Indian Media Reportage of FGC/M- Sensitivity, Imagery, and Language
From questioning the cis-gendered understanding of genital cutting/mutilation to analysing the shock-and-representation used by the media, writer, Nisha Kumari analyses her first-hand experience of reading about FGC/M in the media.
By Nisha Kumari
Mumkin is my first encounter with Female Genital Cutting/Mutilation. I had heard of circumcision or Khatna among men but not among women. And as I learned about the decade-long survivor-led movement on Female Genital Cutting in India, I reflected on — the media representation around the subject, asking myself whose stories we hear and whose stories get lost in the crowd. My piece is my first-hand analysis of the same using the Voyant tool, analysing a random selection of articles from the Indian media, and The Guardian for further comparison.
An average Indian is still profoundly ignorant of the practice of Female Genital Cutting/Mutilation (FGC/M) — prevalent in the Dawoodi Bohra community and some other communities in India. It was only in the last decade that there has been a growing discourse around it as Bohra women came up with a petition to criminalise FGC/M or Female ‘Khatna’. For the uninformed public, media reports and articles often become the first step in the individual’s interaction with the issue and determine their outlook towards it. Of the limited corpus available on the prevalence of FGC/M in India, my article aims to analyse a random selection of online articles in the Indian English news portals about the issue. The news portals are India Today, Hindustan Times, Indian Express. This piece shall also talk about an article in The Guardian compared with Indian media pieces.
The Spectacle of the Other*
For a large part, the economy of online articles is centered around the statistics of ‘for-how-long-can-the-content-keep-the readers’-eyes-on-the-page.’ This can be encashed quite well if the content is about the other*. This renders the reader as a consumer, a spectator interested in the other, and the media then makes a spectacle. The text, images, hypertexts, advertisements all play their role in keeping the spectator glued to the screen.
Here, not only is the other objectified and dehumanised, but it also strips off any acknowledgment of humanity from the spectator, making them only a seeker of the shock-factor, excitement, voyeuristic pleasure, or chilling graphic specifications. We shall also ask if the news media really believes in what it is saying or is it simply putting up an article to utilise and capture an audience that is or might be interested in the issue. One way to access it is to check the depth of their engagement in the issue. In the fast-paced, breaking-news culture, it is quite an expectation from the media houses to study an issue before writing about it deeply. Therefore, in this analysis, we shall be assessing the article’s depth of knowledge about FGC/M, its practice in the Bohra community, and its sensitivity towards the issue and the survivors. We shall also examine the kinds of subject-positions the article develops for the readers and scrutinise it from two particular subject-positions- firstly, of a reader who has no knowledge about FGC/M and is reading about it for the first time and secondly, of someone who has experienced Khatna and is aware of the nuances of the practice. For the former, our quest will be to understand what kind of images, ideas, and emotions the article produces; for the latter, we shall ask if the article is, or is it convincing to take a firmer stance against the practice.
Cis-Gendered understanding of genital cutting and mutilation
One common problem in all the articles is that FGC/M is only related to women. The screenshot of Voyant Tools, a reading and analysis tool attached below, clearly depicts the correlation between FGC/M and women in the four articles. It is assumed that the child on whom it is performed is a girl who grows up to be a cis-woman. The ‘reasons’ cited for FGC/M are to control the woman’s sexuality, maintain her propriety and make her conform to the cis-heteronormative standards of femininity and marriage.
However, there are many transgender individuals on whom FGC/M was carried out in their childhood or adolescence. A non-binary survivor is thus unable to identify themselves with these articles. They may feel alienated, and their experience remains unvoiced and unrepresented in the mainstream media. This alienation from a shared memory further marginalises the marginalised. Moreover, this media assumption can magnify itself in a reader who is already ignorant of this social phenomenon.
TRIGGER WARNING FOR CONTENT BELOW
The shock and awe visualisations
Media 1: An image from India Today article
The article (published on February 6, 2018) opens with a heart-wrenching picture of a pinned-down child, crying and yelling, with the symbolism of red and pink. The paragraph just below uses the second-person pronoun ‘you’ to interpellate the reader as someone who has experienced FGC/M. From both perspectives, we are concerned with, i.e., a novice reader and a survivor, the picture and the graphic narrative are enough to send a shiver down the spine. These can also trigger anxiety in the survivor, and she/they might not feel comfortable continuing with the article.
The most used distinctive word in the article is ‘pleasure’ (used five times), and it concentrates on the sexual aspect of FGC/M for most of the discussion. Religious, cultural, social, and medical explanations used by the Dawoodi Bohra community for FGC/M are not mentioned. The article makes no effort to elaborate about the Bohra community, their practice of Khatna, types of FGC/M. As an article talking of such a sensitive issue, the media should frame it to prevent any stimulation of voyeurism.
“I don’t think I ever enjoyed sex in my marriage. I often wonder what it would have been like if I hadn’t been cut. The sad part is I will never know.” This is the statement of a Khatna survivor in the article. Imagine reading this as a survivor, but just above this, there is a highlighted text in blue, screaming for your attention that says, “Also read: How women can have better orgasms, according to science.” In a sentence, they correlate the FGC survivor with rape survivors, and this can harm the way the survivors think about themselves. The other hyperlink is also about orgasm. They are not ‘polite-topics’ to talk about, but these are hot keywords used to ensure clicks. As a survivor, these links also seem very inappropriate for the concern of the main article. There is one hyperlink that does talk of period-leave, but the headline structure, ‘Do women in India need period leave? Will it ostracise women in the workspace?’ does make you question the unspoken presumptions made by the writer.
Media 2: Hindustan Times- Sensationalistic but loud voices of dissent
Hindustan Times makes use of similar tropes to begin the article. The black, dark background and a wrinkled-hand with a blood-smeared blade, and the first paragraph making similar second-person interpellations to the reader, asking them to imagine something they would never imagine on their own, but the details are so graphic that the images come involuntarily- all these throw the reader off-guard in a vulnerable position. The headline ‘India’s Dark Secret’- bold, capitalised, and dark-red, gives no information to the reader; it is just a sensationalist headline to grab the most eyeballs. The emotions of the survivor are side-lined. Just below it, there are allusions made to the practice of FGC/M in Africa, but no time is spent upon talking about its differences from Khatna. Akin to the India Today article, this too misses many concrete and basic information about Khatna, such as the standpoint of religious leaders, etc.
One positive point about the article is that it brings to the forefront the voices of several Bohra women regarding Khatna. Most of these statements are direct speech that ensures minimum meddling of their experiences in the writing and editing process. The photographs of the survivors and activists (taken with their consent) help the readers see them in reality and help the survivors connect to them. Moreover, there are no distracting or digressing advertisements or hyperlinks in the article.
Media 3: Indian Express- Sensitive language with lots of digressions.
Written in observance of the International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation on February 6, 2020, Indian Express fills in all the gaps of concrete, basic information on FGC/M that were otherwise missing in the previous articles. The headline is informative; the picture used is suggestive and appropriate; the language is not sensational. However, a paragraph into the article and the readers are told the ‘economic costs’ of FGC/M without any coherence of ideas — an odd placement indeed but might as well make you doubt the priorities of the article.
Taking help from WHO, it talks about the practice of FGC/M worldwide and its history but when it turns to the Indian context, it seems the reporter lost interest. Of all the articles, it talks the least about the Bohra community and simply uses ‘Khafd’ without any classification of WHO types of FGC/M which it mentions earlier. The article ends abruptly talking about the petition seeking the ban of the practice by lawyer Sunita Tiwari. It does not expand on it, nor does it provide a final statement like ‘the court is yet to deliver a judgement’, etc, and leaves you hanging with a rather meaningless hyperlink in regards to the article’s concern — Don’t Miss From Explained: ‘What Bhutan’s new tourism fee means for Indian travellers’.
Media 4: The Guardian — Sensitive and empowering voices of the Bohra women against FGC/M
The Guardian’s article (published March 6, 2018) on FGC/M stands out. It is well-rounded and carefully delineates the missing points of the other articles, resolving many of their problems. The report brings in all different perspectives of FGC — religious, cultural, social, medical, and legal, allowing an open and comprehensive discourse. The picture, the language, and the hyperlink of the ban on FGC in Somaliland are appropriate and do not take away the reader’s attention and ensure the reading survivor’s comfort. The Guardian Weekly magazine advertisements can be fairly excused.
CONCLUSION
There are many inherent limitations in this analysis. To start with, it is only about four articles from different Indian media portals. However, the questions asked in the analysis, the criteria of analysis can be used on any number of articles. These articles were also randomly selected based on Google search results for ‘Female Genital Cutting Indian News articles’ that can be generalised in the Indian mediascape. Another limitation is the language of the articles, along with their accessibility. These are online articles in major English news portals in India. We are unsure whether these discourses find space in the printed and television media which the Indian Public primarily uses for news and related information over such socio-cultural phenomena. However, in the future, this analysis’s scope can be expanded to incorporate different forms of content in other Indian languages on FGC/M.
Suggested readings and sources
*The Spectacle of the Other by Stuart Hall
Links of the articles (last accessed December 27' 2021) referred here:
Hindustan Times: https://www.hindustantimes.com/static/fgm-indias-dark-secret/
Indian Express: https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/explained-what-is-female-genital-mutilation-6254573/
The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/mar/06/study-reveals-fgm-india-female-genital-mutilation
All views of the author are personal.
About the Author
“I am Nisha, a final year student of Master’s in Literary and Cultural Studies at the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad. Taking up Cultural Studies as my specialization has been eye-opening. Not that I did not see things before, but I did not have an eye and the required discursive tools to process, articulate and opine on such social phenomena. I’m now more critical and conscious of these happenings.”
