Shows how the debate on female genital excision has evolved over the last four decades of the twentieth century, in response to changing attitudes about ethnicity, nationalism, colonialism, feminism, and human rights. The author discerns a gradual evolution from the 1960s, when writers carefully "wrote around” the physical operation, to the late 1990s, when they situated their denunciations of female genital excision in a much broader, international context of women's oppression and the struggle for women's rights.

Elisabeth Bekers is lecturer in British and postcolonial literatures at the Free University of Brussels (VUB) and research affiliate at the University of Antwerp.