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Paper short abstract:

Au les actions humanitaires menées en faveur ds réfugiés concernent les problèmes de santé sexuelle, la lutte contre les violences sexuelles et les violences basées sur le genre et les pratiques sociales néfastes. Cet article analyse les logiques des résistances qui les sous-tendent.

Paper long abstract:

Depuis quelques années, le Cameroun fait face à un afflux massif de réfugiés aujourd'hui installés dans plusieurs régions du pays. Ceux-ci proviennent de RCA et du Nigéria principalement. POur y faire face, les agences humanitaires ont développés plusieurs interventions et depuis quelques temps la question de la prise en compte des besoins spécifiques des femmes les ont conduit à intriduire un paquet d'activités en faveur des femmes et filles. Celles ci concernent notamment les problèmes de santé sexuelle, la lutte contre les violences sexuelles et les violences basées sur le genre et les pratiques sociales néfastes, etc. La mise en oeuvre de ces interventions ne se fait pas sans parfois des réticences socioculturelles liées à la conception que les populations ont de ces orientations souvent considérées comme exogènes à leurs besoins spécifiques. Cette proposition tente d'analyser ces formes de résistances à partir d'une analyse des logiques culturelles qui les sous-tendent. Il sagit de voir comment les populations se construisent ces interventions souvent très peu culturellement ancrées dans les habitudes

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Paper short abstract:

This paper aims at presenting some ethnographic data stemmed from a research conducted in Egypt concerning humanitarian discourse and practice around female circumcision. It will show the role that this plays on the definition of female body and how women interact with this very same definition.

Paper long abstract:

In 1994, during the International Conference on Population and Development convened by the United Nations in Cairo, a shocking video was shown, recorded by CNN and depicting the circumcision of a ten-year-old child living in the same city. Discourses around female circumcision were not new to Egypt or to the international community, but the video, a new episode in a recurrent scandal, enhanced the 'war against bad government' (Foucault 2003:38) - a war fought with ideological weapons produced by various forms of expert knowledge, among which were medical and feminist views. The assignment of value to the 'integrity' of the female body and to women's freedom of choice, both designed according to western canons, led to different actions to 'save' Egyptian women. In this context, development agencies fostered a widespread representation of the 'victim', the woman's mutilated body. Such representation is functional to establishing programmes that do not guarantee freedom of choice but rather require adherence to another female model, one that defines the 'modern' woman.

My paper, based on ethnographic experience, highlights the complexity of these dynamics and the role played by humanitarianism within them. The female body becomes the arena in which local and international economic powers operate, disregarding a real understanding of the practice, its meanings and its eventual change.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper critically analyzes the logics of “global girls’ empowerment” in Ugandan NGOs, revealing them as biopolitical projects that smuggle in neocolonial assumptions about young women’s time, labor, and sexuality.

Paper long abstract:

In the past decade, efforts to control population growth in the global South have taken new face in the global movement to "empower" adolescent girls. Demographers and development experts alike have increasingly focused on early interventions into the female life course in order to delay and reduce pregnancies, interventions they project will help stem the costs of overpopulation and thereby stimulate macroeconomic growth. In Uganda, the world's "youngest" country with more than 78% of the population below the age of 30, population control is an ever-increasing concern. There, development practitioners conducting "girls' empowerment" interventions interpret this global focus on the adolescent girl through interventions that aim to delay the onset of a young woman's reproductive life by reforming her everyday temporality. In particular, Ugandan "girls' empowerment" practitioners seek to curb pregnancies by occupying girls' time with entrepreneurial labor. Officials voiced a fear that when young women remain "idle," they transact sex in order to earn money, or, more simply, because they are bored. These discourses and social practices, which circulate across transnational, national, and local scales, tie young women's everyday temporalities to promiscuity, population control, and to global developmentalist logics. This paper critically analyzes these logics, revealing them as biopolitical projects that smuggle in neocolonial assumptions about young women's time, labor, and sexuality.

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Paper short abstract:

Drawing on fifteen months of fieldwork, this paper explores how efforts to end 'FGM' practices in Maasai communities around the Kilimanjaro region of Tanzania are entangled with various actors' assumptions and assertions about the desirability of women's virginity and sexual fidelity.

Paper long abstract:

In Tanzania's Kilimanjaro region, NGO employees campaigning for the abandonment of 'FGM' predominantly identify as Chagga and are based around urban Moshi, while the primary targets of their interventions are comparatively rural and less affluent Maasai people. Female genital cutting practices largely ended in Chagga communities decades ago, but continue to be the norm in these Maasai communities. Drawing on fifteen months of fieldwork, this paper explores how local efforts to end FGM are entangled with people's assumptions and assertions about the desirability of women's virginity and sexual fidelity. Maasai initiation into adulthood, emurata, involves genital cutting for both women and men. For many, this initiation remains integral to their Maasai identity, personhood, and religious relationship with the deity Eng'ai. Premarital sex is expected, extramarital sex is tolerated, and paternity is recognized in terms of marriage rather than biology. Recent increases in urban migration, however, have for some increased the importance ascribed to biological kinship. Christianity has played a pivotal role in Maasai discourses supporting an end to women's emurata. Maasai Christians advocating against women's emurata have in certain cases encouraged the 'modern' expectation of premarital virginity and discouraged the commonplace practice of child adoption. Non-Maasai NGO employees working around Kilimanjaro generally assume virginity is a traditional requirement for Maasai marriage. This assumption likely stems partly from the historical expectation of virginity prior to Chagga marriage as well as broader transnational discourses which present attempts to ensure virginity and prevent adultery as key reasons for the continuation of FGM procedures.