Congratulations to MA Legal Studies student, Alexa Dodge!
Her paper entitled, “Genital Culture: Exploring the Cultural Importance of Genital Surgery in the West” received the Oxford University Book prize for best paper on a feminist legal theory topic. As part of this prize, Dodge receives $200 towards books from Oxford University Press.
In this paper, Dodge demonstrates how Western discourse vilifies cultures that engage in female genital mutilation (FGM) without realizing how the Western practices of intersex surgery and cosmetic vaginal surgery are also culturally imbued practices that can be seen as forms of genital mutilation.
Dodge argues that the cultural influence of the West needs to be recognized so that we can better perceive how the agency of Western subjects is also directed and confined by our cultural context. Western society is often conceived of as “normal” and “un-cultured” in comparison to the third-world, which is seen as abnormal and cultured. The use of Western society as the reference par excellence by which to measure other cultures needs to be questioned. Western society is also a cultured space wherein subjects are regulated and controlled and, in this case, where the importance of gender norms and the ideal of the perfect, “normal” vagina regulate women and their bodies.