The Routledge International Handbook of Harmful Cultural Practices

Book excerpt: "This handbook looks at cross-cultural work on harmful cultural practices considered gendered forms of abuse of women. These include Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), virginity testing, hymenoplasty, genital cosmetic surgery and child marriage. Bringing together comparative perspectives, intersectionality, and interdisciplinarity, it uses feminist methodology and mixed methods, with ethnography of central importance, to provide holistic, grounded theorizing within a framework of transformative research. Taking Female Genital Mutilation, a topical, contested practice and making it a heuristic reference for related procedures, makes the case for global action based on understanding the complexity of harmful cultural practices that are contextually differentiated and experienced in inter-sectional ways. But because this phenomenon is enshrouded in matters of sensitivity and prejudice, narratives of suffering are muted and even suppressed, dismissed as indigenous ritual, or become ammunition for racist organizing. Such conflicted and often opaque debates obstruct clear vision of the scale of both problem and solution. Divided into 6 parts: -Discourses and Epistemological Faultlines -FGM and Related Patriarchal Inscriptions -Gender and Genitalia -Female Bodies and Body Politics: Economics, Law, Health, and Human Rights -Placing Engagement, Innovation, Impact, Care -Words and Texts to Shatter Silence and comprised of 24 newly written chapters from experts around the world, this book will be of interest to Scholars and students of nursing, social work, and allied health more broadly as well as sociology, gender studies and postcolonial studies"--