The Common Sense Cut and the Gendered Body Project

Abstract

The U.S. discourse regarding the practice of genital cutting differs depending on the perceived sex of the body. The authors understand this difference as crucial to the construction of gender normative body projects in the contemporary United States. Using a content analysis of 172 randomly sampled newspaper articles in the United States, we present differences in not only the value position of media but in the framing of genital alteration across sexes or genders and national contexts. We find that U.S. media overwhelmingly exhibits a positive viewpoint regarding the circumcision of male bodies and considers the question to be a fundamentally medical one. Our analysis suggests that while personal narrative is employed to center the personhood of females who have been circumcised, the device is also used to normalize parental choice when discussing male circumcision. Our analysis shows that U.S. media engages almost exclusively white male voices as experts in the discussion of normative male body presentation, while a relative diversity of opinions is deemed legitimate for female bodies and genitals. Given these findings, we argue that media-driven discourse is key to perpetuating the currently normative body projects that undergird conceptions of bodies as fundamentally different dependent on gender role.