Baraza: March 25, 2022
This week’s special baraza was also the keynote lecture for the SEAN (Southeast Africanist Network) annual meeting, held by Centre for African Studies. The speaker was Dr. Saida Hodžić, from Cornell University on the topic of “From (In)security to Abolition: African Perspectives on Ruling Imaginaries.”
Dr. Saida Hodžić is associate professor of Anthropology and Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies; her focus is on women’s rights activism, NGO advocacy, humanitarianism, and civic environmental activism. She is also the author of several publications. Her first book The Twilight of Cutting: African Activism and Life after NGOs (University of California Press, 2017) has won the Michelle Rosaldo Book Prize by the Association for Feminist Anthropology and the Amaury Talbot Book Prize for African Anthropology by the Royal Anthropological Institute. Currently, Dr. Hodžić is working on two book manuscripts, Affective Encounters: Humanitarian Afterlives of War and Violence and For Whom is Africa Rising? Unsettling Transnational Feminism in the 21st Century. The talk was based on Dr. Hodžić’s research in the UK and Ghana on the criminalization of female genital cutting. She claims that unlike other forms of solidarity platforms before, during, and after the cold war, gender solidarity promises were failed and unmet. To elaborate her claim, Dr. Hodžić drew from cases from the UK and Ghana in which she examined the women’s rights framework and its codification of law related to FGM for the African women, both migrants and those in the continent. Regarding the UK, she discussed how the security paradigms are double-edged swords for African immigrants and asylum seekers. While those paradigms were meant to provide protection, they are used to figure African immigrants as a threat. Dr. Hodžić stated that when people are construed as threats, they would be seen as subjects whose lives are devalued and undeserving of protection.
Dr. Hodžić shared the experience of a pregnant Ghanaian female student in the UK who happened to be a victim of female genital mutilation (FGM). Against the law that prescribes care and protection, medical workers, security personnel, and social workers treated the mother as a threat to her unborn baby girl. Assessing the woman’s experience of going through the state’s surveillance, scrutiny, travel restriction to Ghana, and denial of asylum, Dr. Hodžić underscored, this case represents the governing logic that ties protection and criminalization to substitute the concern of care. According to Dr. Hodžić African parents, regardless of their legal status, are figured as threats in the broader cultural framework to whiteness as the basis for the UK’s national moral order. Although FGM is significantly declining in African content, especially among the diaspora, the discourse about its intractability and underground proliferation is intensifying, said Dr. Hodžić. Not only in the UK, as she noted, FGM is mobilized in the global north for surveillance and criminalization of immigrants.
Changing the gear to the Ghanaian state’s handling of FGM, Dr. discussed the zero-tolerance campaign imported from the US and repurposed by Inter African Committee (IAC) for traditional practices. IAC is an umbrella organization of 30 African countries and twelve affiliates from the global north dedicated to ending FGM. This continental organization is also known for advocating a pan-African interest. As Dr. Hodžić informed, zero tolerance has become a multi-layered global product; it serves as a penal ideology and practice for the court prosecuting crimes and is adopted by the UN, international NGOs, and many governments.
In addition, Dr. explained a how the implementation of “punitive rationality,” as a technique of governance through criminalization, laid the ground for the zero tolerance campaign against FGM. Ghana was at the forefront of two global waves of criminalizing FGM. In 1994 it became the first independent African country that outlawed circumcision. Following the IAC, other NGOs, and legal feminists campaign for sever measurement, in 2007 the Ghanaian parliament passed a bill proclaiming up to ten years of imprisonment to those involved in FGM, including women who do it willingly. Dr. Hodžić argued that in Ghana and elsewhere in Africa, the desire to criminalize FGM was not intended to respond to the historical context of cutting; there are traditional practices that involve worse cuttings on other parts of the body. Instead, it is a means to ethicize the poor and rural other through ascribed technology. Therefore, the zero-tolerance harsher punishment targeted people who belong to devalued culture and are structurally dispossessed.
In line with her discussion, Dr. Hodžić critically analyzed the stance of carceral feminism. Advocating for policing, criminalization, and imprisonment for gender and sexual violence is at the core of carceral feminism. Carceral feminism is a form of feminist legal advocacy that places a very uncritical faith in the legal framework of punitive practices of governance without analyzing the intended and unintended consequences.
Dr. Hodžić also explicated the term “abolition” that she suggested in the title of the talk. Explored how abolition works extensively and profusely if looked at from the global south, specifically Ghana, Dr. Hodžić argued that Ghanaians practice abolition. According to her, Ghanaians practice of abolishing policing and incarceration is beyond opposing police brutality. Instead, it also involves the refusal of conflating protection to criminalization and policing and expressed through critiquing and struggling against the “punitive rationality” approach. Ghanaians also advocated for a more inclusive approach and vision for the different parts of society that foreground care and mutual relation as part of abolition.
Recap written by Yekatit G. Tsehayu