Sukuelinkirurgiaa

Ruskeat tytöt pistävät aina vain paremmaksi:

And then there is also the habit of white women building careers on the traumatized bodies of black women and girls, which is not anything new, but very much evident in photographer Meeri Koutaniemi’s work. She launched her career by photographing of female genital surgery in Kenya. The photographs exposing the Maasai girls’ faces and identities were displayed in Finland’s biggest newspaper Helsingin Sanomat in 2014, as well as other media platforms. The debate that ensued with the publication of Koutaniemi’s photographs was captioned well in Teivo Teivainen’s, Professor of World Politics at the University of Helsinki blog post. This display of African girls’ most private parts forced organizations such as UNICEF to publicly condemn Koutaniemi’s work. Meeri Koutaniemi has since been feeding the Finnish white gaze for years by bringing images of these different African rituals and customs to public exhibition spaces in Finland.

Like western feminists, who have sensationalised female genital surgeries by naming it genital mutilation, Koutaniemi represented the female circumcision through what researcher Chandra Mohanty calls the western gaze. African feminists have condemned this western gaze which materializes the western saviour mentality. In the Journal of Opinion titled “African women in an age of transformation”, African feminists argue that the debate on female circumcision should be placed within African feminist discourse.


Vai että ihan kirurgiaa. Pitäkööt hyvänään.