“There is hardly a reason to circumcise a little boy for medical reasons because those medical reasons don’t exist”, said Dr. Michael Wilks, Head of Ethics at the British Medical Association, who admitted that doctors have circumcised boys for “no good reason”. In the United States, parts of Africa, the Middle East, and in the Muslim world, 13.3 million infant boys and 2 million girls have part or all of their external sex organs cut off for reasons that defy logic and violate basic human rights. Doctors, parents, and politicians have been misled into thinking that circumcision is beneficial, necessary, and harmless. In Circumcision and human rights, internationally respected experts in the fields of medicine, science, politics, law, ethics, sociology, anthropology, history, and religion present the latest research on this tragedy, as a part of the worldwide campaign to end sexual mutilation. They outline steps for eradicating this abusive practice to enable males and females the dignity of living out their lives with all the body parts with which they were born.

Scenes of violence and incisions into the flesh inform the demand for law. The scene of little girls being held down in practices of female circumcision has been a defining and definitive image that demands the attention of human rights, and the intervention of law. But the investment in protecting women and little girls from such a cut is not all that it seems. Law's Cut on the Body of Human Rights: Female Circumcision, Torture and Sacred Flesh considers how such images come to inform law and the investment of advocates of law in an imagination of this scene. Drawing on psychoanalytic and postcolonial theory, and accompanying ideas in political theology, Juliet Rogers examines the language, imagery and excitement that accompanies recent initiatives to legislate against what is called 'female genital mutilation'. The author compliments this examination with a consideration of the scene of torture exposed in images from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. Rogers argues that the modes of fascination and excitement that accompany scenes of torture and female circumcision betray the fantasy of a political condition against which the subject of liberal law is imagined; this is subjectivity in a state of non-mutilation, non-prohibition or, in a psychoanalytic idiom, non-castration. To support the fantasy of this subject, the mutilated subject, the authors suggests, is rendered as flesh cut from the democratic nation state, deserving of only selective human rights, or none at all.

Every year around the world 13.3 million boys and 2 million girls have part or all of their external sex organs cut off. Doctors, parents, and politicians have been misled into thinking that these mutilations are beneficial, necessary and harmless. International respected experts in the fields of medicine, science, politics, law, ethics, sociology, anthropology, history and religion present the latest research, documentation and analysis of this world-wide problem, focusing on the ethical, political and legal aspects of sexual mutilation; the cost and burden to healthcare systems; the latest medical research; anatomical and function consequences; religious and cultural aspects; psychological aspects; and the world-wide campaign to end sexual mutilation.

This volume contains the proceedings of the 10th International Symposium on Circumcision, Genital Integrity, and Human Rights. Authors are international experts in their fields, and the book contains the most up-to-date information on the issue of genital cutting of infants and children from medical, legal, bioethical, and human rights perspectives.

Every year 13.3 millions boys and 2 million girls are subjected to circumcision, the involuntary removal of part or all of their external sex organs. Bodily Integrity and the Politics of Circumcision illuminates the vulnerability of human society to medical, economic, and historical pressures. It provides a much-needed, thoughtful, and detailed analysis of the devastating impact of circumcision on bodily integrity and human rights, and it provides hope for change.

Circumcision is one of the oldest and most common surgical processes, being practised, for a range of medical, social and religious reasons, on up to 30% of males worldwide. It is currently being promoted by a range of health bodies as a means of tackling HIV in developing countries. Yet, there is significant concern about sexual, physiological and psychological effects and complications and its prophylactic effectiveness. In examining a case in which a failed circumcision was performed for religious reasons, the Regional Court in Cologne decided that the practice contravened the bodily autonomy of minors and was subject to the same legislation used to classify female genital cutting as assault. This, understandably, aroused serious concerns among various religious communities who practise circumcision. At the same time as religious groups seek to protect circumcision from comparisons with female genital cutting, there is a trend, particularly in post-colonial thought in the US, to revise negative understandings of female genital cutting by making cautious, positive comparisons with circumcision. This collection considers the apparent contradictions and complications of the contemporary status and deployment of the many forms of genital cutting, raising a serious, wide-reaching question: what scope should society have to impose physically invasive rites on people? This book was originally published as a special issue of Global Discourse.

Who owns your sex organs? Different cultures today and in different epochs have given a variety of answers to this question. It may seem self evident that every individual owns and has sovereignty over his or her own body parts, such as the head, legs, nose, stomach, pancreas, and other body parts. The sex organs, however, seem to be an exception. Even though they are as much an integral part of the individual as a leg or a liver, the sex organs are unique in that many cultures have established laws and taboos over the use and even the mere display of the sex organs. Thus, certain cultures have placed constraints over the individual's ownership of his or her sex organs and actively regulate and restrict the individual's access and use of those organs. In other cultures, the question of ownership of the sex organs is more decisively answered. In any culture where circumcision to any degree of either the male or female is practiced, permitted, encouraged, or even merely tolerated, it is clear that the individual is not considered to own his own sex organs. In the United States today, the medical establishment has created an is considered acceptable and desirable that anyone for environment where it any reason can authorize or execute the amputation of the foreskin from a male child's penis.