The author presents a critique of the presentation of Female Circumcision as occasioned by the work of Alice Walker and Parthiba Pamar’s film Warrior Marks, Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexual Blinding of Women. The discussion focuses on North East Africa (with references to female circumcision by Western physicians in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries). In the African context, the author observes, the operation is implemented almost exclusively by eIder women who regard the ritual as an important affirmation of one generation of women’s authority over another. The practice will not be successfully eradicated, she argues, without a strategy that offers alternative possibilities of authority between older and younger generations of women in societies where it is practiced.

Interweaving personal narrative and theory, this essay frames the valorization of female virginity in Guatemalan ladino society within the context of ethnic conflict between ladinos and Mayan Indians. A consideration of what is at stake in the premarital loss of virginity for ladino women can illuminate interrelationships among nationalism, the engendering of ethnicity, and women’s bodies.

The author explores the viability of rational political action - here understood as a philosophy of liberation - through an examination of practical and material, practical-discursive, strategic and instrumental, critically normative, discursive, and strategic criteria.