‘The Women Are Doing It for Themselves’

Questions about legality, Western cultural hypocrisy, and the theoretical location of the subject as a choice-making agent, or not, have been raised in recent (‘analogue’-type; Pedwell 2007) comparisons between the conceptualisation and treatment of women seeking ‘cosmetic surgery’ on their genitalia (female genital cosmetic surgery or FGCS 1 ) and those seeking ‘traditional’ forms of genital cutting (often referred to as female genital mutilation or ‘FGM’ 2 ) in the West. The rhetoric of choice and its close relatives, individual agency and consent, appear diversely throughout discourse around FGCS. In this paper, I consider the use of choice rhetoric in relation to Western women’s bodies and genital cutting practices, suggesting that such rhetoric is necessary to discursively (and politically, and practically) separate FGCS from ‘FGM’. My primary interest is in the discursive questions of how choice is constructed and deployed, and the work that this does, rather than the realist question of whether women really have choice and agency in relation to FGCS, or theoretical questions about the extent to which choice and agency are possible.