FGM/C: from medicine to critical anthropology

This book is the product of the Seminar MAP-FGM (https://mapfgm.eu, Rome, 24-25 Nov. 2017), where anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers, exponents of NGO, gynaecologists and jurists exchanged their knowledge by pursuing several aims: re-introducing the FGM/C issue inside an anthropological framework, seeking to widen the theme to body modifiability, not only women’s bodies, and proceeding from historicization and the acknowledgment of subjectivities; criticising the biomedical approaches, as other forms of criminalization, examining the connection with the other disciplines and their knowledge potential; finally, opening the issue to uncommon geographical fields, both in Africa and Asia. The main objective has been establishing the conditions for building a socio-ethno-anthropological gaze on the social gender constructions and on the biopolitics on/of the bodies, by making emerge the strengths but, most of all, the weaknesses, of the medical and regulatory gazes, which, on their part, call into question an anthropological vocabulary which does not pertain to them, and risk to produce effects opposed to the ones wished, that is the abandonment of these practices.