Eric K. SilvermanThinkers

Circumcision is a rite that creates a form of manhood that is modeled after, and yet in opposition to, uterine fertility, parturition, menstruation, and motherhood.

Circumcision is an expression of male envy of female fertility.

Circumcision is, in classic anthropological accounts, linked to symbolism, politics, aggressive manhood, history, structuralist inversions, and the nature-culture dichotomy.

Circumcision is, in Judaism, a denial of the ideology of the 'self-made man' and a challenge to the hellenistic ideal of the naturally whole body (that achieved hegemony through the spread of pauline Christianity).

Circumcision is, in Judaism, an act of dividing a single body into two parts, and thus parallels the structure of the genesis 1 cosmogony, the genesis 2 creation of woman from the body of an androgynous yet male creature, and the formation of society in the hebrew Bible.

Circumcision is, in Judaism, such that it emulates menstruation to invest men with the ability to reproduce the community.

Circumcision is related to the idea that despite a denuded phallus (as it were) circumcised jews within judaism remain whole men.

Circumcision creates or carves single-sexed bodies.

Circumcision dramatizes unease over separation-individuation through a symbolism that affirms yet blurs the normative boundaries between masculinity and motherhood.

Circumcision is an act whereby the blood is considered a positive male transformation of negative menstrual blood.

Female circumcision is, for alleged victims, in fact a form of symbolic capital, allowing them to gain access to custom, community, virtue, and morality.

Female circumcision is less about enhancing male sexual pleasure, as is commonly averred, and more about preparing a woman for motherhood by retaining her inner, fertile moisture.

Female circumcision is often opposed by westerners on the western chauvinistic grounds and a type of moral manifest destiny that sees african and islamic cultures as oppressive and insane.

Female circumcision even allows some women to contest, not accede to, patriarchy, and to define, not erode, their self-worth.

Female circumcision is an ethically tricky situation. However much westerners might yearn to save and enlighten african women, it should be considered whether they are possibly unwittingly exacerbating the muteness of the circumcised subaltern.