From the War on Terror to the Moral Crusade Against Female Genital Mutilation: Anti-Muslim Racism and Femonationalism in the United States

On January 5, 2021, just a few days before leaving office, President Donald Trump signed into law the “STOP FGM Act of 2020” (H.R.6100). This new federal law prohibiting female genital mutilation (FGM) ¹ was celebrated as a victory by anti-FGM advocates, American feminist NGOs, and the then Republican-controlled Congress, which voted unanimously in favor of the bill. H.R.6100 replaces and strengthens the penalties provided by the 1996 ban on FGM. As I will discuss in detail below, this older ban had been ruled to be unconstitutional in 2018, during the first federal criminal court case concerning FGM in Michigan, which involved several members of the Dawoodi Bohra community (a Muslim sect of Indian origin).

However, the enactment of H.R.6100 in 2020 can be interpreted in several ways. On the one hand, the American government's resolve in helping to eradicate FGM is praiseworthy. Since the 1990s, international organizations such as the World Health Organization and UNICEF have campaigned for the abolishment of a wide range of genital modification practices undergone by underage girls and adult females, collectively referred to as FGM. This umbrella term comprises the pricking, nicking, cutting, or sewing together of one or several parts of the female external genitalia for non-medical reasons. ² These practices are most predominant in African and South-Asian countries, and, because of immigration, within diasporic communities in the global North. FGM has been on the radar of Western feminists since the 1970s, as many forms of the practice have harmful consequences on women's mental, sexual, and reproductive health. Hence, most national governments, in both the global North and South, have made legal provisions to ban FGM.

On the other hand, this paper also argues that the issue of FGM has been instrumentalized in order to bolster anti-Muslim discourses. It should not be forgotten that the president who signed the new anti-FGM bill also issued an executive order banning immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries, separated immigrant children from their parents at the US–Mexico border, supported white supremacist groups, and made openly racist and sexist comments. Thus, how should we understand Donald Trump's willingness to sign a Democratic-authored bill ³ that protects immigrant, Black, and/or Muslim women and girls from FGM? To answer this question, this paper focuses on the aftermath of the landmark 2017 FGM criminal court case (hereafter referred to as the “Michigan case”), which led to the mass mobilization of Republican lawmakers with the aim of introducing state-level anti-FGM laws. Drawing on publicly available material, including national and local newspaper articles, governmental texts, and lawmakers’ official webpages and social media posts, this paper explores how Republican lawmakers framed their commitment to ending FGM and justified the need to pass legislation. To be clear, this paper does not in any way suggest that outlawing or advocating against FGM is wrong. Rather, it shows how conservatives’ contemporary political opposition to FGM in the U.S. is intertwined with anti-Muslim racism.

Although FGM is not an Islamic practice and is also carried out by non-Muslim groups, ⁴ I argue that the Michigan case, which involved a visibly Muslim group (i.e., wearing distinguishable religious clothing), spurred a resurgence of anti-Muslim discourses among politicians and in the media. These discourses notably included rescue narratives regarding Muslim women, accompanying discourses of “U.S. gender exceptionalism” (Puar, 2007), and depictions of Muslims as threats to national security, all of which initially came to the fore after 9/11 as a means of legitimating the “war on terror.” These narratives explicitly target immigrants, particularly of Muslim heritage.

In their joint mobilizations in purported support for women's rights, conservative lawmakers and liberal feminists form “unholy alliances” (Farris, 2017), with both groups supporting restrictive migration policies and discriminatory laws while drawing on feminist vocabularies and concerns. This phenomenon, termed “femonationalism” by Italian sociologist Sara Farris (2017), has attracted much academic attention, especially in Western Europe (notably, on the French debate regarding the Muslim headscarf). By contrast, little is known about the mechanisms of femonationalism in the U.S., and even less so in the realm of FGM. Nevertheless, FGM legislation is particularly relevant to the study of American femonationalism. Two observations support this assertion. Firstly, the STOP FGM Act of 2020 shares troubling features with its predecessor, the 1996 FGM ban. Like its successor, the latter was Democratic-authored, yet passed as an amendment of a Republican-sponsored bill (the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act), which eventually worsened the conditions of immigrant women of color in the asylum system (Bader, 2022). Secondly, as I will demonstrate, the intense mobilization of white, male, and overtly xenophobic Republican lawmakers against FGM cannot be explained as the result of a genuine concern to combat violence against immigrant women.

In the following section, I review the literature to show how femonationalism in the U.S. is grounded in rescue narratives regarding Muslim women, which gained unprecedented traction during the “war on terror.” I then describe the Michigan case and show how it shifted the framing of FGM in American public discourse from being an African issue to a Muslim one. Subsequently, I highlight how Republican lawmakers were the primary sponsors of two-thirds of the anti-FGM state laws that were introduced in the aftermath of the Michigan case and unpack the symbolic dimensions of these legislative actions. Finally, I analyze how Republican lawmakers have used FGM to support their femonationalist rhetoric, which seeks to depict Muslim culture as “backward” and “oppressive” of women. I therefore demonstrate how the legislative measures to combat FGM were bound up with anti-Muslim racism.

The War on Terror and Femonationalism

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks in 2001, the U.S. embarked on a series of military interventions (beginning, almost immediately, in Afghanistan) that it labeled the "war on terror.” Although these were primarily framed as a campaign against Islamist militant groups (particularly al-Qaeda), the interventions were also justified on the basis of women's rights. In fact, as Charles Hirschkind and Saba Mahmood (2002, p. 340) show, Afghan women's living conditions under the Taliban regime had already been a rallying concern in the U.S. for at least two years prior to 9/11, providing “a point of unity for groups from a range of political perspectives: from conservatives to liberals and radicals, from Republicans to Democrats, and from Hollywood glitterati to grass roots activists.” The Bush administration capitalized on this emerging nationwide concern for Afghan women. For example, shortly after Republican President George Bush Jr. announced the “war on terror” in September 2001, First Lady Laura Bush underscored, in a radio address two months later, that the American military intervention in Afghanistan was also motivated by a concern for the rights of Afghan women (Berry, 2003, p. 137). U.S. foreign policy thus sought legitimation by presenting itself not only as fighting Afghan men (depicted as terrorists), but also as liberating Afghan women, who were presented as imprisoned in a “backward” and oppressive patriarchal culture (Abu–Lughod, 2013; Berry, 2003; Riley, 2013). As Hirschkind and Mahmood (2002, p. 341) write: “The twin figures of the Islamic fundamentalist and his female victim helped consolidate and popularize the view that such hardship and sacrifice were for Afghanistan's own good.” The invasion of Afghanistan was thus framed as doubly “necessary,” not only for purported American national security interests but also for women's rights (Riley, 2013, p. 2).

The “war on terror” and its propaganda exemplified what Robin Lee Riley (2013, p. 2) calls “transnational sexism,” whereby ideas about Muslim women are “deployed, used and propagated” to Western audiences through public discourse. In fact, Muslim women were depicted both as victims and threats (Scott, 2012). As Claudia Brunner and Daniela Hrzan's (2009) demonstrate with reference to the examples of women as respectively victims of FGM or perpetrators of female suicide bombing, these dichotomous and contradictory representations robbed non-Western women of their agency by presenting them in both cases as deterministically constrained and defined by a patriarchal and oppressive culture. Additionally, rescue narratives silenced the voices of Muslim women who challenged their portrayal as victims. As Fatima El-Tayeb (2011) argued with reference to what she calls the “mute Muslima,” in Western public discourse Muslim women have little say in whether they are oppressed. Unveiled Muslim-born women who adopt Western mainstream critiques of Islam often benefit from media platforms disproportionate to their numbers. The admiration shown by many American and European lawmakers and liberal feminists for American-Dutch-Somali feminist and anti-FGM advocate, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, is a telling example of this tendency.

Depictions of Muslim women as under the control of a patriarchal culture are a powerful narrative that upholds representations of the U.S. as morally superior to Muslim countries. The characterization of Muslim women as oppressed functions by way of contrast to present American women as liberated (Razack, 2008, p. 86). This suggests that the U.S. government champions gender equality, thereby legitimizing the country's foreign policy interventions to “rectify” the situation of Muslim women worldwide (Riley, 2013, p. 2). Femonationalism functions likewise; rescue narratives of Muslim women abroad are transposed onto immigrant women at home, shifting the discourse from saving Muslim women over there to saving Muslim women over here. The “war on terror” thus justifies a “war on multiculturalism” within the state's borders. Multiculturalism is seen as a threat to Western liberal values by right-wing parties and some feminists who “in the name of women's rights” (Farris, 2017) criticize the so-called Western twin policies of laissez-faire diversity tolerance and immigrant assimilation. As Sirma Bilge (2010, p. 9) argues, “Contemporary debates over citizenship and immigrant integration are increasingly characterized by the prescriptive normativity of gender equality and sexual freedoms, articulating women's rights and gay rights to the nation to draw civilisational boundaries between Western modernity, framed as liberal and secular, and non-Western cultures, supposed to be illiberal and prone to religious fanaticism.” Drawing on Eléonore Lépinard (2020), the place to give to pious Muslim women in the Western world (particularly on the question of the headscarf) constitutes such a contentious point among feminists that it has resulted in an ideological cleavage between “white and racialized feminists” (Lépinard, 2020, p. 10), with the former notably rejecting the compatibility of the headscarf with feminist theory and practice. This point of view has gained strength across Western Europe, particularly through public debates regarding the Muslim veil.

Femonationalist discourses are therefore mobilized by both feminists who resent Islam and right-wing actors who justify their racist ideologies in the name of Muslim women's liberation. As Ferruh Yilmaz (2015, p. 12) puts it, “Successive chains of moral panics and crises around Muslim immigrants’ ‘cultural practices’ such as honor killings, forced marriages, headscarves, female circumcision and homophobia create a sense of imminent threat and push progressive forces (e.g., feminists and gay movements) to forge unlikely alliances with right-wing groups against the insidious threat.” Moreover, following Jasbir Puar (2007), the “war on terror” was also supported by members of LGBTIQ+ communities, who actively participated in the demonization of Muslims as homophobic and intolerant of sexual diversity. As Puar (2007, p. xxiv) argues, “U.S. sexual exceptionalism” was thus upheld through homonationalism, that is, “the dual movement in which certain homosexual constituencies have embraced U.S. nationalist agendas and have also been embraced by nationalist agendas.” That said, in contrast to femonationalism, homonationalism is not an ideology that all right-wing parties in the global North have embraced. While the framing of gay rights as national values is mobilized by the Dutch populist Party for Freedom (Mepschen et al., 2010), it is rejected by the conservative Swiss People's Party, which opposes gay marriage (UDC Suisse, 2020). Femonationalism is thus a particularly powerful ideology, as it enables right-wing parties to participate in broad coalitions, alongside parties with whom they do not necessarily share similar views on social policies.

As is characteristic of femonationalist rhetoric, right-wing lawmakers employ a feminist vocabulary and articulate feminist concerns within a racist and anti-immigration discourse. In particular, by emphasizing the “insurmountability” (Balibar, 1991) of cultural differences between Muslims and non-Muslims, they promote (cultural) racism “under the guise of feminist liberation” (Al-Saji, 2010, p. 887). As Jackie Hogan and Kristin Haltinner (2015, p. 531) point out, most right-wing populists have foregrounded arguments that are “carefully colourblind, focusing on irreconcilable cultural differences or the refusal of today's immigrants to assimilate.” Given the idea of the “incompatibility” between local and immigrants’ culture (Balibar, 1991; Yılmaz, 2015, p. 39), female immigrants are expected to adopt Western lifestyles. If they do not or cannot assimilate, by virtue of being purported “prisoners of traditions” (Kaya, 2012), then they must be “saved” (Abu–Lughod, 2013). Rescue is implemented through legislative measures imposing cultural change (meaning assimilation) and prosecuting those who allegedly resist. Correspondingly, a feminist vocabulary enables public endorsement of restrictive migration policies and discriminatory laws. Femonationalist rescue narratives around Muslim women in particular, but also non-Western women more broadly, therefore serve the purpose of legitimating state intervention, whether military (as in the “war on terror”) or legislative (as in the “war on multiculturalism”).

Nevertheless, despite the rescue narratives, femonationalism leads to adverse outcomes for immigrant women, constraining their rights. Similarly to how the conditions of Afghan women have worsened because of the U.S.-led military intervention (Hirschkind & Mahmood, 2002, p. 341; Rich, 2014, p. 1), Muslim and immigrant women have been adversely affected by legislation against FGM. As I have shown elsewhere (Bader, 2022), the 1996 federal law against FGM was passed as part of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, a Republican-authored law limiting access to asylum in the U.S. (including for women claiming asylum because of FGM). Likewise, the Swiss 2012 FGM Act, which was enthusiastically supported by the conservative Swiss People's Party, led in 2018 to the first ever conviction of a woman for carrying out FGM on her daughters prior to migration (Bader & Mottier, 2020). During the trial, evidence was submitted suggesting that the mother, who had been denounced by her ex-husband, was illiterate, a victim of domestic abuse, and had required FGM in a country (Somalia) where it is still a social norm, and is barely prosecuted (Bader & Mottier, 2020). Notwithstanding the above, as a direct consequence of the Swiss FGM Act, the mother was threatened with deportation. These discrepancies between FGM policies (promoting the protection of women and girls affected by FGM) and migration policies (regulating the entry and stay of the same women), shed light on the fact that the femonationalist ideologies underpinning anti-FGM legislation primarily aim to serve nationalist projects, rather than improving the living conditions of immigrant women affected by this bodily practice.

In fact, conservative lawmakers’ use of the femonationalist rhetoric serves not only to push their anti-immigration agenda, but also to increase the popularity of their party through electoral success. As Farris (2017) points out, the combination of gender and immigration issues enables right-wing parties to reap a dual reward in terms of electoral gain: it secures the votes of women eager to push a feminist agenda as well as those of white citizens afraid of the potential repercussions of immigration on their daily life. Therefore, the “threatening immigration” frame, which promotes restrictive and punitive measures for immigrants, ensures the Republican party's electoral successes (Hout & Maggio). As Mayda et al. (2016, p. 1) show, Republican votes increase when immigration is perceived as a major issue because of the rise in the number of immigrants, and they decrease “when the share of naturalized migrants in the voting population increases.” Thus, limiting immigration—and the number of voting citizen immigrants—is also a political strategy to ensure the Republican party's prosperity.

The Michigan Case: Challenges to Mainstream Preconceptions About FGM

The first federal court case under the 1996 FGM law began in April 2017. A 44-year-old female physician and American citizen of Indian heritage, Jumana Nagarwala, was charged with the nicking of the clitoral hood ⁵ of 9 girls. A second male physician, Fakhruddin Attar, was prosecuted for allowing this procedure to be carried out at his clinic in Michigan, and for assisting Nagarwala during the interventions. The 7-year old girls from Michigan, Minnesota, and Illinois were brought by their mothers to undergo what Nagarwala claimed was “a religious procedure, not FGM” (Snell, 2017). All the protagonists involved (i.e., physicians, parents and children) were from the Dawoodi Bohra community, a Muslim sect from India.

The Michigan case challenged several preconceptions about FGM, which are mainstream in the Western press (Bader, 2019). Neither did the procedure lead to severe complications, nor was it performed by an untrained practitioner, and nor were the protagonists of African heritage. The procedure carried out by the Dawoodi Bohra community, nicking the clitoral hood, is considered to be one of the less invasive types of FGM, according to the WHO's (2016) classification. Moreover, by framing the procedure as a religious duty, and arguing their case on the basis of religious freedom, the defendant physicians and parents echoed commonly accepted rationales for male circumcision. Although the comparison between FGM and male circumcision is fiercely rejected by international and feminist organizations, ⁶ the analogies between the procedure carried out by the Dawoodi Bohra and the custom of male circumcision were highlighted before the court. As Harvard Law School professor and member of the defense team Alan Dershowitz explained in the New York Times:

You write that I was hired “to help the defense.” In fact, under no circumstances am I defending female genital mutilation. To the contrary, I am consulting with a religious group and advocating the practice's total abolition and the substitution of a benign, sterilized, symbolic pinprick in the hood covering the clitoris, which is much like the foreskin of the penis. The symbolic pinprick is modeled on the longstanding Jewish tradition used when a non-Jewish child has been secularly circumcised and then converts to Judaism. The pinprick itself, like cosmetic ear piercing, has no medical benefits or harm. But it is much less intrusive than procedures practiced by some groups while protecting the constitutional right of its religious practitioners. (Dershowitz, 2017)

Furthermore, as the excerpt suggests in its reference to “Somali culture,” FGM remains strongly associated to Africa (even though the protagonists of the case that gave rise to the legislative movement in Ohio were of Indian heritage). My analysis of the American press since 1980 further confirms the existence of this association by discovering a primary focus on African countries (e.g., Togo, Kenya, Ivory Coast, Egypt). As Eloïse Brière (2005)explains, this enduring association may be because of the relatively high number of African women who have sought to escape the practice by applying for asylum in the U.S. Besides, African countries are the primary targets of international efforts to eradicate the practice (UNICEF, 2013).

Despite therefore challenging many preconceptions about FGM, the Dawoodi Bohra case publicly affirmed that some Muslims also perpetrate the practice. As my findings suggest, the American media coverage of the case suggested the existence of inherent connections between Islam and FGM. Firstly, both defendant physicians and parents mobilized religious arguments to justify their actions. Secondly, the picture circulated by the media of the female physician, Nagarwala, shows her wearing a headscarf. Thirdly, Nagarwala's husband was a leader of the Farmington Hills mosque, a place of worship for the Dawoodi Bohra community. Moreover, the media reported that the court tried to assess whether and how the mosque supported Nagarwala's actions. Fourthly, the case triggered a controversy as to whether FGM is required by Islam. Imams of several states were interviewed on the matter by media outlets. All but one of these imams rejected the practice—a leading imam of a Virginia mosque supported equally “circumcising” both boys and girls; he was eventually fired (Hauslohner, 2017b). Nonetheless, the public debate around the Michigan case added a layer on the figure of otherness embodied by Black and brown immigrants affected by FGM, by shifting it from an “African” to a “Muslim” issue.

Specific Legislation on FGM as Symbolic Politics

The Michigan case had a surprising, albeit disappointing, outcome for many anti-FGM advocates, who expected a spectacular victory. Instead of convicting the confirmed perpetrators, federal Judge Bernard Friedman dropped the charges against them on November 2018 and declared the 1996 ban on FGM ⁷ to be unconstitutional, reasoning that Congress “had no authority to pass this statute.” ⁸ Judge Friedman provided several reasons for this. Firstly, he underscored that the FGM statute cannot enforce treaty obligations, such as those of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which demands “protection of children without discrimination” (Article 24). In fact, since the FGM statute only addresses bodily practices on girls, it failed to protect boys from the American custom of male circumcision on infants. ⁹ Secondly, he stressed that FGM was a local criminal activity and therefore should be prosecuted under state law. He challenged the assumption that FGM constitutes a form of interstate commerce and hence that Congress could pass legislation under the Commerce Clause, a constitutional clause which grants Congress the ability “to regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian Tribes” (Article 1, Section 8, Clause 3 of the U.S. Constitution). To the contrary, he argued that:

The government's only evidence of such a market is the fact that it has alleged 9 FGM victims in the present case, five of whom were brought to Michigan from neighboring states. […] This is not a market, but a small number of alleged victims. If there is an interstate market for FGM, why is this the first time the government has ever brought charges under this 1996 statute? ¹⁰

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Table 1.

Number of Anti-FGM State Bills Introduced Between 2017 and 2020 (Including Newly Enacted Laws and Amendments to Previous Laws).

Status	No. of specific laws	No. of amendments	Total
Introduced	19	8	27
Enacted	15	7	22
Died	3	1	4
Pending	1	0	1
Total of states with a specific law as of 2016			24
Total of states with a specific law as of 2020			39a

^a

Excludes pending and dead bills.

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Table 2.

Party Sponsorship of FGM-Specific Criminal Laws per State, Year of Enactment, and Status Between 2017 and 2020.

Democratic	Bipartisan	Republican
Alabama (pending) Illinois ([1998] 2019) Massachusetts (2020) Vermont (2020)	Connecticut (2020/died) Hawaii (2019/died) Iowa (2019) North Dakota ([1995] 2019) Pennsylvania (2019) Wyoming (2020)	Arkansas (2019) Idaho ([2019] 2020) Kentucky (2020) Maine (2018/died) Michigan (2017) Minnesota ([1994] 2019) Missouri ([2000] 2020/died) New Hampshire (2018) North Carolina (2019) Ohio (2018) South Carolina (2019) Tennessee ([1996] 2019) Texas ([1999] 2017) Utah (2019) Virginia ([2017] 2018)

Note. Brackets signal the year of the enactment of the first state law. The second year is the year of the adoption of an amendment to the previous law. If the bill died, the date corresponds to the year the bill was introduced. For each column, state laws are listed alphabetically.

However, in declaring that FGM is a local crime, Judge Friedman's ruling had not suggested that a specific state law on FGM should be enacted so that the crime could be punished. Rather, he only clarified that the crime should be prosecuted in state courts. In fact, there are two ways to ban FGM, either via existing laws or by introducing specific legislation. For instance, France, which in 1979 became the first Western country to ban the practice and has the highest number of prosecution cases to date in Europe (42 as of 2010, Nijboer et al., 2010), criminalizes FGM under its general laws on assault. By contrast, the UK established a specific law against FGM in 1985, from which the U.S. 1996 FGM law was inspired, and yet has only one conviction to date, from 2019 (Bader & Mottier, 2020). As French attorney general Linda Weil-Curiel, who enabled the first conviction of a circumciser in France in 1999, argued in a 2019 interview with Madame Figaro:

As a lawyer, I explained that we did not need a new law since the penal code already provides for all kinds of sanctions against bodily injury, and mutilation is defined as a crime punishable by the Assize Court. Moreover, the creation of a specific law condemning excision amounts to pointing the finger at immigrant populations. The existing law is sufficient, and it applies universally to all persons living on French territory, even if the mutilation took place outside of France. (O’brien, 2019; my translation)

The criminalization of FGM under existing laws is also possible in the U.S, as demonstrated by the first conviction of a perpetrator of FGM, in 2006. Khalid Adem, a 30-year-old gas station employee of Ethiopian heritage, was convicted in Georgia for his daughter's clitoridectomy, which he allegedly performed himself at home, when his daughter was 2 years old (Beety, 2007; Steffen, 2011). Adem was charged with aggravated battery and cruelty to children and sentenced to 10 years in prison. In 2017, after serving a decade-long sentence, he was deported to Ethiopia (Victor, 2017). Although this case shows that existing state laws are effective in criminalizing FGM, it also provoked a moral outrage that led Georgia to adopt legislation against FGM in May 2005. As Charles Steffen (2011) argues convincingly, this law was motivated by “symbolic politics”:

Why was such a statute needed? Not because it imposed a stiffer penalty on the circumciser, or because it would make it easier to win a conviction. Indeed, the bill that the state legislature was then debating stipulated that an individual convicted of the crime of “female genital mutilation” would serve a prison term of no more than twenty years, compared to the forty years that Khalid was then facing for the two counts against him. The D.A. wanted the new law for reasons that went well beyond the practice of female genital cutting per se, to the larger problem of assimilating Gwinnett County's exploding immigrant population. “Clearly, a black-and-white statute that says we don’t care what you do in your country, it's illegal here, would make it easier,” Porter told reporters. As the D.A.'s comment made clear, the prosecution of Khalid would send an unmistakable message that Old World culture was no excuse for breaking Gwinnett's New World laws.

Despite the strong evidence showing that, in many countries, FGM can be prosecuted under existing laws (Johnsdotter & Mestre i Mestre, 2015), many Western legislators have nevertheless campaigned for introducing specific laws targeting the practice. In fact, attempts to enact specific laws against FGM maintain ideological and moral boundaries between “us” and “them.” As several scholars have stressed, given the possible prosecution against FGM under general statutes, specific laws against FGM are motivated by symbolic politics, as they primarily serve to “send a message” toward immigrant populations (Bader & Mottier, 2020; Mona, 2014; Steffen, 2011). The subtext to such laws is that Western countries fully guarantee women's rights, and that immigrants need to conform to “national” values such as gender equality. By the same token, these laws assume that Black, brown and/or Muslim immigrants have a moral burden to overcome through their "integration" into the host society, thereby sustaining implied civilizational hierarchies, as well as racialized notions of belonging. For this reason, sending a “clear message” to immigrants is a common discursive pattern in many legislative efforts to enact specific laws against FGM, whether in the U.S. (Bader, 2022) or elsewhere (e.g., Switzerland, see Bader & Mottier, 2020). The superfluity of introducing specific anti-FGM laws was acknowledged in some states that failed to pass legislation (i.e., Maine, Hawaï, Connecticut, Missouri). For instance, Maine's Republican-authored bill died, since lawmakers argued that existing laws were sufficient to criminalize FGM. The failure of her bill led Heather Sirocki, a Republican member of the state's House of Representatives, to declare:

Opponents say that our penal code is already sufficient. That our penal code already allows a way to prosecute for this crime. We already have child abuse laws on the books. We already have aggravated assault laws on the books. And that the prosecutors already have plenty of state laws on the books to prosecute this crime. Opponents say that this is very unnecessary and that this is a hate bill. The only reason to put this in is to target an immigrant community and to create hate, they say. So my response is, “you’re absolutely right, I hate child abuse.” (AHA Foundation, 2019)

Furthermore, my findings indicate that Republican lawmakers who campaigned against FGM in the aftermath of the Michigan case were mostly white and female. As shown by Table 3, female lawmakers vastly outnumber their male counterparts among the primary sponsors of anti-FGM state bills, whether as sole sponsors or in tandem with a male counterpart. Only 4 bills out of 27 had male lawmakers as the sole primary sponsors. Echoing First Lady Laura Bush's 2001 announcement that the invasion of Afghanistan was taken place for the benefit of Afghan women, these Republican white women mobilized rescue narratives for their campaign, declaring their intentions to “save” Muslim women and immigrants of color from FGM. In doing so, they echoed the historical figure of “imperialist feminists,” such as the English feminists of the nineteenth century who supported the British Empire in India (Grewal, 1996), or contemporary American feminists whose commitment to “international feminism” (Abu–Lughod, 2013) sustain American nationalism and military interventionism (Grewal, 1996, p. 9). However, rather than participating in empire building, the Republican women who campaigned for state-level laws against FGM were involved in racialized nation-building. As Meyda Yegenoglu (1998, p. 111) writes, “[T]he imperialist feminist desire to emancipate the Muslim woman is part of a system based on the disciplining and normalizing gaze of modern colonial disciplinary power.” FGM, which represents the “arch-symbol of Southern inferiority” (Razack, 1998, p. 6), and is combated by all Western nations, therefore constituted an ideal battleground, due to its status as an uncontested feminist issue, which allowed Republican lawmakers to demonstrate their dual commitment to the emancipation of American women as well as to their country's moral superiority.

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Table 3.

Primary Bill Sponsors Per Gender, State, and Year of Enactment, 2017–2020.

Female	Tandem	Male
Arkansas (2019) Idaho ((2019] 2020) Illinois ([1998] 2019) Kentucky (2020) Minnesota ([1994] 2019) New Hampshire (2018) North Carolina (2019) North Dakota ([1995] 2019) South Carolina (2019) Texas ([1999] 2017)	Alabama (pending) Connecticut (2020/died) Hawaii (2019/died) Iowa (2019) Maine (2018/died) Massachusetts (2020) Michigan (2017) Ohio (2018) Pennsylvania (2019) Tennessee ([1996] 2019) Wyoming (2020)	Missouri ([2000] 2020/died) Utah (2019) Vermont (2020) Virginia ([2017] 2018)

Note. Brackets signal the year of the enactment of the first state law. The second year is the year of the adoption of an amendment to the previous law. If the bill died, the date corresponds to the year the bill was introduced. For each column, state laws are listed alphabetically.

The Construction of the Muslim Threat

The Republican legislative mobilizations against FGM discursively constructed a “Muslim threat” as a justification for the enactment of state-level laws. This was produced by combining a feminist anti-FGM vocabulary with conspiratorial allusions to threats to national security. Firstly, as femonationalist theories underscore, right-wing lawmakers use a feminist vocabulary to depict non-Western citizens as dangerous in order to sustain restrictive migration policies proposals. My content analysis of the local and national press shows that Republican lawmakers refer to three repertoires of evilness to describe the actions of the Muslim community implicated in the Michigan case. The first repertoire is deviance: for example, “an attack on little girls” (Sen. Rick Jones, Oosting, 2017b), “physical abuse […] emotional abuse” (Sen. Margaret O’Brien Oosting, 2017b). The second is human primitiveness: for example, an “act of barbarism” (Sen. Tonya Schuitmaker, Gerstein, 2017), a “horrific and barbaric act” (Sen. Margaret O’Brien, Oosting, 2017c), “barbaric practice” and “these horrors” (Rep. Mary Franson, Karnowski, 2018). The third repertoire is inhumanity: for example, a “brutal and inhumane act” (Rep. Michele Hoitenga, Oosting, 2017a), “a very evil, horrific, demonic act” (Sen. Rick Jones, Oosting, 2017b).

These repertoires range from describing the deviant and criminal actions of ordinary human beings (“attack,” “abuse”), to condemning the presumed ordinary actions of deviant humans (“barbarism,” “barbaric”) and even denying their humanity (“inhumane,” “demonic”). These ways of othering recall past colonial discourses (Harries, 2007; Steffen, 2011). However, they have long been “normalized” (Young, 2006) by the global anti-FGM discourse and Western media, which deliberately publish shocking photographs when covering FGM (Bader, 2019). Although the use of this feminist anti-FGM vocabulary promotes anti-Muslim racism and anti-immigration sentiments, Republican lawmakers mask their racist vocabulary towards immigrant and Muslim populations behind their adherence to an international cause, the campaign against FGM.

The xenophobic messaging of the campaign against FGM, which presents minority groups as posing a threat, secures the political backing of Republican male lawmakers who otherwise oppose women's rights. For instance, Virginia state Senator Richard Black is against the criminalization of spousal rape (Kaltenhauser, 2019) and a firm pro-life advocate. He writes on his website that “Immigration by criminal elements strains law enforcement. […] America mustn’t be a dumping ground for violent criminals from foreign countries” (Black, n.d.). On the Michigan case, he argued:

This female genital mutilation is an absolutely horrid process, and I’m not a shrinking violet, I was in fierce combat in Vietnam […] I’ve seen a lot of carnage on the battlefield, but I must say that when I read what was being done to these little girls, it really sent chills down my spine. (Thoet, 2017)

Furthermore, the construction of a Muslim threat against national security was facilitated by allegations, made by the federal prosecutor during the 2017 Michigan trial, that the nine identified girls were the victims of a “conspiracy” that had possibly harmed up many girls from different states over a decade. As reported by the Detroit News:

The Michigan House on Thursday approved bipartisan legislation that would create a new 15-year state felony for female genital mutilation, extend the statute of limitations for victims and revoke the medical license of doctors who perform the procedure. The vote came a day after a federal prosecutor said as many as 100 girls may have had their genitalia mutilated during a 12-year conspiracy involving three Metro Detroit doctors. (Oosting, 2017a)

Moreover, the striking down of the federal ban generated the assumption that, without specific provisions against FGM, states would become “hot spots” or “destinations” for parents seeking to perpetuate the practice. As the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 2019) reported: “Advocates warned after the federal judge's ruling in Michigan that states like Connecticut, without laws on the books, could become 'destination states'for the practice.” The idea that a legal vacuum existed at the state level was further stressed by reporters who presumed that FGM was lawful in the states where no such specific laws existed. As the Dayton Daily News stated:

A federal ban on the practice has been on the books since 1996 but was ruled unconstitutional earlier this month by a federal judge, who held that only states can regulate the activity. The practice is prohibited in 26 states, but not Ohio. (Bischoff, 2018)

Furthermore, given that the Michigan case highlighted that some girls had been brought from neighboring states (i.e., Minnesota and Illinois), lawmakers raised concerns about interstate travel to perform FGM. Echoing fears of so-called “vacation cutting,” ¹⁴ this “transportation” argument enabled states to legitimate their legislative actions. As discussed above, states without specific provisions against FGM framed the existence of an alleged legal vacuum as an open door to criminal activities on their soil. Meanwhile, states that already had laws against FGM before the 2017 trial also highlighted interstate travel to legitimize amendments, which were often geared at strengthening existing penalties against the practice (e.g., increasing jail time and even implying the loss of child custody). As Jane Nelson, a Republican State Senator from Texas, argued:

While we had laws against the practice of FGM, we did not have anything in law to punish those who help facilitate the FGM practice by transporting girls to undergo this gruesome act. I introduced legislation. Every woman in the Texas Senate signed on as a joint author, and we overwhelmingly approved a new law making it a felony to transport girls for FGM procedures. (AHA Foundation, n.d.)

In fact, the “transportation” element was also key to legitimizing the adoption of the STOP FGM Act of 2020. Challenging Judge Friedman's interpretation that FGM does not represent an interstate market and thus that Congress had no power to legislate on the practice, lawmakers inserted into the new federal ban that even “the use of instruments traded in interstate or foreign commerce” (Article 5, section 2, STOP FGM Act of 2020) implies transportation for the purposes of committing FGM. In other words, whether girls have crossed state borders or not was deemed irrelevant to be prosecuted under the federal statute. It is sufficient that instruments that were used to perform FGM did cross such borders. Lawmakers, therefore, found a way to fit FGM into the “interstate commerce” definition, since the Commerce Clause seemed to be the only way Congress could legislate on the practice at the federal level. This broad, indeed elastic, interpretation of what transportation means in the realm of FGM demonstrates that leaving the U.S. without a federal ban on the practice was not an option for lawmakers. This is not least as, from a symbolic point of view, American lawmakers felt that they could not maintain the reputation of a role model country guaranteeing gender equality without having an explicit law criminalizing FGM. As the new law explicitly stated: “The United States should demonstrate its commitment to the rights of women and girls by leading the way in the international community in banning this abhorrent practice” (Article 1, section 2, STOP FGM Act of 2020).

Passing legislation on FGM was indeed interpreted by lawmakers as the equivalent of building a symbolic fortress to repel a bodily practice that, as stated in the Bangor Daily News, “virtually nobody in the Western world wants to see here or elsewhere” (Shepherd, 2018). As Rick Jones, a Republican State Senator in Michigan, stated in the Detroit News:

I’m angry that the federal judge dismissed this horrific case that affected upwards of a hundred girls who were brutally victimized and attacked against their will. […] This is why it was so important for Michigan to act. We set a precedent that female genital mutilation will not be tolerated here. … I hope other states will follow suit. (Snell, 2018)

While the U.S. is accustomed to receiving asylum claims of women fleeing FGM in Africa, the Michigan case suggested that the “threat” of FGM was also perceived as emanating from within the national borders. In response to the “threat” of FGM, American lawmakers provided an immediate response, often with unanimous support across the political spectrum. As mentioned earlier, within 4 years, 25 states had introduced legislation on FGM. Many of them passed the legislation with a speed that demonstrates not only the level of consensus but also the lack of in-depth discussion on the matter. As mentioned in an earlier quote, Michigan passed legislation in 2017 only “the day following” the prosecutor's conspiratorial allegations. In Texas, the vote lasted a few minutes:

With lightning speed, the Texas Senate on Wednesday approved increased penalties for the long-banned and ritualistic practice of female genital mutilation. Senate Bill 323, which shot through a Senate committee after being filed just a week ago, was approved in a final vote of 31-0. All eight women senators were co-authors. The vote took less than three minutes. (Ward, 2017)

By explaining to reporters that the issue was on their agenda long before the Michigan case, Republican lawmakers suggested that they were not merely attempting to fix an issue they failed to avoid, but that they were already aware of the “problem.” They thereby indicated that their bill was not a response to the Michigan case, but, on the contrary, that the latter merely reinforced the preexisting importance of legislative action against FGM. Finally, as the last quoted excerpt above shows, stressing the Republican lawmakers’ proactivity rather than reactivity enabled them to deny accusations of anti-Muslim racism.

Anti-Muslim Racism in the Name of Muslim Women's Rights

Overtly Islamophobic positions, that is, against the Islamic faith, are absent from Republican lawmakers’ anti-FGM discourses. However, the press highlighted the relationships of some Republican lawmakers with Islamophobic organizations. As the Bangor Daily News reported:

An Islamophobic group has joined the Maine fight against it. The Southern Poverty Law Center published emails on Monday between the LePage bill's sponsor, Rep. Heather Sirocki, R-Scarborough, and a Maine member of ACT for America, a group that SPLC has deemed “the largest anti-Muslim hate group in the United States.” Sirocki dismissed the report on Tuesday as “typical reaction from people who disagree on this issue” and her cosponsor, Senate Majority Leader Garrett Mason, R-Lisbon Falls, made clear on Tuesday that cutting is “a cultural issue, not a religious one.” However, anti-immigrant sentiment is a motivator for some here, with hard-line Rep. Larry Lockman, R-Amherst, asking on Twitter whether this is a reason to send certain Somali Muslims home to “make Somalia great again”—a riff on President Donald Trump's slogan. (Shepherd, 2018)

Two Islamophobic organizations have been particularly involved in the criminalization of FGM. As mentioned in the above quote, the first is ACT for America, an organisation founded by Brigitte Gabriel (born Hanan Qahwaji), a Maronite Catholic Lebanese American citizen who in 2017 called for nationwide demonstrations against FGM (Pulliam Bailey, 2017). As The News & Observer reported, with regard to the North Carolina anti-FGM bill:

On its website, [ACT for America] says it has helped pass legislation in Arizona, Kansas, Louisiana, South Dakota, Florida, New Jersey, New York, Oklahoma and Virginia. It is unclear if ACT for America is pushing the legislation here [in North Carolina], but the group has ties to [Lt. Gov. Dan] Forest. Forest's chief of staff, Hal Weatherman, once worked for the organization. (Horsch, 2019)

The second Islamophobic organization with strong ties to Republican lawmakers is the AHA Foundation. The AHA Foundation was founded by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the American-Dutch-Somali critic of Islam who was subjected to FGM in her childhood. On its website, the AHA Foundation (n.d.) declares its commitment “to pass legislation in all 50 states.” Both ACT for America and the AHA Foundation coach legislators on how to frame and present the issue, as well as providing them with model legislation. ¹⁵ To show its influence, the AHA Foundation's website quotes Jane Nelson, a Republican State Senator from Texas, as saying:

When I heard Ayaan Hirsi Ali talking to Tucker Carlson on Fox News about the case in Michigan, I was so horrified that I immediately reviewed our existing state laws to determine whether this could happen in Texas. […] I am so grateful for Ms. Hirsi Ali for courageously speaking out about this important issue. There is no place in our society for this barbaric practice. (AHA Foundation, n.d.)

Nevertheless, Republican lawmakers, notably, for example, Garrett Mason (mentioned above), often stress the cultural rather than religious reasons behind FGM. This enables members of the party to avoid challenging cherished values such as the freedom of religion, as is guaranteed by the First Amendment of the Constitution. Overtly Islamophobic discourses may be perceived as being at odds with the conservative wing of the Republican party's intense valorization of religion. Meanwhile, returning to the Michigan case, and as was mentioned above, the defendant Dr. Jumana Nagarwala, and her attorney Alan Dershowitz, explicitly framed Nagarwala's actions as having been driven by her religious beliefs, allowing the defense to draw parallels with the Jewish, Muslim, and American custom of male circumcision on infants. Therefore, it is unsurprising that Republican lawmakers attempt to avoid religious criticism of FGM, while reinforcing anti-Muslim racism by framing Muslims as culturalized Others.

While Republican lawmakers claim that their anti-FGM bill is devoid of Islamophobic and xenophobic intent, members of the targeted religious and/or national communities seem to held a different opinion. As the Star Tribune and The Detroit News reported:

Brikti Hiwet, an Ethiopian-American elder and reproductive health lecturer at the University of Minnesota and St. Catherine University who attended Monday's hearing, said she felt lawmakers had a “knee-jerk reaction” to the issue. She says existing state and federal laws prohibiting the practice are effective. “How can you protect children when you take them away from their families and put them in foster care?” she said. (Koumpilova & Mahamud, 2017)

Reservations about the actual intentions behind the criminalization of FGM was not limited to the targeted communities. They were also expressed by allies of the anti-FGM campaign. As the Washington Post reported: “Some activists and Democratic lawmakers have argued—in lieu of hard data about the prevalence of FGM—that racism, Islamophobia and anti-immigrant sentiments have played a role in fueling enthusiasm for the new policies” (Hauslohner, 2017a).

One prominent figure of these critics is Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar, the first Somali-born and veiled woman elected to Congress. As Fox News reported:

When [Mary Franson's] bill first hit the floor in 2017, it faced tough questioning from several lawmakers—among them then-state legislator and current U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, who suggested Franson was using the bill as a bid for press attention. “What I don’t want us to do is to create laws because we want to get in the media,” Omar stated in a committee at the time. “What I would like to have been done is to have (the parents) charged with laws that already exist.” (McKay, 2019)

Meanwhile, to avoid criticism, Republican lawmakers mobilized the “protection of little girls” frame as a rationale for their actions. As the Star Tribune reported:

Rep. Mary Franson, who introduced the House bill, said the Senate is bowing to pressure from groups “more concerned with perception than doing the right thing and protecting girls.” “Watering down the bill really does a disservice to the little girls who are in danger,” she said (Koumpilova & Mahamud, 2017)

By framing their intentions as being to “save” Black, brown and/or Muslim girls from their “abusive” parents, Republican lawmakers intertwined anti-Muslim racism with the party's emphasis on principles of “family values” (Steffen, 2011). The commitment of Republican lawmakers against FGM therefore demonstrates the useful complexity of femonationalism—opposition to FGM enabled legislative mobilizations on feminist claims without weakening the party's social conservative policies. Therefore, FGM constitutes the ideal political issue to signify national unity, transcend political divides, and generate national pride and patriotism through femonationalist narratives.

Discussion

Contributing to the growing scholarship on femonationalism, this paper examined the mobilization of Republican lawmakers to pass anti-FGM legislation. Drawing on publicly available material, the findings showed that the 2017 Michigan criminal court case, which is the first and only prosecution under the 1996 U.S. FGM ban, elicited a moral crusade, which was largely led by Republican lawmakers. Republican lawmakers were among the primary sponsors of 23 out of the 27 state laws against FGM that were introduced between 2017 and 2020. This flurry of Republican-authored legislation, actively supported by Islamophobic organizations and some Democrats, was sustained by, on the one hand, suggestions of a decade-long, nationwide conspiracy that may have harmed more than 100 girls, and, on the other hand, fears of a legal vacuum (since the 1996 U.S. ban was ruled as being unconstitutional). Nevertheless, the enacting of specific laws against FGM was largely a matter of symbolic politics (Bader & Mottier, 2020; Mona, 2014; Steffen, 2011). I demonstrated that the “legal vacuum” argument functioned as a particularly powerful metaphor, as it suggested that the absence of specific laws against FGM left states vulnerable to a foreign “threat.” This ignored the fact that existing laws have been effectively used to criminalize FGM in the U.S., for example, when in 2006 Georgia convicted, incarcerated, and eventually deported Khalid Adem, an Ethiopian father, for aggravated battery and cruelty to children.

Moreover, this paper shows that the Michigan case has resurrected rescue narratives of Muslim women that were mobilized during the “war on terror” launched by another Republican president, George Bush Jr., to legitimize U.S. interventionism against Muslim-majority countries. Although FGM is not an Islamic practice, the fact that the people involved in the Michigan case were members of a Muslim community arguably bolstered anti-Muslim discourses in public debates regarding FGM. Nevertheless, the figure of Dr. Jumana Nagarwala, the main defendant in the Michigan case, challenged popular perceptions of circumcised and veiled women. As a Johns Hopkins University-trained physician, Nagarwala did not fit mainstream representations of the “FGM circumciser” as an old, poorly educated African woman wielding a rusty razor blade (Bader, 2019), nor that of the Muslim woman as the “passive victim” whose actions are driven by “false consciousness” (Bilge, 2010). Instead, she embodied what Joan Scott (2012, 155) described as representation of the “aggressive” veiled women, “their veil taken as the flag of a terrorist insurgency.” As such, Nagarwala better approximated the Republican party's conception of veiled women and Muslims generally as constituting threats. This is mirrored by the party's continued attacks on the (veiled) Minnesotan Representative Ilhan Omar and its corresponding support of anti-Islam activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, both of whom are descendants of Somalian Muslims.

Just as republican secularism has been a strategy of justification of anti-Muslim racism in France (Wolfreys & Wolfreys, 2017), femonationalist rhetoric linked to anti-FGM debates, upholding the idea of gender equality as national value, has functioned to stigmatize Muslims in the U.S. Since the criminalization of FGM has generated such a consensus in Western countries, focusing on the plight of women affected by FGM by stressing cultural rather than structural causes is a savvy political strategy for Republican lawmakers. Sponsoring bills that tackle a feminist issue such as FGM, while also criminalizing immigrants of color, enable “unholy alliances” (Farris, 2017) including some Democrats and anti-FGM NGOs, and the support of the female electorate and white conservatives. Hence, supporting the criminalization of FGM, which ultimately leads to the deportation of convicted immigrant parents (as in the Adem case), is a useful political tool for the GOP. As Sherene Razack (2008, 84) puts it, “The eviction of groups of people from political community begins with their difference, coded as an incomplete modernity that poses a threat to the nation.” Moreover, the results show that anti-FGM bills, whether at the state or federal level, often generate unanimity of votes. Thus, sponsoring an anti-FGM bill appears to be a risk-free, malleable tactic for lawmakers to record a legislative success on their political resume. This in no way entails that FGM bans are racist, or that FGM should be legal. However, anti-Muslim racism and political opportunism, embedded in femonationalist rhetoric, are important analytical lens to explain Republican lawmakers’ mass mobilization to criminalize FGM after the Michigan case.

In conclusion, femonationalism is a key concept for understanding contemporary political discourses against FGM in the U.S. The commitment of Republican lawmakers to ending FGM by legislating on the basis of rescue narratives, with potential consequences for immigrant communities including loss child custody and deportation, echoes similar political dynamics observed in Switzerland (Bader, 2022; Bader & Mottier, 2020). However, the question of how social workers and healthcare professionals working with women and girls affected by FGM perceive the commitment of such powerful yet controversial political allies remains unexplored. Further research is therefore needed to examine the impact of the intertwining of the anti-FGM and the anti-immigration debates on prevention programs within diasporic communities. Moreover, it is important to also explore the participation of left-leaning politicians (Democrats in the U.S. and Social Democrats in Switzerland) in the “unholy alliance” with their right-wing counterparts. One particularly interesting dimension of these linkages is the existence of dissent within these left-wing parties on the question of supporting anti-FGM laws which stigmatize minorities and may expel them from the societies in which they have made their homes.