Abstract
After briefly examining the discursive asymmetry in writings about excision (as I call it in my book Between Rites and Rights [Stanford UP, 2007]) and circumcision, I discuss four moments in the literary history of autobiographies around male circumcision—the seventeenth-century “confessions” from Conversos in Spain and Portugal; two Kenyan ethnoautobiographies from the 1960s, Mugo Gatheru’s Child of Two Worlds and Karari Najama’s Mau Mau From Within; Jacques Derrida’s Circumfession introduce a necessary subjectivity and redress the wrongs in what was originally a rite.
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Zabus, C. (2010). Writing Rites Gone Wrong: Autobiography, Testimonials, and Their Relevance to the Debate Around Genital Alterations. In: Denniston, G., Hodges, F., Milos, M. (eds) Genital Autonomy:. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9446-9_15
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