Saturday, April 10, 2010
Making money off of FGM
I've added a new blog to the bloglist. Wanjiru, who writes the blog "Can we save Africa?" (and who also got her PhD in Political Science at the U of Minnesota when I was new to grad school there) has been posting a really interesting series on companies who use the issue of female genital mutilation in Africa to promote their products as a socially conscious and women-friendly choice. She criticizes these companies for not being serious about the issue, but using the suffering of women in order to sell more products. She also critiques an NGO for their 'adopt a clitoris' campaign for reducing women to their body parts. Check it out.
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This was an interesting blog. I completely agree with the author that campaigns like this are demeaning, even though they don't intend to be. How much good is really being done when organizations care more about shock value and gimmick than looking at the "big picture" implications? The apparent inadequate research into programs and issues makes me question how committed organizations like this are to really helping those they claim to be "saving". It shows an interesting intersection of feminist and post-colonial thought, which I'm guessing we'll discuss some next week.
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