Seminar Questions

• Why were humanitarians so concerned with women? To what extent can we disentangle humanitarian concerns over women from wider political, social, economic, and religious concerns?
  
• How did Africans respond to humanitarian interventions into women's affairs? How did the responses of men and women differ?

Required Reading

• Susan Pederson, “National Bodies, Unspeakable Acts: The Sexual Politics of Colonial Policy-making,” Journal of Modern History, 63.4 (Dec 1991): 647-80.
• Lynn Thomas, ‘‘Ngaitana’ (I will circumcise myself): The Gender and Generational Politics of the 1956 Ban on Clitoridectomy in Meru, Kenya’, Gender and History, 8.3 (1996): 338-363.
• Christine Walley, “Searching for ‘Voices’: Feminism, Anthropology, and the Global Debates over Female Genital Operations,” Cultural Anthropology, 12.3 (1997), pp. 405-438.

Recommended Reading

• Lynn Thomas, Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya (Berkeley, 2003), pp. 21-51. [e-book]
  

Further Reading

• Janice Boddy, Civilizing Women: British Crusades in Colonial Sudan (2007).
• Janice Boddy, ‘Womb as Oasis: The Symbolic Context of Pharaonic Circumcision in Rural Northern Sudan’, American Ethnologist 9.4 (1982): 682-98.
• Heather Bell, Frontiers of Medicine in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, 1899-1940 (1999), pg. 198-228.
• Amy Kaler, Running After Pills: Politics, Gender, and Contraception in Colonial Zimbabwe (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2003).