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The Epilogue returns to the politics of knowledge about cutting that disavows its endings – not only in Ghana, but across the African continent and in the global North. Having shown that debates about knowledge have practical consequences, I point to the scholarly and political work that lies ahead.

The movements on domestic violence and abuse expanded as time went on. This chapter brings the discussion of domestic violence services from the late 1980s to the 2020s. It discusses the challenges thrown up by the growth of domestic violence services as time went on and the evolution of accepted definitions. It debates, the development of specialist BMER services (including the Asian Women’s Resource Centre, Brent, and Southall Black Sisters) and services for abused women from other diverse communities. The chapter charts the development of Women’s Aid in the 2000s and of projects in the wider movement like Refuge, AVA, SafeLives and Justice for Women. It discusses the development of attention to harmful practices, like FGM, forced marriage and ‘honour’-based violence, and the struggles against them.

This essay sets up a dialogue between political anthropology and cultural psychology to examine how they expose the slippages between public reason and embodied morality within multiculturalism. By examining the work of Richard Shweder and Elizabeth Povinelli on radical alterity, morality and bodily practices, the essay details how cultural psychology and anthropology identify similar impulses and impasses within multiculturalism. Moreover, it advances a critical reading of cultural psychology's larger framing of debates about multiculturalism around the question of tolerance.

Introduction: Governmentality Against Itself lays out the book’s overarching arguments and analytical contributions to anthropology and feminist theory. Rather than debating how “we” as Western subjects should think about cutting, this book attends to the political concerns and ethical dilemmas of Ghanaian and other African women and men who are most engaged in and affected by the efforts to end and regulate cutting. It addresses two questions: Are efforts to end female genital cutting a problem, and if so, what kind of a problem are they and for whom? For whom is the ending of cutting a problem and why? I redefine answers to these two questions from the perspectives of Ghanaian lifeworlds rather than liberal debates about FGM. In Ghana, cutting has been ending in many districts, and dramatically so in areas where sustained, decades-long campaigns have taken place. The waning of cutting has been accompanied by critical responses to the colonial order of things and its afterlives in the liberal governance of everyday life. These critiques are voiced not in public protests or debates but in a different key: in indirect speech and in practices of living. They gather their force from sensibilities (that is entanglements of thought, affect, and habitus) formed at the interstices of social and governmental logics, and in consonance with tacit principles on which society is built, such as the ethics of relationality and mutual responsibility.

Chapter 3, When Cutting Did and Did Not End, examines how it is that the discourse of FGM lives on, despite the demise of cutting. Although cutting is on the wane in Ghana, the discourse of its “intractability” is used to produce suspect citizens and to legitimate punitive rationality and “Zero Tolerance” campaigns and legislation. This chapter shows how social science “evidence” is mobilized to support truth claims that rural communities “resist” anti-cutting campaigns and continue to practice cutting “underground.” It also refracts the endings of cutting through the lens of nostalgia: former circumcisers long for the ancestral benevolence that cutting secured for them, and uncut Ghanaians bemoan the disappearance of the traditional patriarchal values they believe cutting upheld.

For women who have stopped cutting, the success of interventions against cutting in northern Ghana is also an index of a troubled economy and consequent bodily vulnerability and precarity. Chapter 5, Cutting in Times in Scarcity: Blood Loss and Slow Harm after NGOs, recasts the aftermath of governmental achievements in light of the perspectives of rural women in the Bongo district targeted by NGO and state interventions. Taking their concerns about lack of blood as a starting point, I explore how they problematize harm and make sense of the end of cutting. Cutting is now seen as unworthy of blood loss, and as a critical event that generates a lifelong susceptibility to illness. Cutting had to stop, they say, given how the struggles of the contemporary moment have meant that women can no longer afford to lose blood. Furthermore, while NGOs and the state seek to isolate cutting in a hermetically-sealed world of rural northern Ghanaians who resist change, these women link the end of cutting to national and pan-African concerns and idioms, joining a chorus of voices that criticize national blood shortages and emphasize the associated failures of biopolitical care.

In the wake of the Constitution of 1992, Ghana criminalized cutting not once, but twice. In chapters 6 and 7, which should be read in conjunction, I investigate the intimate relationship between violence and law by analyzing, respectively the associated efforts to reform and enforce the law against cutting. Chapter 6, The Feminist Fetish: Legal Advocacy illuminates how GAWW’s advocacy for more severe legislation functions as an early instantiation of “zero tolerance to FGM” logic. I attend to Ghanaian advocates’ reckoning with both the power of law and the tensions within feminist liberalism, namely, those between protection and punishment, and freedom and violence.

The introduction asks how individuals and communities respond to transnational activism that pits international norms against local norms. It highlights the theoretical significance of research on norm change among nonstate actors and the substantive significance of research on the practices of female genital mutilation (FGM) and early marriage. In addition, this chapter provides an overview of the argument and describes and justifies the research design (including issue selection, case selection, and research methods). It defines keyterms—norms, FGM, early marriage—and discusses conceptual and practical issues associated with these definitions. It further describes variation in the practice of FGM and early marriage worldwide, as well as the evolution of transnational activism against them.

This chapter presents the central theoretical framework for understanding local-level norm change in response to a conflict between international and local norms. It disaggregates individual norm change into three discrete activities—attitude change, primary behavioral change, and secondary behavioral and rhetorical change—and establishes the conditions under which each of these changes is most likely to occur. It also identifies factors that influence the extent of exposure to the international normative message. The theory highlights systemic, local, and individual-level sources of variation in both exposure and norm change. It then considers the processes by which international norms diffuse across individuals and through communities, emphasizing both social and temporal dimensions of change.

This chapter outlines the practice of and campaign against FGM and early marriage in Kenya, among the Maasai and Samburu, and in the three case study communities. It discusses the scope of the two practices and the nature of the local norms supporting them, as well as observed changes. It also considers the history and range of activism against the practices, and the activities of the Kenyan government. The chapter draws on quantitative data from Kenya’s Demographic and Health Surveys and from the author’s own original survey, as well as qualitative data from the Author’s interviews and from a range of primary and secondary documents.

Chapters 4 through 7 present empirical support for the theory, drawing on both qualitative interview data and original survey data. Chapter 4 focuses on awareness of international norms. It shows that there have been comparable levels of transnational activism against FGM and early marriage in the study communities. While the high salience of the international norm against FGM drives up activism by aid-dependent NGOs, the high salience of the local norm supporting the practice drives down activism by other community organizations. The low salience of both the international and local norms surrounding early marriage drives down activism by aid-dependent NGOs but creates space for activism by actors and organizations that are financially independent. However, the level of activism against both practices varies by community—awareness of the international norms against FGM and early marriage is most likely when communities, and individuals within communities, are accessible to NGOs and other activists.

This chapter addresses attitude change in response to transnational activism against FGM and early marriage. It finds that individual attitude change is most likely to occur when the international normative message people receive is not only frequent but also of high quality, and that aid-dependent NGOs are less likely to provide such a high-quality message. While message quality is difficult to operationalize, the chapter is able to show that individuals with a strong grasp of the content of the international norms—that is, knowledge of the health and human rights consequences of FGM and early marriage—are more likely to express opposition to the two practices. It also shows that, for any given level of activism, individuals are less likely to change their attitudes about FGM than about early marriage, because of FGM’s higher local salience.

This chapter considers the barriers to individual behavior change and the diffusion of behavior change through communities. It shows that because of the relatively low salience of the local norm supporting early marriage, individual behavior change closely tracks attitude change. However, the high salience of the local norm supporting FGM means that individual behavior change lags significantly behind attitude change. Because of FGM’s high local salience, behavior change is most likely to occur where individuals are able to somehow mitigate the high barriers to defection—the chapter demonstrates that exposure to noncircumcising ethnic groups is associated with individual behavior change in communities that have experienced minimal norm change, and that elite opposition to FGM is associated with individual behavior change in communities that are at both early and advanced stages of transition.

This chapter focuses on rhetorical and secondary behavioral change. It finds that many individuals take steps to misrepresent or hide their true attitudes and behavior with respect to FGM and early marriage, and that they are motivated to do this by both reputational and material considerations. The survey experiment shows that individuals are willing to make false rhetorical commitments to international norms when they encounter an international audience, and the qualitative interviews show a propensity both for rhetorical misrepresentation to international activists and for actively hiding local norm compliance from local activists and authorities. However, these types of activities occur primarily in communities that have experienced significant exposure to the relevant international norms.

This chapter concludes by reviewing the theory and the central findings from the research conducted in the three Kenyan case study communities. It also places the theory in a broader context by applying it to FGM and early marriage cross-nationally and by applying it to two additional issues—girl-child education and dowry. It discusses policy implications for international donors and on-the-ground activists, and outlines theoretical implications for literatures on international norm promotion; the politics of culture, tradition, and modernity; and gender violence. Finally, the conclusion explores potential avenues for further research, including new cases, alternative methodological strategies, and theoretical extensions.

In modern liberal democracies, the gendered division of labor is partially the result of men and women making different choices about work and family life, even if such choices stem from social norms about gender. The choices that women make relative to men’s disadvantage them in various ways: such choices lead them to earn less, enjoy less power and prestige in the labor market, be less able to participate in the political sphere on an equal basis, make them to some degree financially dependent on others, and leave them at a bargaining disadvantage and vulnerable in certain personal relationships. This chapter considers if and when the state should intervene to address women’s disadvantage and inequalities that are the result of gender specialization. It is argued that political liberals can and sometimes must intervene in the gendered division of labor when persons’ interests as free and equal citizens are frustrated.

Chapter 5 considers threats to sexual self-determination through case studies of FGM/C in Egypt, trafficking in the Philippines, and child marriage in India.Persisting patterns of denial of self-determination over sexuality and marriage result from state complicity with local patriarchal elites, honor cultures, and suppression of women’s agency. Sexual slavery is most characteristic of patriarchal states, but often lags in sectors of emerging economies. Violations of self-determination such as trafficking or forced marriage may also resurface in all types of gender regimes when the society or community experiences a severe crisis such as war, radical regime change, forced migration, natural disaster, or economic collapse. We will map the incidence of these violations of bodily self-determination, analyze the causal dynamics, illustrate patterns of abuse, and expose the dilemmas for rights reform. In each case, we will trace responses in the international regime, law, and human rights campaigns.