Number of girls and women who have undergone FGM is estimated at between 100 and 140 million.
Author: Ophelia Benson
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WHO Press Release on FGM Study
‘FGM is a practice steeped in culture and tradition but it should not be allowed to carry on.’
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WHO Calls FGM a Form of Torture
‘By medicalising it, we will be endorsing this practice,’ Joy Phumaphi of WHO told the BBC.
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Re-Open the M F Husain Exhibition
Awaaz – South Asia Watch urges Asia House, London to re-open the exhibition of the work of renowned Indian artist, MF Husain. Awaaz condemns the forced closure of the exhibition following violence, harassment and intimidation by fundamentalists claiming to represent the views of British Hindus. The fundamentalists who vandalised the paintings reflect the authoritarian ideologies and tactics of militant Hindu Right groups in India.
In India, organisations such as the extremely violent Bajrang Dal, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and other organizations linked to the fascist-inspired Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) [1], have repeatedly attacked MF Husain and other artists, filmmakers, intellectuals and cultural practitioners. In 1998, Hindu Right groups attacked and ransacked Husain’s Bombay home, one of several such attacks on the artist and his work. Hindu Right groups have regularly attempted to undermine the freedom of thought and expression enshrined in the Indian constitution and reflected in the vibrancy of Indian culture.
In Hindu traditions there is an extensive history of wide and diverse representations of the sacred deities, including nude, erotic and other depictions. Hinduism has never possessed a concept of censorship or blasphemy of the kind that authoritarian groups wish to promote. A key reason the exhibition is being attacked is because MF Husain is a Muslim. Groups involved have used religious claims to mask a political agenda that owes to the Hindu Right, an agenda which has caused considerable violence and misery in India since the 1980s.
Hindu Right groups in Britain have previously used tactics of intimidation to attempt to prevent films on the 2002 Gujarat carnage being shown in London. Contrary to any Hindu tradition, they have also appointed themselves to police in an authoritarian way the representation of Hindu deities and icons in the UK.
The Hindu Forum of Britain and Hindu Human Rights accuse Asia House of not ‘consulting’ with them before putting up the exhibition. But they are not democratically-elected representatives of Hindu populations or opinion in the UK and represent little beyond their limited and chauvinistic political agendas. The Hindu Forum of Britain has actively supported or defended the RSS’s UK projects as well as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad. The Hindu Forum of Britain has attempted to present these as ordinary religious organizations, whereas they are in fact political organizations of the Hindu Right.
We urge Asia House not to give in to the bullying and intimidation tactics of Hindu fundamentalists and to reinstate the exhibition of works by one of the subcontinent’s most acclaimed artists. Asia House must reject the intolerance, narrow-mindedness and political interests of the Hindu Right. By re-opening the exhibition, Asia House will genuinely honour the rich and diverse traditions of expression arising from Hinduism and from India.
Note
1. The RSS was created in the 1920s as a semi-paramilitary movement and its origins were inspired by Italian Fascism and German Nazism. The assassin of M.K. Gandhi was a former RSS member. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) is the RSS’s religious front and has been repeatedly indicted for acts of violence and hatred in India over several decades. The ideology of the RSS and its vast network of organizations is Hindutva, an intolerant worldview of Hindu supremacy, anti-minority hatred and an exclusive ‘Hindu nation’. The RSS and VHP have an extensive network of branches in the UK, organised through the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS) and the VHP UK. The National Hindu Students Forum, which has opposed the exhibition, is also very closely associated with the HSS.
For further Information contact: Awaaz Secretariat on: (+44) 020 8843 2333 or email contact@awaazsaw.org
Awaaz – South Asia watch is a UK based South Asian secular network committed to challenging all forms of religious hatred and intolerance. Awaaz – South Asia Watch is a project of The Monitoring Group.
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Well, Gravediggers Are Pleased
Bad. ‘Uganda was a beacon of hope in Africa’s struggle against HIV, but the Christian right’s grip on US policy is undermining this effort with fatal consequences, reports Oliver Duff from Kampala.’
Aids activists and development officials point to the 130,000 Ugandans infected with HIV last year alone – up from 70,000 in 2002 – and say the recent obsession with abstinence is handicapping the country’s once-successful fight against the virus. Health workers see the fingerprints of America’s Christian right all over the chastity message and believe the Bush administration is using its financial might to bully them into accepting evangelical ideology at the expense of public health…Uganda receives more US money than ever…But that cash comes with conditions: in a gesture to the Christian right in the US, at least one-third of all prevention money must go to “abstinence-only” projects…Critics counting each new infection in field clinics say this has dangerously skewed Uganda’s previous “balanced” approach which seemed to be working.
Working, yes, but at the price of allowing some people to go with condoms instead of abstinence, and that’s dirty. It’s better to make the dirty people be dead and only the clean people live. Except that gets tricky, because you can get people who are faithful (one of the items in Uganda’s ABC – abstinence, be faithful, condoms) but are infected by their partners; that usually means women being infected, because male to female transmission is much easier. And then there are the children they have, and the children they leave orphans, some of whom are forced to become prostitutes to survive, and quickly get Aids and die themselves. But maybe it’s worth it, to keep from allowing condoms to appear on billboards and remind everyone of sex? Maybe not.
“Because of the US, our government now says Abstain and Be faithful only,” says Dr Katamba. “So people stop trusting our advice. They think we were lying about how condoms can stop Aids. Confusion is deadly.” And so it is proving to be: the number of infections is again rising, after years of decline…The trusted and influential first lady, Janet Museveni, is a born-again Christian. She has publicly equated condom use with theft and murder and said that Aids is God’s way of punishing immoral behaviour.
Aids is God’s way of punishing immoral behaviour in men by infecting their wives and leaving their children orphans. Interesting view of punishment, isn’t it.
People on both sides of the argument agree that Washington is prolonging tens of thousands of Ugandans’ lives through treatment – and that abstinence is crucial. “The evangelicals are absolutely right: abstinence is the best way of preventing the spread of HIV/Aids,” says Sigurd Illing, the EU ambassador to Uganda. “But some people aren’t receptive. We need an end to this bedevilling of condoms by people who take a high moralistic stance and don’t care about the impact that this has on reality.”
Ah yes, reality. Now where have we heard about that before…
“Saying ‘abstain’ is not realistic.” Nor is saying “Be faithful” at present, given the widespread and accepted male infidelity in Uganda that results in one infected person spreading the virus quickly…Constance Namuyiga, a 28-year-old mother of three young children, found out she was HIV-positive two years ago. “Men think they own us here,” she says…Not everyone is sad about the escalating epidemic. In a roadside timber yard near Kampala’s Mulago Hospital, coffin makers report that business has never been better.
Oh, good, that’s cheering.
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Happiness and Multiculturalism
Commission for Racial Equality has done work looking at the effect of diversity on well-being.
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Abstinence-only Policy Hurts AIDS Fight in Uganda
‘The number of infections is again rising, after years of decline.’
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Weaker UN Statement on AIDS Feared
Some want to downplay links between HIV infection, gender inequality and violence against women.
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On James Buchan on Adam Smith
Few economic theorists’ views have been embraced by both Karl Marx and Margaret Thatcher.
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Geekiness Not Just for Men
Oh look, here’s Catherine Bennett confirming much of what Lucy and I said in But What About? the other day – on the ‘why aren’t there more women writing blogs and editing websites and doing Euston-type things?’ question. It’s not, as I pointed out, because they’re not allowed. One reason I offered was that a lot of them think, stupidly, that it’s a childish guyish geeky thing to do, and that they’re better than that. Now here’s Catherine Bennett doing just what I was talking about:
A couple of months ago, an American robin, Turdus migratorius, made it across the Atlantic. News reports showed a long row of birdwatchers, waiting, with the utmost patience, by a garden wall in Peckham, London. Almost all of them were men. I wondered, at the time, if this – minus binoculars – is what a reception party of bloggers would look like. Now, thanks to the drafters of the Euston Manifesto, a pub-born project that has just launched as a real-life political alliance, the question has been answered. It is, indeed, what a reception party of bloggers would look like.
Good for them – the patient watchers. That’s not a bad or a stupid thing to do; it’s not bad or stupid to be interested in birds; what is the sneer for? I bet Bennett wouldn’t sneer that way at women who watch ‘Neighbours’ of an afternoon – she’d think that was elitist, she’d be embarrassed to sneer (I’m betting – I don’t know for a fact), but to sneer at people watching for a bird with binoculars is fair game. Why is that? As it happens, the most passionate birders I know are women; one of them goes on trips to Africa and Brazil to watch birds; and she knows a lot more women birders than I do. But even if that weren’t the case, it might be that women were missing something of value by not themselves watching birds, as opposed to being more grown-up and sensible by ignoring birds. Bennett is claiming (apparently without realizing it) that women are better than men because they have narrower interests. They have better sense than to watch birds or mess around with blogs or politics. Well – I respectfully disagree. And guess what – I’m a woman.
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Something Cyborgic in Academic/Biker Hybridity
Outlaw club: one that has refused Foucaultian regime of subjective normalization imposed by American Motorcyclist Association.
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‘Speak’ Posts Workers’ Address on Website
Builders’ quarters could become the target of violent protests.
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Blair Speaks Out in Support of Pro-Test
In March over 800 students, staff and members of the public marched in favour of Pro-Test.
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Robert Winston Defends Animal Testing
‘Some…would have people believe that animal research does not work. This is simply a lie.’
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UCL Provost Concerned Over Boycott
Freedom of inquiry fundamental to the global dissemination and enhancement of knowledge.
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AUT Statement on NATFHE Vote
Free expression, open debate and unhampered dialogue are prerequisites of academic freedom.
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NATFHE Backs Boycott of Israeli Academics
A boycott of Israeli Jewish academics and no one else in the world seems dubious.
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Genuflect Genuflect Genuflect
The old ‘how do I look in this attitude’ problem again. The old ‘get me, I’m so transgressive’ problem again. Funny how persistent it is.
What chiefly surprised me about last winter’s list was its lack of any humor, any irony. The self-styled most important journal of theory was going to inform us – so it told us – what an objective method revealed about who the most important theorists were in its pages. How? By counting citations to theorists. Behind the rhetoric about discovering “the identity of our journal” lies an implicit assumption: If you’re cited in Critical Inquiry, you’re the best of the best. Sometimes the folks in Chicago get a little pumped…
If we like you you’re the best of the best. Okay, that’s one way of measuring. Possibly not the most self-effacing or non-risible method though.
The authors of the ranking, Anne H. Stevens, an assistant professor of English at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, and Jay W. Williams, Critical Inquiry’s managing editor, note that “Benjamin’s works are cited nonargumentatively,” which I think is a nice way of saying his ideas are just window dressing, not engaged with. That must be why he ranks high as one of the most perfectly citable authors of all, because you can cite him reverently without having to figure out what he said. With Benjamin a citation is the academic equivalent of the purely ritual move, like a ballplayer’s sign of the cross. But the genuflecting to Benjamin points, perhaps, to something hocus-pocus about this whole counting exercise. The essay that accompanies CI’s list crows that the theories featured in the journal “share a tendency to question received wisdom and accept few absolutes or foundations.” Yet this list seems like a monument to CI’s importance.
That, exactly, is what makes my skin crawl about ‘theory’ at its (all too abundant) worst: that dreadful and endemic habit of citing totemic names ‘nonargumentatively’, of using names as window dressing rather than the ideas of the names as something to be engaged with, of citing people reverently without having to figure out what they said, of genuflecting. It’s a great marker for the presence of empty attitudinizing as opposed to real thought or inquiry. That’s why I sometimes, as a reader pointed out last week, criticize the writing of X about Y on the basis of what X said without necessarily having read Y, because it is what X has said about Y, rather than Y, that I’m talking about. It really is possible, in fact it’s pretty easy, to spot nonargumentative citation window dressing when you bump into it. It’s nothing if not obvious.