the anorexic’ and ‘the veiled woman’etc.) would be situated as simultaneously linked to numerous otherimagined subjects. Tracing some of the multiple links structuring such aweb may enable us to theorize relationality beyond the binary self/otherdialectic, yet without effacing the relations of power that particular

binaries produce and secure or disavowing the power of such binaries toendure.

Weaving relational webs

Despite the ways in which a relational web approach departs from thecommonality-based comparisons I have critiqued, it should not be seen ascompletely divorced from these, but rather as a partial extension and re-orientation of some of their more effective and productive elements. For





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example, tracing a relational web may include theorizing culturalanalogues or similarities between practices or figures within particularcontexts. The point is, however, that the establishment of such analoguesdoes not represent the end point of the web approach, but rather one inte-grated component of a larger process. Furthermore, while I use the verbs

‘trace’ and ‘weave’ to describe the process of fleshing out relational webs,my language should not be taken to imply that we are weaving webs outof thin air or that we can ever stand fully outside the webs that we create.Deciding to trace the links between any particular pair or group of figuresor practices depends on a hunch or assumption that such practices aresomehow related in the first place. Indeed, as theorists we are, through theprocess of web weaving, reconstructing (from our own particular locationsand perspectives) networks which have already been woven throughmultilayered histories of discursive-material practice and encounter

(Ahmed, 2000). Yet we are also always inside these webs, reproducing andre-directing their stands through our actions and interactions with others.‘The webs we weave are contingent and changing, and “each web affectsthe next one”’ (Griffiths, 1995: 2).

If we take the relational unit, in which ‘A’ is the ‘cosmetic surgeryconsumer’ and ‘not-A’ is the ‘victim of female genital mutilation’, whathappens if we think about other salient imagined figures that might be rela-tionally linked to each of our original ‘A’ and ‘not-A’ figures? Suppose thatwe draw a relational link joining the ‘victim of female genital mutilation’

to, for instance, the figure of the ‘uncircumcised African woman’. Howdoes adding the imagined ‘uncircumcised African woman’ to the existingrelational unit alter our relational web? In order to address this question,we need to begin tracing the constitutive connections linking the ‘victimof female genital mutilation’ and ‘the uncircumcised African woman’ inmuch the same way that we interrogated the mutual constitution of the‘victim of female genital mutilation’ and ‘the cosmetic surgery consumer’.We might acknowledge, as several feminist theorists who employ cross-cultural approaches have, that in some communities which practise FGC,the genital cutting or circumcision ritual is understood as a mark of virtue,cleanliness and/or proper femininity (Gunning, 1991; Abusharaf, 2001;Weil Davis, 2002). As Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf points out, ‘the Arabicterm for circumcision, tahara, also means purification’ (2001: 116). Assuch, negative attitudes may be exhibited towards uncircumcised girls andwomen in various African and Arab contexts. In her study of a circumcis-ing community in Douroshab township in Sudan, for example, Abusharaf shows how many of the women she interviews understand FGC as a‘virtuous act’ which morally, aesthetically and ethnically delineates thosewho have undergone the procedure from those who have not. From this

perspective, we can begin to see how posing the ‘uncircumcised Africanwoman’ in relation to the ‘victim of female genital mutilation’ alters thepresumed character of the latter. In this particular relation, the ‘victim of female genital mutilation’ is no longer seen primarily as a victim of patri-archal ideologies or barbaric cultural rituals, but rather becomes a ‘virtuouscircumcised African woman’ who is defined hierarchically against ‘the





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uncircumcised African woman’. Whereas in relation to the ‘cosmeticsurgery consumer’, the ‘victim of female genital mutilation’ was ‘other’ (the‘not-A’ term), in her new position as ‘virtuous circumcised African woman’she becomes the ‘self’ (the ‘A’ term). One’s viewing position within therelational web at this point is now crucial. In the context of this new three-

point linking, the status of the ‘victim of female genital mutilation/virtuouscircumcised African woman’ changes in relation to whether one is inter-preting the relationship from the perspective point of the cosmetic surgeryconsumer or from that of the uncircumcised African woman. As such, the‘victim of female genital mutilation/virtuous circumcised African woman’cannot be interpreted as either self or other, A or not-A. She is in fact bothand/or neither. Consequently, neither the original relation nor the new onecan be understood solely in terms of a binary model. They must instead beseen as fluid links within a web of multiple relationalities.

As part of the process of tracing the relational construction of this newlink between the ‘virtuous circumcised African woman’ and the ‘uncir-cumcised African woman’, we need to pay careful attention to the ways inwhich particular ideas about gender and sexuality have been (re)producedvia the construction of notions of virtue, cleanliness and ‘proper’ feminin-ity. We therefore need to ask, through which gendered social, culturaland/or religious processes has FGC been constructed as ‘virtuous’ withinparticular circumcising communities? How do discourses that portray FGCas cleansing or purifying in particular contexts overlap or intersect with

(and/or differ from) those concerning male circumcision in ways that maydisrupt feminist linkings of FGC and cosmetic surgery under the banner of universal patriarchy (Gollaher, 2000; Njambi, 2004)? Furthermore, howmight such discourses and processes be linked not only to genderedrelations of power but also to histories of slavery and/or to Western colo-nialism and concomitant nationalist movements of opposition to colonialrule, in which gender and sexuality have been produced in and throughrace, ethnicity and nation? For example, Gerry Mackie (1996) has outlineda strong connection between the enslavement of Sudanic people by Egyp-tians in the 15th century and the adoption of FGC in Sudan and Egypt.Documentation from this period suggests that female slaves were morelucrative in the Islamic slave trade if they were infibulated in a way thatmade them unable to conceive (Mackie, 1996, see also Boyle, 2002). Herewe see how a particular form of FGC in one region may have originatedand spread through violent embodied encounters in which race, religionand cultural difference intersected with and co-constituted gender andsexuality.

But how is the nature of the relational web changed again if we addanother imagined figure, for example, ‘the cosmetic surgery rebel’, this time

linked to ‘the cosmetic surgery consumer’? While cosmetic surgery has been interpreted traditionally by feminist commentators as an ‘oppressivetechnology’ employed to ‘colonize’ women’s bodies (Negrin, 2002: 21),some theorists have advocated the use of cosmetic surgery for ‘subversive’feminist purposes. Kathryn Pauly Morgan argues, for example, that‘healthy women who have a feminist understanding of cosmetic surgery





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are in a situation to deploy cosmetic surgery in the name of its feministpotential for parody and protest’ (2003 [1991]: 179). She suggests thatwomen ‘might constitute themselves as culturally liberated subjectsthrough public participation in Ms. Ugly Canada/America/Universe/Cosmos pageants and use the technology of cosmetic surgery to do so’

(p. 179, original emphasis). The French performance artist Orlan hasenacted such radical experiments with cosmetic procedures. Her performa-tive project, ‘The Ultimate Masterpiece: The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan’,initiated in 1991, involved a series of televised surgical procedures‘designed to transform her face in ways that destabiliz[e] male definednotions of idealized female beauty’ (Negrin, 2002: 31). Through thisconsciously political endeavour, she ‘seeks to disturb the notion of theperfected, the fixed and the standardized, producing a result which is atodds with conventional ideals of beauty’ (p. 32). Thus, in contrast to the

constructed figure of the ‘cosmetic surgery consumer’ who actively pursuescosmetic surgery as a means to achieve cultural ideals of feminine beautyand sexual desirability, the imagined ‘cosmetic surgery rebel’ undergoessuch procedures precisely to resist and destabilize such ideals.

As with the previous example, the addition of this new relational strandto the web will function to transform the assumed character of the‘cosmetic surgery consumer’. Through her relational linking with the‘cosmetic surgery rebel’, the ‘cosmetic surgery consumer’ may now beinterpreted, rather differently, as the ‘cosmetic surgery victim’. When

connected in binary relation to the oppressed and downtrodden ‘victim of female genital mutilation’, the ‘cosmetic surgery consumer’ could beconstituted as liberated and self-determining, making her own ‘free’ choiceto engage in cosmetic procedures. However, once linked to ‘the cosmeticsurgery rebel’, the consumer’s choices may no longer be seen as free, butinstead as reductively shaped by dominant cultural imperatives. Ratherthan being defined as autonomous and empowered, ‘the cosmetic surgeryvictim’ becomes the interpellated object of patriarchal, consumerist ideol-ogies, the woman persuaded by ‘the beauty myth’ (Wolf, 1990), or even theobsessive ‘scalpel slave’ (Balsamo, 1996: 70). Thus, through the construc-tion of the ‘cosmetic surgery rebel’ as subversive, the ‘cosmetic surgeryvictim’ is (re)constituted as conformist.

It is important to interrogate the intersectional, relational processesthrough which this subversive/conformist binary is produced and secured.The ‘cosmetic surgery rebel’ and the ‘cosmetic surgery victim’ can be posedas oppositional through a largely gendered narrative (through her parodicperformance of femininity, the ‘rebel’ actively resists oppressive patri-archal ideals of beauty, whilst the ‘victim’ more passively embraces andembodies such norms). We need to explore, however, how this gendered

account is produced through various raced, classed and sexualizedrelations of power. Is the ‘rebel’s’ capacity for subversion via surgicalmeasures secured precisely through her class and race privileges? As othercritical theorists have argued, performative or parodic experimentationwith cosmetic surgery is not a strategy that is equally available to allsubjects (Bordo, 1993; Skeggs, 1997; Negrin, 2002). Llewellyn Negrin





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points out, for example, that ‘it is only those who already have a securesense of their own identity who can afford to entertain the possibilities of its dissolution’ (2002: 38). Drawing on Susan Bordo’s analysis (1993), sheargues that radical cosmetic surgery ‘is a rather “aristocratic” form of revolt, which can only be engaged in by those who have the freedom from

economic need to be able to contemplate and realize different forms of embodiment’ (Negrin, 2002: 39). Christian Klesse suggests furthermorethat, in a Western context, ‘racialized bodies’ cannot be ‘reconstituted andmade into a project’ as easily as other bodies as ‘there is always a problemof visibility and passing in which the incorporated histories of bodiesweighs down the potential for action’ (2000: 21). It has been argued that,in the industrialized West, ethnic or racial minorities ‘generally have lessdiscursive space than their white counterparts for justifying their decisionsto have cosmetic surgery’ (Davis, 2003: 81). As Kathy Davis suggests, while

surgery (perceived as being undertaken) to alter ‘racial or ethnic features’elicits ‘surprise and disapproval’, procedures to enhance femininity ‘mayseem so ordinary that they have become – more or less – acceptable’ (2003:75). Moreover, ‘mindful of keloid formation and hyperpigmented scarring’,many cosmetic surgeons, ‘routinely reject black patients’ (Vaugn cited inBalsamo, 1996: 61). To what extent, then, does the inclusion of the ‘ethnicminority cosmetic surgery patient’ bring into relief the assumptions of whiteness through which both the ‘cosmetic surgery rebel’ and the‘cosmetic surgery consumer’ are constituted?

Importantly, in order to gain a better understanding of how culturallyessentialist constructions of gendered practice operate in particularcontexts, the process of web weaving also needs to probe those messiercontradictions and complexities of agency and subjectivity that each

binary must elide to retain its contingent A/not-A status. Saba Mahmoodargues that an investment in the category of ‘resistance’ within feministand poststructuralist theory often imposes ‘a teleology of progressivepolitics on the analytics of power’ which makes it difficult to identify andconceptualize forms of agency ‘that are not necessarily encapsulated by thenarrative of subversion and reinscription of norms’ (2005: 9; see alsoMcNay, 2003). We might ask what assumptions about agency the ‘cosmeticsurgery rebel’/‘cosmetic surgery victim’ binary reifies through its equationof agency with the subversion of gendered norms, and in turn whatcomplexities of subjectivity and embodied practices it covers over. Wemight consider, for instance, how claims to beauty that reproduce particu-lar gendered norms have simultaneously provided a basis for anti-racist political agency in particular contexts. Maxine Leeds Craig suggests that,in the context of a late 19th-century racist and classist aesthetics whichportrayed black and working-class female bodies as grotesque, ugly and

licentious against constructions of white, middle- and upper-class female bodies as classical, beautiful and virtuous, black middle-class women inEurope and North America ‘proclaimed the beauty of black women in waysthat simultaneously proclaimed their virtue’ (2006: 170). Claiminggendered norms of beauty was a risky strategy for black women, ‘who aswomen and blacks were already seen primarily as bodies’, yet also a





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necessary one: ‘black women had to claim beauty or . . . be annihilated’(p. 174; see also Hill Collins, 2004). Making links between these histori-cally sedimented discourses of beauty and contemporary practices of cosmetic surgery, Ruth Holliday and Jacqueline Sanchez Taylor (2006)argue that women who employ surgical measures to ‘adopt the markers of

hypersexualization associated with classed and racialized bodies (such as buttock implants or collagen lips)’ must be seen not as passive ‘victims’, but rather as ‘active and desiring (not just desirable)’ (p. 191). Feministdepictions of ‘women as “victims” of the beauty industry and motivated

by the pain of being outside normative (classed and raced) ideals of beautyeffectively erase their subjectivity’ (p. 190) and are ‘likely to alienate ageneration of young women for whom sexual self-determination, expressedthrough the glamorous body, is a central component of identity’ (p. 192).In disrupting feminist equations of agency with resistance, these examples

point to some of the more complex negotiations of agency and subjectivitythat binary formulations of gendered cultural practices routinely obscure.15

We could similarly explore some of the complexities associated withembodied negotiations of agency concealed or suppressed by the ‘victimof female genital cutting’/‘cosmetic surgery consumer’ and ‘victim of female genital cutting’/‘uncircumcised African woman’ binaries discussedabove.

There are many different relational avenues we could pursue in buildingour web. Once fleshed out, what this particular relational web would illus-

trate most potently is that the ‘victim of female genital cutting’/‘cosmeticsurgery consumer’ binary represents only one constructed link in a muchlarger representational system, hence disrupting the insulated or dualisticframework that makes a more basic comparative approach insufficient. Itshows not only that ‘there are multiple others embedded within and across

binaries’ (Brah, 1996: 184–5), but also that, within any particular cultural binary, the ‘self’ is only the ‘self’, and the ‘other’ is only the ‘other’, fromone particular nodal point within the web – as your position on the web(and hence your perspective) changes, so do the hierarchical categories (therelation is (re)produced through one’s perspective), and as such, they resist

being fixed.What, therefore, does a relational approach offer to a critical feminist

project of theorizing (and interrogating) cultural formations and binaries?Reorienting commonality-based cross-cultural approaches, a focus ontracing webs of relationality enables theorization of (contingent) particu-larity as well as connection with respect to gendered embodied practices.As such, it moves us away from the reification of essentialist cultural differ-ences and the flattening of important specificities. It provides a processthrough which the production of salient gendered cultural figures and

practices can be traced with an emphasis on intersectional, historical andcontextual relations of power. The concept of particularity is useful here

because it departs from a colonialist ‘difference from’ register which positshegemonic axes such as ‘the West’, ‘whiteness’, and ‘heterosexuality’ asnorms against which subordinate entities and embodiments reveal their‘difference’. In this sense, particularity does not ‘belong’ to the minoritized





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‘other’, but rather represents the specific intersection of multiple social andembodied axes through which each imagined subject or practice is consti-tuted. Being attuned to particularities is critical in preventing and/or inter-rogating essentialist, ethnocentric and homogenizing constructions.16

Crucially, in conjunction with theorizing particularity, the web approach

also maps the constitutive connections between various figures or prac-tices. Connection underscores the ways in which processes of social andcultural differentiation and the production of social particularities arealways relational and contingent, rather than bounded or discrete. The webapproach acknowledges that the discursive-material links between variouspractices or figures are relationships of power which may function asmodes of ‘othering’ and exclusion. Yet, as will be discussed further below,it also suggests that such connections represent relationships of mutualitywhich hold the potential for the development of transformative social links

and interactions between differently located subjects. Providing the possibility of mapping what Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan have referred toas ‘scattered hegemonies’, the web model may thus enable the productionof ‘analysis that acknowledges our structurally asymmetrical links’ andrefuses to ‘construct exotic authors and subjects’ (1994: 15).

I am aware that a reader might argue that my emphasis on examining theproduction of essentialized figures like the ‘victim of female genital muti-lation’ and the ‘cosmetic surgery consumer’ may function to re-fetishizesuch stereotypical constructions. Clearly, individual embodied subjects

may fit none (or all) of these categories of representation. Does myapproach thus risk endorsing the reification of complex lived experiencethrough the subject positions used as nodal points on the web? Doesfocusing on these contrasting positions inevitably continue the essential-izing practice that is challenged in the first part of the paper? These remainpertinent questions. However, it is important to emphasize that I chosethese figures as a starting point precisely because they have been fixed asobjects with a ‘life of their own’ (Ahmed, 2000: 5) in past cross-culturalanalyses. The web approach I advocate provides a framework for unravel-ling and interrogating some of the historical, discursive-material processesthrough which such figures have been constructed and reified, rather thansimply taking their ‘nature’ for granted. Indeed, a focus on tracing consti-tutive connections between particular entities produces a shift away fromthinking of set or coherent ‘figures’ and ‘practices’ and towards contem-plating the relationships produced in and through various encounterswithin specific contexts. As the activity of weaving relational webs high-lights, there is no (singular or fixed) ‘victim of female genital mutilation’,‘cosmetic surgery consumer’, ‘uncircumcised African woman’, ‘virtuousAfrican woman’, ‘cosmetic surgery victim’ or ‘cosmetic surgery rebel’. Yet

the intersectional relations of power through which such figures are(re)produced are ‘real’ and have continuing material effects, which the webapproach enables us to tease out and address.17 As it now stands, therelational web provides a tool for tracing the relational constitution of particular salient categories of representation and is not intended to enabletheorization of complex processes of subject constitution. However, as





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discussed earlier, an approach to web weaving that involves tracing notonly how particular binary strands are (re)produced, but also how theymay fray and break away under scrutiny, opens space for examining someof the fluid complexities of agency, subjectivity and lived experience thatessentialist and/or fetishizing constructions of particular cultural practices

(and their imagined subjects) inevitably homogenize or conceal. Thisprocess could provide opportunities to theorize the interaction and inter-twinement of ‘the real’ and ‘the imagined’, ‘the social’ and ‘the subjective’and ‘the structural’ and ‘the psychic’ (Brah, 1996), with respect to howracialized cultural essentialism is negotiated, (re)produced and (poten-tially) resisted through engagements with gendered, embodied practice(see also Mama, 1995; Ahmed, 2000, 2004; Cheng, 2001).

Furthermore, following the legacy of feminist writing on ‘the politics of location’ (Rich, 1986; Kaplan, 1994), the web approach could provide a

pedagogical tool through which to reflect critically on the links amonglocation, embodiment, power and knowledge within cross-cultural andtransnational feminist theory projects. In this vein, it is important to try toaccount for the ways in which the decisions one makes in constructing arelational web are shaped by one’s specific location. For example, theembodied practices and figures which have been culturally salient to meas a researcher living and working in the UK and which I have opted totrace are shaped by both my feminist lens and the urban, multicultural,Western context in which I am operating. Being an English speaker

working in a London-based university has also, to a great extent, deter-mined the types of historical and contemporary texts I have had access toand drawn on in my tracings. Moreover, my academic training has beenprimarily in poststructuralist and postcolonialist feminist methodologiesand this has influenced my focus on discursive-material construction andthe legacies of slavery, colonialism and imperialism in the (re)productionof particular embodied practices and imagined figures. All of these factorsplay into the type of relational web I will produce in respect to any particu-lar cultural formations and thus need to be assessed reflexively.

While acknowledging the potential effects of my particular location onthe type of web I may produce is a crucial step, it is also important toexplore how and why my relational web might differ from a web produced

by a theorist working from a different social and geopolitical location. Forexample, if the binary of ‘the cosmetic surgery consumer’ and ‘the victimof female genital cutting’ had been traced by a theorist centred in anAfrican or Middle Eastern context, it would possibly look quite differentfrom my own, although there may also be some important similarities andoverlaps between the two webs. Discussing (with subjects located differ-ently than oneself) the cultural and historical specificities relating to

particular gendered practices or figures – and the structures of assumptionsthat underlie various theoretical formulations – could provide an oppor-tunity to work with and through some of the challenges cultural transla-tion raises within specific critical frameworks. This critical process couldhelp theorists in diverse locations to become ‘accountable for [their] owninvestments in cultural metaphors and values’ (Kaplan, 1994: 139), whilst





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also developing a better understanding and appreciation of the ways inwhich others’ cultural investments may differ from (as well as intersectwith) their own. Ideally then, the process of weaving relational webs andtracing the construction of hierarchical cultural ‘differences’ would

become a collaborative, inter-subjective, cross-cultural project. As such,

the web approach suggests ‘a politics invested more in its process than inits results’ (Grosz, 2005: 2).

NotesI want to express my gratitude to Clare Hemmings and Anne Phillips for theirincredible inspiration, advice and encouragement with respect to this articleand the larger research project from which it emerged. Thank you also to GailLewis and Vikki Bell for their careful readings of an earlier version, astuteadvice on its strengths, gaps and weaknesses, and helpful suggestions of additional source materials. Special thanks to Stacy Gillis, Amy Hinterberger,Faith Armitage, Deborah Finding and Rebecca Lawrence, all of whom readvarious versions of the article and provided extremely helpful comments andsuggestions. I have benefited immensely from the valuable feedback receivedfrom Diane Perrons and members of LSE (London School of Economics)Gender Institute’s Ph.D. research seminar, as well as the members of the LSE’sPerformativities reading group. I am also indebted to my two anonymousreviewers who provided very useful comments and suggestions, which nodoubt made for a stronger article. Finally, thanks to Laurie and Dave Pedwellfor their careful reading, detailed comments and unyielding support.

1. I have chosen the label ‘female genital cutting’ (FGC) to refer to the broadgroup of procedures which are, or have been, practised (with greatvariation) within some African and Middle Eastern countries and theirdiasporic communities. This term avoids the pejorative tone of the term‘female genital mutilation’ as well as the equation with male circumcisionthat the label ‘female circumcision’ implies.

2. I use labels such as ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ to indicate howparticular practices have been differentiated and compared within theliterature I am analysing. Such descriptive markers, however, are

problematic because they group together and homogenize a vast range of diverse practices, downplaying heterogeneity and hybridity. Thus, while Iemploy such labels for practical reasons, I will seek throughout thecourse of my analysis to trouble the dichotomies they (re)produce.

3. Within critical feminist frameworks, ‘essentialism’ and ‘non-essentialism’are not cast straightforwardly as opposites. Rather, a more complexrelationship between the two forms of representation is theorized (Fuss,1989; Ahmed, 1998). Feminists have also debated whether ‘strategic’mobilizations of essentialism may sometimes be necessary within largerdeconstructive feminist projects (Spivak, 1987; Grosz, 1994; Schor, 1994;Whitford, 1994).

4. A racialized, culturally essentialist binary that portrays ‘African’ FGC as‘primitive’, ‘patriarchal’ and ‘oppressive’ against portrayals of ‘Western’cosmetic surgery as ‘modern’, ‘scientific’, and a ‘personal consumerchoice’ is prevalent in a range of media, academic and legal discourses(for analyses of this binary see Gunning, 1991; Sheldon and Wilkinson,





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1998; Weil Davis, 2002; Chase, 2002; Njambi, 2004; Braun, 2005; Pedwell,2007).

5. African, Asian and Middle Eastern rooted practices of FGC have also beencompared to a host of other ‘Western’ practices including cosmetic breastaugmentations, liposuction, body modification, transsexual surgery,

female reproductive procedures, abortion and eating disorders, as well asvarious ‘non-Western’ practices including Chinese foot-binding andIndian sati (or widow burning) (see Women’s Caucus of the AfricanStudies Association, 2002 [1983]; Wolf, 1990; Greer, 1999; Leonard, 2000;Salecl, 2000; Meyers, 2000; Weil Davis, 2002; Chase, 2002; Davis, 2004;Chambers, 2004; Njambi, 2004).

6. See also Gressgård (2006) who argues that, on a structural level, thefigures of ‘the veiled woman’, ‘the anorexic’ and ‘the transsexual’ reveal a‘striking similarity’ (p. 325).

7. See also Hirschmann (1998); Hoodfar (2003); Duits and Van Zoonen (2006).

8. For example, David Gollaher describes how students of African culturesin the late 19th and 20th centuries concluded that ‘the operation wasperformed only to lessen the extraordinarily active sexual instinct of women among the African tribes . . . or because so many African womenhad unusually large clitoral or labial bulges’ (2000: 196).

9. African opponents to FGC (in its various forms) had been present forsome time before second wave feminist campaigns. In 1960, at the UnitedNations seminar on the participation of women in public life, held inAddis Ababa, African delegates called upon WHO (World Health

Organization) to undertake a study of the medical aspects of FGC (Koubaand Muasher, 1985). However, it was not until the better financed andinstitutionally supported Western feminist campaigns of the 1980s thatinternational awareness of the practice and substantive support fromWHO to eradicate it were achieved (Boyle, 2002).

10. Campaigns and programmes directed at eradicating or reducing the healthrisks associated with FGC have been led by numerous groups including,Women Living Under Muslim Law, the International African Congress,Union Nationale des Femmes de Djibouti, the Somali DemocraticWomen’s Organization, Le Mouvement Femmes et Societé (Senegal),

Union Nationale des Femmes du Mali, the Babiker Bedri Foundation forWomen’s Studies and Research (Sudan), the Association of AfricanWomen in Research and Development, the Women’s Group AgainstSexual Mutilations (France), and RAINBO (UK) (Kouba and Muasher,1985; Gunning, 1991; Obiora, 2000; Meyers, 2000).

11. To be clear, in acknowledging these broad historical differences indiscourses pertaining to FGC, I do not seek to position indigenousAfrican, Asian or Middle Eastern women as ‘authentic insiders’ (Narayan,1997) through fusing ethnicity, geographic location or experience with‘privileged knowledge’. Homogenizing and/or culturally essentialistrepresentations of FGC have clearly been (re)produced within both‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ settings and by differently located actors.However, social and geopolitical locations of enunciation do, I believe,shape (without directly determining) political representations andarguments, if in complex and sometimes conflicting ways.

12. In a CNN news programme aired in 1994, for example, a young Egyptian





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girl’s circumcised genitalia were displayed on video for ten minutes(Njambi, 2004: 285).

13. It should be acknowledged that some of the feminist theorists I havediscussed, namely Gunning (1991) and Weil Davis (2002), do at leastconsider (if not foreground) these kinds of intersections and

relationalities. However, as I have suggested, the overarching frameworksthey advocate to represent the similarities between particular embodiedpractices (such as cross-cultural analogues and continua) end upproblematically flattening such intersections and relationalities and, assuch, remain limited from a relational perspective.

14. The concept of the ‘web’ has become a salient metaphor within criticalfeminist theory. From Donna Haraway’s ‘webs of connections’ (1990:191), to Morwenna Griffiths’ ‘web of identity’ (1995: 1), to Rosi Braidotti’s‘webs of complex interaction’ (2006: 154), the image of the web has beenemployed increasingly to indicate the necessity of theorizing complex

interconnections between various discursive-material entities.15. We might also ask how notions of agency associated with the ‘cosmetic

surgery consumer’/‘cosmetic surgery rebel’ binary are complicatedthrough considering the narratives of subjects who deploy normalizeddiscourses about cosmetic surgery, such as medicalized transsexualdiscourse, to produce aberrant bodies and subject positions (see, forexample, Halberstam, 2005).

16. It may also aid comprehension of the complex reasons why particularforms of specific practices perpetuate in certain contexts (and not others)

and could help determine whether intervention is necessary orappropriate in respect to a specific practice in a particular context, and if so, which kinds of localized interventions may be more effective thanothers.

17. At the same time, there is no reason that a relational approach has to takesuch figures as a starting point. For example, Elizabeth Grosz (2005)advocates a (relational) theoretical framework in which ‘inhuman forces,forces that are both living and nonliving, macroscopic and microscopic,above and below the level of human are acknowledged and allowed todisplace the centrality of both consciousness and the unconscious’

(p. 186).

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Carolyn Pedwell is a Visiting Lecturer and Research Fellow at the Gender

Institute, London School of Economics. Her main research interests includeembodiment and cultural practice; critical approaches to theorizing multi-axial difference; feminist research epistemologies and methodologies; and thedevelopment of transnational gender theory and pedagogy.

Address: Gender Institute, London School of Economics, Houghton Street,London WC2A 2AE, UK. Email: [email protected]


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