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Genital Mutilation and Moolaade (2004)

Female circumcision is the focus of Sembene’s Moolaade, released in 2004. Also referred to as genital mutilation, the excising of the clitoris is a common coming of age ritual throughout Africa. Debates between feminists and those who practice the tradition discuss a violent kind of women’s oppression versus a cultural perception of purification. Specific to the film, African womanist readings question whether Sembene subverts or upholds the status quo. The term “pornotroping” is brought up in the conversation of Moolaade. According to Tamura Lomax, pornotroping describes how myths surrounding the image of black women are imposed on their bodies via visual modes of representation, such as film, that effectively support the “othering” of black womanhood.

Postcolonial Feminism

Chandra Taplade Mohanty’s “Cartographies of Struggle” illuminates the faults of dominant Eurocentric thought on the historical and political terrain of third world women. This prevalence partially stems from the issue of a world that is only definable in relational terms and via divisions of class, race, and gender, color, and place. Through the eyes of Western feminisms, Europe and the United States are the world’s center, its consciousness, and its standard. It has been made so through centuries of colonial oppression, as Western empires have gobbled up third world territories and imposed their normative structures on foreign cultures and spaces. This history of colonization is pervasive enough to form third world sites within the US today, such as inner city neighborhoods and other minority sites. This emphasis on thinking beyond nationalisms and geography critiques the way in which Western notions of feminism do not consider the historical, cultural, social, or economic specificities of third world women’s struggles, and how Western feminism judges against its own societal model, rather than accounting for a range of economic, political, and social platforms globally. It is necessary to always apply context to analyses of the struggles of third world women and women of color in order to develop a more accurate illustration of their feminist thought, instead of universalizing all women’s experiences.