9.1 Introduction

This article argues female genital cutting (FGC) in Southeast Asia from the viewpoint of the increasing global medical control over the female body.Footnote 1 It questions modern medicine’s involvement in women’s health issues and the influence it has on the public health policies enforced by legislators. In this study, we focus on the medicalization of FGC in Southeast Asia as manifestation of the modern medicine system. Our study does not assume that modern medicine necessarily stands for progress and civilization. Rather, we question the aspect of its control in defining and governing the human body and the unquestioned premise that medicine can legally “harm” the human body. We aim to reveal the complexity of FGC issues in the light of the above concerns. Needless to say, the authors do not promote the medicalization of FGC and a “milder” form of FGC. Rather, we aim to question and problematize acts that harm and control the female body.

There are different terms to refer to FGC, for instance, female circumcision, female genital mutilation, female genital cutting, female genital surgery, female genital operation, and female genital alteration. We choose to use FGC in this article for the following two reasons. First, the term FGC covers both the practices performed in Africa and Asia that harm the female genitals as well as its practice in Southeast Asia where the genitals are not mutilated. Merli describes the practice in southern Thailand, saying “a very small piece of skin, no larger than a grain of rice, was removed (in others the skin was only pricked or scratched for the same purpose)” (Merli 2008: 279). Isa et al. described one process as follows: “the method used [in Malaysia]—nicking with a small knife, drawing a drop of blood—leaves no physical damage and does not lead to complications” (Isa et al. 1999: 141–142). Secondly we choose the term to counter a specific aspect of the rhetoric of Southeast Asian discourse around FGC. That is, many religious leaders in Southeast Asian countries call the local practice “female circumcision” (using a translation of the English term) to differentiate it from the African practice. They call the African practice “FGM” and agree that it violates women’s human rights. Yet, they urge for the legitimization of the local practice because they believe that the procedure follows Islam and is different from “FGM.” (Iguchi and Rashid 2020: 175). (Other terms such as female genital mutilation, female circumcision, and female genital operation are used in this article only in direct and indirect quotations from literature.)

While previous scholars have problematized the issue of FGC in terms of a dichotomy between preserving tradition or protecting human rightsFootnote 2 we, in contrast, have situated the issue in the context of the increasing global medical control over the female body, contending that arguments for either stopping or encouraging FGC have both led to increasing medical intervention in women’s bodies. Specifically, we sought to answer the following questions: what are the processes of medical control over women’s bodies through FGC in Southeast Asia? Is FGC being actively promoted or is it an unconscious practice? Using a cultural studies methodology of text analysis, we examined various discourses on FGC in Southeast Asia, including interview results from our own research projects, in an attempt to answer these questions.Footnote 3

Our report is divided into three sections: first, a review of the theoretical discussions on modern medicine and its relation to the female body, Second, an overview of FGC in various parts of Southeast Asia. Third, an examination of how FGC has promoted medical control over the female body in Southeast Asia.

9.2 Theoretical Background

The theoretical framework of our discussion is based on the ideas of Michel Foucault’s and those influenced by him. Foucault held that the development of modern medicine did not reflect progress and civilization, but rather it restructured the concept of the human body and offered a system to control the human body according to a binary opposition between health and disease (Foucault [1963] 1994).

In his History of Sexuality (Histoire de la Sexualité), Foucault ([1976] 1990) argued for two concepts of the human body as forms of biopower: an anatomo-politics of the human body centered on the body as a machine, and a bio-politics of the population focused on the species body.

In concrete terms, starting in the seventeenth century, this power over life evolved in two basic forms; these forms were not antithetical, however; they constituted rather two poles of development linked together by a whole intermediary cluster of relations. One of these poles – the first to be formed, it seems – centered on the body as a machine: its disciplining, the optimization of its usefulness and its docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls, all this was ensured by the procedures of power that characterized the disciplines: an anatomo-politics of the human body. The second, formed somewhat later, focused on the species body, the body imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis of the biological processes: propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity, with all the conditions that can cause these to vary. Their supervision was effected through an entire series of interventions and regulatory controls: a bio-politics of the population. (Foucault [1976] 1990: 139)

In short, modern medicine views the human body as a machine at the individual level and functions as a bio-politics at the population level by medically controlling and intervening with not only patients but also healthy people (Mima 2015: 134).

It is the moral concept of the “model man” or the healthy man that modern medicine utilizes to control individual human bodies and populations. Foucault’s Naissance de la Clinique [The Birth of the Clinic] (1963) questions the idea of progress and civilization in modern medicine and argues that modern medicine has generated the moral concept of the healthy man.

Medicine must no longer be confined to a body of techniques for curing ills and of the knowledge that they require; it will also embrace a knowledge of healthy man, that is, a study of non-sick man and a definition of the model man. In the ordering of human existence it assumes a normative posture, which authorizes it not only to distribute advice as to healthy life, but also to dictate the standards for physical and moral relations of the individual and of the society in which he lives. (Foucault [1963] 1994: 34)

By interlinking with state governments, modern medicine provides those in power with systems to control the human body according to this binary opposition of health and disease (Foucault 1994: 35).

One can trace the history of colonial and postcolonial medical control over the female body in terms of this moral concept of the “model man.” Under European colonialism from the end of the nineteenth to the early twentieth century, systems expanded to non-Western colonies (Arnold 1993; Headrick 1981; Manderson 1996). Colonial governments used public health systems to govern their residents according to this binary opposition of health and disease. Referring to Edward Said’s Orientalism, Lenore Manderson observed that European thought’s binarism of “them/us, inferior/superior, lower/upper and ruled/ruler” underpinned colonial discourses (Manderson 1996: xiv). In other words, the colonies and their residents were seen as signifying “illness” (Wakimura 2002).

Until the eighteenth century women’s and men’s bodies had been observed as similar (Laqueur 1990). However, at the end of the eighteenth century, with the development of modern medicine, a new model formed that stressed the differences between women’s and men’s bodies. Under the model, modern medicine implicitly observed the female body as “illness” because it has organs such as the womb and the ovary that are different from the male body’s (Ogino 2002: 157–163). This is also why obstetrics and gynecology were established as clinical departments that were especially for women.

Ogino further argues that modern medicine has implicitly controlled women by controlling their wombs and ovaries in the sense not only of the control of the organs’ function but also of the moral control of women. In this process, discourses of women’s identity were constructed centered on women’s sexual organs (Ogino 2002: 192). Foucault calls the same process (reducing women’s existence to sex) hystérisation of women (Foucault 1990: 104).

That the colonized female population came to signify women as illness had a double meaning: women were ill in contrast to European women at the level of colonialism and in contrast to colonial men at the level of gender. Specifically, colonial medicine redefined the female body with respect to reproductive health, and as objects of colonial state control (Manderson 1996).

Undoubtedly, colonial governments saw the practice of FGC as a symbol of illness in colonies. According to Boddy, stopping “female circumcision” for the sake of infant mortality and maternal health was a project to “civilize” women in colonial Sudan (Boddy 2007). In short, eradicating the practice aimed to create healthy men and women who could contribute to the colonial economy by creating productive/reproductive labor. Today, governments and international NGOs have carried out projects to stop FGC. Iguchi and Rashid have analyzed postcolonial FGC controversies engendered by the opposition between concepts of universal humanism and cultural relativism and argued that the medical gaze has provided an unquestioned premise for both of these camps (Iguchi and Rashid 2019).Footnote 4

In Southeast Asia, medical control over the female body and women’s sexuality has been promoted since the nineteenth century under colonial rule. However, colonial governments in Southeast Asia, unlike those in Africa, did not pay much attention to the practice of FGC.Footnote 5 Our chief question is: what is the situation today? Do Southeast Asian countries see FGC as an issue of women’s health, sexuality, and human rights, or is it still an unconscious local practice?

9.3 FGC in Southeast Asia

WHO and UN agencies define female genital mutilation (FGM) as “partial or total removal of the female external genitalia or other injury to the female genital organs for non-medical reasons” and consider it “a harmful practice and a violation of the human rights of girls and women” (WHO 2011: 1–2). “FGM” is currently practiced in 33 countries in Africa and in some countries in Asia and the Middle East (UNFPA 2022). It is estimated that 200 million women worldwide have undergone “FGM”, and that 4 million girls are at risk of mutilation each year (UNFPA 2022).

FGC is popular among Muslim women in Southeast Asia. In Southeast Asia, the practice of FGC relates to Islam, while in Africa it predates Islam. Not all Muslim communities perform FGC. There are four schools of thought in Sunna Islam, Hanafi, Hanbali, Maliki, and Shafi’i, and only the Shafi’i school regards “female circumcision” as compulsory [wajib] (Rashid et al. 2009: 5).Footnote 6 Researchers believed that FGC was introduced to Southeast Asia with the advent of Shafi’i Islam in pre-modern times (Clarence-Smith 2008; Feillard and Marcoes 1998). There are academic articles on the practice of FGC in Indonesia (Budiharsana et al. 2003; Clarence-Smith 2008; Feillard and Marcoes 1998; Newland 2006; Putranti 2008; Susilastuti et al. 2017), in Malaysia (Ainslie 2015; Isa et al. 1999; Iguchi and Rashid 2020; Rashid and Iguchi 2019; Rashid et al. 2009, 2020; Salleha et al. 2017), in southern Thailand (Merli 2008, 2010), and in Singapore (Marranci 2015) but none on the practice in Brunei, southern Philippines, or the Muslim communities in Vietnam and Cambodia, although the practice is reported there. Additionally, there have been more studies on FGC in Indonesia than in other Southeast Asian countries.

Indonesia’s Basic Health Research (Riset Kesehatan Dasar, Riskedas) includes information on FGC (Susilastuti et al. 2017: 6). Feillard and Marcoes trace the history of FGC in the country to the Dutch colonial period finding that the oldest record of the practice of FGC in Indonesia is found in Description Historique du Royaume de Macacar by the French writer, Nicolas Gervaise in 1688 (Feillard and Marcoes 1998: 338). Scholars have conducted multiple studies across Indonesia, for instance, in Padang, Padang Pariaman, Serang, Sumenep, Kutai Kartanegara, Gorontalo, Makassar, and Bone (Budiharsana et al. 2003); West Java (Newland 2006); and Yogyakarta and Madura (Putranti 2008). Susilastuti et al. conducted surveys in the seven areas with the highest prevalence of FGC: Gorontalo, Bangka Belitung, Banten, West Java, Rian, South Kalimantan, and West Sulawesi (Susilastuti et al. 2017).

According to Indonesia’s Basic Health Research 2013, 51% of women in the country had been circumcised at that time and in most cases traditional practitioners had performed the practice. Most women had undergone the practice between age one and five (Susilastuti et al. 2017: 6). Clarence-Smith observed that FGC became more popular and widespread with the Islamic revivalism that started in the 1970s (Clarence-Smith 2008: 20), and Susilastuti et al. later observed that “Muslims who did not carry out FGM/C on their daughters were then encouraged to adopt the practice” (Susilastuti et al. 2017: 3).

Furthermore the increasing medicalization of FGC in Indonesia encouraged the spread of the practice: “Clinics now offer the service of ear piercing (tindik), vaccination, and child delivery in one package…The coupling of circumcision with ear piercing for girls is increasingly taken for granted to the point that the term sunat is sometimes used for ear piercing” (Feillard and Marcoes 1998: 356).

The Indonesian government takes an ambivalent attitude toward FGC. In 2006, the Ministry of Health (MOH) “issued a regulation prohibiting all forms of female genital cutting to be performed by medical professionals” (Susilastuti et al. 2017: 4) but in 2010 it “overturned an existing ban on the practice under pressure from Indonesia’s largest Muslim cleric body, the Majelis Ulema” (Patel and Roy 2016: 6). The Majelis Ulema issued a fatwa in 2008 “stating that the prohibition of FGM/C was against the Islamic law” (Susilastuti et al. 2017: 4).

As a result of a compromise, the MOH introduced guidelines on how to perform FGM/C based on the fatwa; the guidelines allowed medical professionals to perform the procedure, causing disputes among medical professionals and human rights groups that raised concerns about the medicalization of FGC (Patel and Roy 2016: 6). In 2014, the Indonesian government revoked the 2010 law, stating that FGC lacked medical urgency; however, critics contended that “this 2014 regulation [was] a step backwards rather than forward because it still allows for the practice of FGC to be continued without any State intervention and facilitation” (Patel and Roy 2016: 6).

It is often said that FGC in Indonesia is largely symbolic, with no injury. However, Susilastuti et al. showed that only 1.2% of practitioners performed the “symbolic” act with no injury and 33.2% of women had undergone type 1, partial, or total removal of the clitoris and/or the prepuce (Susilastuti et al. 2017: 69, 117). It is not clear, however, whether the respondents in that study had adequate anatomical knowledge of the female genitalia to answer the questions adequately.

The Malaysian government has no official statistics on FGC, and there are only seven academic articles on the practice in Malaysia even though the practice is very common among Malay women (Ainslie 2015; Iguchi and Rashid 2020; Isa et al. 1999; Rashid and Iguchi 2019; Rashid et al. 2009, 2020; Salleha et al. 2017).Footnote 7 In a recent study in rural northern Malaysia by Rashid and Iguchi, 99.3% of respondents had undergone FGC (Rashid and Iguchi 2019: 1, 4).Footnote 8

According to Isa et al., the procedure involves nicking the skin of the clitoris with a small knife, resulting in only a drop of blood (Isa et al. 1999: 141–2). In a survey of medical doctors, Rashid et al. found that “most doctors used instruments to nick (29.3%) and prick the prepuce of the clitoris (25.3%)” (Rashid et al. 2020: 9). The method used in Malaysia can be categorized as WHO’s type four (Rashid et al. 2020).

In one recent study, 87.6% of respondents believed that FGC was compulsory in Islam, and nearly all, (99.3%), wanted to continue the practice in the future (Rashid and Iguchi 2019: 4). There were contradictory findings in Malaysia concerning FGC and sexual desire. Some study survey respondents thought that the reason for FGC was to control women’s libidos (Isa et al. 1999; Rashid and Iguchi 2019; Salleha et al. 2017), but others believed the practiced increased the libido (Rashid et al. 2009).

Rashid et al. reported a current trend of medicalization of FGC in Malaysia evident in quantitative data and interviews with medical doctors who had performed FGC (Rashid et al. 2020). For example, although fewer FGCs are being performed by traditional midwives (bidans), more are being conducted in clinics in rural Malaysia (Rashid and Iguchi 2019: 4; Rashid et al. 2009: 3). However, as in Indonesia, the Malaysian government shows an ambivalent attitude toward the practice of FGC. The UN reported that Malaysia had “taken effective and legal measures to prohibit the practice of female genital mutilation and raised awareness of its prohibition” (UN 2003: 199). However, the Department of Islam Development Malaysia (Jabatan Kemajuan Islam Malaysia [JAKIM]) issued a fatwa in 2009 to say that “female circumcision” in Malaysia is legal from the Islamic point of view (JAKIM 2009).

In February 2018, several delegates from Muslim countries to the 69th Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women strongly criticized Malaysia for allowing FGC,Footnote 9 but in November 2018, Malaysia’s UN delegates asserted that “female circumcision” was Malaysia’s cultural obligation at the Universal Periodic Review of the United Nations Human Rights Council. Critics considered this a self-justification, and National Human Rights Commission Malaysia accused the delegates of making an “unconvincing and misleading” statement.Footnote 10 The then Deputy Prime Minister Datuk Seri Dr. Wan Azizah Wan Ismail affirmed the government’s standpoint that “female circumcision” in Malaysia was unlike that practiced in African countries.Footnote 11 Again, the Southeast Asian rhetoric came into play. Wan Azizah carefully chose the term “female circumcision” for referring to the Malaysian practice to differentiate it from the African “FGM”.

FGC is popular among Muslim women in Malaysia and is embedded deeply in their daily lives. Most of them had not recognized it as an issue of dispute until the debates between Malaysia’s UN delegates and National Human Rights Commission Malaysia.

In southern Thailand, Malay-speaking Muslims are the majority. “Among the Thai-and Malay-speaking Muslims living in southern Thailand, the traditional midwife performs a mild form of female genital cutting (FGC) on baby girls” (Merli 2008: 32). Merli conducted research in the Satun Province in Thailand bordering the Malaysian state of Perlis, and focused on the multiplicity of local discourses regarding female and male circumcision: “People have different views of the practice: men question the cutting, considering it both un-Islamic and un-modern, whereas women generally support it” (Merli 2008: 32). In Satun, “female circumcision” is markedly gender-segregated and is not medicalized, whereas male circumcision has become medicalized and is publicly displayed. In Singapore, meanwhile, Marranci observed that women performed female genital operation as a mark of their Malay Muslim identity. Marranci indicates that the government was silent about the practice because a ban could have been construed as an attack on the already-threatened Malay identity (Marranci 2015: 288).

9.4 FGC Through the Medical Gaze

The WHO and other international organizations often argue that “FGM” is performed to suppress women’s sexual desire (WHO 2022). However, we here focus on the problem of dominance and control in the act of seeing the female body as an object of medical science. In other words, the question here is whether the female body is seen by the medical gaze, that is, in terms of the two forms of biopower in the Foucauldian sense: the anatomo-politics of the human body centered on the body as a machine and the bio-politics of the population focused on the species body (Foucault [1976] 1990: 139).

We discuss Southeast Asian discourses of FGC through the medical gaze from three viewpoints. The first is medical FGC intervention by the state. The crucial question here is whether the state public health department intervenes in FGC and, if so, how state intervention can be evaluated from perspectives such as religion and culture. The second viewpoint we address is the medicalization of FGC and whether it constitutes medical intervention in the female body, and the third is the meaning of FGC for the local people. Is it a traditional practice, the meaning of which has been constructed outside of the modern framework, or has it been restructured in the processes of modernization and medicalization?

As stated earlier, medical control of the female body began in colonial times in Southeast Asia. Scholars, writers, and administrators at the time described FGC practices in colonial Indonesia (Feillard and Marcoes 1998) yet there is no record that colonial governments or public health departments attempted to stop the practice of FGC.

In contemporary Indonesia, the MOH has national statistical data on FGC (Susilastuti et al. 2017: 6) and recognizes the practice in its public health policy, but the government takes an ambiguous attitude toward the practice. In contrast, other Southeast Asian countries do not have official statistics on FGC. The government of Singapore situates the issue of FGC within ethnic politics and seemingly tries to avoid interventions (Marranci 2015).

Despite the absence of official data, FGC is a popular practice in Malaysia. The Malaysian government does not address it as a public health matter but recognizes the practice from a religious viewpoint. In 2009, JAKIM issued a fatwa to say that “female circumcision” is compulsory in Islam.

The Fatwa Committee National Council of Islamic Religious Affairs Malaysia held on 21st–23rd April 2009 has discussed on rulings on female genital mutilation. The Committee has decided that female circumcision is part of Islamic teachings and it should be observed by Muslims. (JAKIM 2009)

This is a state intervention in FGC, seemingly on the grounds of religion, but we argue that it is nonetheless a medical intervention because the logic of the 2009 fatwa derives its terms from the anatomo-politics of the human body centered on the body as a machine. Iguchi and Rashid might call it the anatomical gaze, under which the human body is recognized as an assembly of different parts (Iguchi and Rashid 2020: 180). The 2009 fatwa provides anatomical details of the differences between “female circumcision” as an Islamic obligation, and “FGM” as banned by the WHO. After explaining the WHO’s four types of “FGM”, the resolution argues that a part of the skin in the upper part of the female genital is cut in Malaysian “female circumcision.”Footnote 12 Clearly the religious discourse co-opts medical terminology to justify and explain the resolution’s legitimacy.

International organizations such as the WHO oppose the practice of FGC by medical practitioners and health care providers because it is harmful and has no medical value (WHO 2011: 1–2). The WHO defines medicalization of “FGM” as a “situation in which FGM is practiced by any category of healthcare provider, whether in a public or private clinic, at home or elsewhere” (WHO 2010: 2). To the WHO, FGC is not medicine at all, and any interventions should be aimed at abolishing the practice (Shell-Duncan and Hernlund 2000: 109).

How can one see this process of medicalization of FGM from the Foucauldian viewpoint? According to Rashid et al., the Malaysian government is silent on medical practitioners’ performing FGC, and “the Malaysian Medical Council (MMC) has not stated its official stand on the practice of FGC among doctors” (Rashid et al. 2020: 5). Furthermore, 20.5% of the Muslim doctors in their survey practiced FGC and most had only received unofficial training from their colleagues (Rashid et al. 2020: 8–10). Nearly two thirds, 60%, believed that FGC was legal in Malaysia (Rashid et al. 2020: 13). Most of those who performed the practice obtained consent first, and some asked whether patients had infectious diseases, bleeding disorders, or other ailments (Rashid et al. 2020: 9–11). Most of the doctors performed WHO type 4, nicking or pricking the prepuce of the clitoris, and most used local anesthesia (Rashid et al. 2020: 9). After the procedure, more than half applied antiseptic, and nearly all said that they had never encountered any complications (Rashid et al. 2020: 8–9).

We think it is clear that FGC as practiced by doctors in Malaysia is a “medical” procedure even though the WHO does not allow the practice. In a survey conducted by Rashid et al., 63.9% believed that medical doctors should be the ones to conduct FGC in the future, citing the medical arguments of fewer complications and better hygiene, safety, and expertise (Rashid et al. 2020: 15). These doctors clearly viewed the practice of FGC under the medical gaze in the Foucauldian sense. Therefore, the acts of both medicalizing FGC and stopping the practice promote medical control over the female body.

The question remains as to the local peoples’ perceptions and interpretations of the practice of FGC. In modern times, medical science and knowledge regarding the human body have converged with public government policy to promote governmental control over the female body. We examined the extent of this process through the discursive formation of FGC.

Newland’s study on West Java showed that “female circumcision” was an unconscious practice for the local people. Referring to Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, Newland described the practice as “unproblematized” (Newland 2006: 397). The meaning of the practice has been constructed outside of the modern framework. Newland found that female circumcision in West Java was performed as one of a series of birth rituals, and that “circumcision inscribe[d] the major distinction between Muslim and heathens” (Newland 2006: 396–397). In Newland’s study, the local people did not consider the practice of FGC through the medical gaze.

Similarly, when we conducted research in the rural areas of northern Malaysia in 2016, villagers told us that all Muslim sects in the world perform the same practice as they do; they did not know that the international community problematized FGC. As in West Java, the local people in northern Malaysia thought that circumcision was a mark of Muslim identity. A village woman said,

Dia [sunat] adalah salah satu tanda-tanda nak tentukan bahawa kita seorang Islam. Untuk bezakan antara yang bukan Islam dengan Islam. Dengan cara kita bersunat. [Sunat is one of the marks by which we can differentiate Muslims from non-Muslims. Therefore, we practice circumcision.]Footnote 13

However, although female circumcision was an unproblematized practice for the local people in northern Malaysia, they did not create their own autonomous cultural sphere on the subject. Medical terminologies and viewpoints gradually came to pervade the local people’s ideas and consciousness. According to Rashid and Iguchi, female respondents generally preferred that medical practitioners perform FGC because of hygiene: “More younger respondents were in [sic] the opinion that doctors should conduct FGC as compared with older respondents who preferred traditional midwives” (Rashid and Iguchi 2019: 4). This shows a gradual transformation of the people’s ideas regarding FGC. Rather than situating the human body in cultural and religious frameworks, increasing numbers of people came to view it from a medical aspect.

Merli’s study in southern Thailand reflected a process of negotiation between the global and local discourses on FGC (Merli 2008). Merli found that the local women in Satun did not consider that medical practitioners might perform FGC.

One of the reasons women in Satun do not consider the medicalisation of the female sunat possible is the experience they have of the routine medical interventions on female genitalia during childbirth, which they find inexplicable and harmful. Where medical authorities have monopolised women’s bodies in the context of human reproduction, the bidan and other Muslim women guard their authority and autonomy to perform a slight cut which perpetuates their ethnic and religious identities. (Merli 2008: 39)

Ogino has explained that the female body became a male-centric society’s target of control in the nineteenth century when male doctors began to confront the process of child delivery, which had traditionally been attended by female midwives (Ogino 2002:157–163). Ogino’s analysis appears to be one-way, whereas Merli studied local women who were resistant to medical control and were attempting to maintain their autonomy over their bodies in the face of attempts at medical control as evidenced in the above quotation. The process of medical control is not one-way but is always a process of contestation and negotiation.

9.5 Conclusion

In this article, we examined discourses on FGC in Southeast Asia, analyzed them with regard to the increasing medical control over women’s bodies, and identified three points. The first was the state’s use of FGC to medically control the female body. Distinct state medical control over FGC does not appear to exist in Southeast Asia, although the government of Indonesia does partly intervene in the practice from a public health perspective. Yet the interesting part is that from the Foucauldian viewpoint, the religious resolution has incorporated the medical gaze to consolidate its stance.

The second point we identified was the ambivalent nature of medicine. Modern medicine was formed on the assumptions of progress and civilization, but Foucault questioned these assumptions and argued that modern medicine embraced the moral concept of the model man; through that concept, modern medicine has controlled populations using the medical gaze (Foucault 1994). Indeed, to the extent of objectifying the female genitalia, medical practitioners are sharing the same medical gaze whether they are promoting FGC or attempting to stop it. Either way, they are implicitly contributing to medical control over the female body.

The third point we explored was whether local people themselves had internalized the medical gaze around FGC and considered the practice as a medical one, and we found that the answer was not simple. Local people initially thought that FGC marked religious identity, but they increasingly came to view it through the medical gaze as did the European colonists. In this sense, Southeast Asia presents as a complex site of negotiation and contestation between the local and global discourses on FGC.