Nawal El Saadawi on Female Genital Cutting and Women's Rights in Woman at Point Zero and Searching

Nawal El Saadawi on Female Genital Cutting and Women's Rights in Woman at Point Zero and Searching

Nawal El Saadawi's account of women's rights must be situated in Egyptian women's liberation movement. Women's position in society has been caught between modernists and traditionalists in the process of creating a new social order for the new nation. When El Saadawi wrote her novels Woman at Point Zero (1983) and Searching (1991), an urbanized fundamentalist movement that encouraged underprivileged young professionals, clerks, and college students to return to a traditional way of life was on the rise. To aid in the fight to abolish female genital cutting (FGC), El Saadawi argues that one's body is a gift from God and that the clitoris, as a part of the body, is created for a reason. A psychoanalyst by profession, El Saadawi criticizes Freud's penis envy theory and creates female solidarity in Woman at Point Zero and Searching to restore the clitoris. She compares FGC to other practices to disrupt gender boundaries and the East/West dialectic. This article investigates how El Saadawi deconstructs binary systems such as men/ women, East/West and Islam/Islamism in her layered discourses on FGC and women's rights. This study argues that El Saadawi's discourse must be situated in the long history of the Western civilizing mission, the well-intentioned postmodern relativism, and the liberal progressivism in the FGC eradication campaigns.