Abstract
The anti-circumcision movement, intactivism, is an international social and health activist collective that opposes the circumcision of neonates and children. Most men affiliated with this movement are circumcised. Circumcised men who identify as intactivists have developed biographies of harm because they speak about circumcision as mutilating. The way they speak about circumcision provides insight into how circumcision has continued as a sociocultural regime within the epistemic genealogy of circumcision. Despite the men’s activist resistance to neonatal circumcision, the prevalence of neonatal circumcision remains high, suggesting that (dominant) discourses of circumcision are resistant to change.
Aims: This research aimed, first, to explore circumcised intactivist men’s constructions of circumcision and, second, because circumcision has continued as a practice despite such activism, to explain the shortcomings that result from these constructions that impact the movement. The first aim is an empirical aim, and the second is an activist aim.
Research Questions: This research had four research questions (RQs). The first three align with discourse dynamics, and the fourth, which solely responds to the secondary aim, is situated within a memetic theoretical frame. The questions were as follows: RQ1: How do intactivists talk about circumcision?; RQ2: How does circumcised men’s opposition to circumcision shape their sociopsychological selves?; RQ3: How does the way intactivists speak about circumcision reveal the workings of institutions and ideologies?; RQ4: What causes circumcision to be a stable phenomenon?
Structure of the Thesis: This thesis is structured in article format. Four manuscripts make up the body of this research project, which is bookended by two chapters that precede the manuscripts (an introductory chapter and a literature review) and the remaining bookend after these manuscripts is a chapter containing an extended discussion and the presentation of thesis conclusions.
Methods: Ten circumcised intactivist men recruited online were interviewed individually and 6 of them were interviewed again in a focus group to explore how they speak about
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circumcision. The candidate then familiarised himself with the audio recordings of these interview texts and applied a particular version of discourse analysis to the texts. The guidelines to practise this discourse analysis provided conceptual steps, three of which addressed the first three RQs of the thesis. The analysis identified the discourses operating within participants constructions of circumcision. Then, the study explored how these discourses position circumcised intactivist men, followed by identifying and explaining the ideologies and institutions at work within their constructions of circumcision. Thereafter, the shortcomings of the discursive constructions of circumcision within intactivism were considered using a memetic approach.
Findings:
• The first manuscript, which addressed RQ1, reported on the five dominant discourses that were interpreted into a discursive reading of intactivist talk. The findings indicate circumcision was constructed as depriving men of personal agency, sexual sensitivity, and the experience of material fullness on the bodily level. Circumcision was also constructed as violent—the outcome of sinister parenting—and as fraudulent. These findings, as reported in the first manuscript, contribute to understanding intactivist men’s struggling embodiment within activism ideals.
• In the second manuscript, which focused on subjectivities, five subject positions for the circumcised male are reported on: the Circumcision Sufferer, the Scientist, the Amputee, the Ineffective Innovator, and the Reluctant Savior. These subject positions illustrate the shifting and/or multiple ways in which the intactivist circumcised men resisted the perceived mutilating effects of circumcision.
• The third manuscript, which reported on ideologies and institutions, focused on the ways in which intactivists consider themselves at the forefront of an ideological and thus, societal, confrontation between those who advocate for circumcision and those who object to it. Here, findings show circumcision as viewed through the cultural lens of Americanism: Americanisation, the American family, and heteronormativity are posited as means through which Americanism spreads. Located and, even subjugated by the hold of these ideologies and institutions, circumcision of boys is not considered a matter of personal choice but as shaped by dominant social norms of the United States of America.
• The fourth manuscript, which is a non-empirical paper different from the other three manuscripts both in approach and focus, critiqued the framing strategies of intactivism using
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memetic theory, as postulated by Richard Dawkins. Although the anti-circumcision movement, intactivism, has argued that nontherapeutic circumcision of boys and men violates medical ethics and mutilates the penis, it has not offered an alternative (meme) that can compete with the circumcision memeplex. In this manuscript, serving as a conceptual review in the genre of argument, the characteristics of the circumcision meme and its role in kin altruism are explored. That is, in this paper, the argument, partially, is that parents circumcise their sons to ensure their survival, believing circumcision is associated with better health outcomes.
Conclusions: The foreskin, with its many representations and social roles foregrounded in the intactivist project, may not appeal to different audiences because intactivism does not present a unified understanding of what the foreskin is able to do. As a floating signifier, it moves beyond cognitive reasoning and establishes, in the circumcised intactivist man, an emotional resonance through which he feels a strong desire for regaining a (lost) foreskin. Communicating about the embodied importance of the foreskin by convincing an apathetic public of the harms of circumcision is not an easy task for intactivists. This task is made all the more difficult when the strategies of intactivists include labelling circumcision ‘mutilation’. Intactivists also argue that circumcision results in a psychological trauma, one of the framings used to construct circumcision as an unethical act. Such arguments make for a limitation to promoting their activist project because they focus more on blaming others than forming alliances. Their focus on penile mutilation has alienated potential support because arguments about harm and mutilation are psychologised, causing it to appear that circumcision harms exist (merely) in the mind rather than being experienced as a type of harm to the body, thus affecting embodiment. Simply, the ways in which intactivists have constructed circumcision as a form of bodily mutilation and, by extension, that they are victimised men, enforce and maintain a restrictive and self-subjugating narrative. This is the type of discursive regime that compromises or limits society’s receptiveness to the messages of this movement, further limiting the social movement’s international reach.