Words and questions: the category/governance complex in social science knowledge-making

Female Genital surgeries, procedures, and operations, now branded through the dominant idiom of “FGM”, is an example of being bound by categories such as assimilation, and a governance that is increasingly legitimated and secured through the binding power of one word – the word of mutilation. It seems impossible now, forty years after its introduction to the global lexicon, to overestimate the powerful semantic effects of mutilation. The deployment of this word, I argue here, is part of the assimilation/governance nexus that has driven the creation of laws, policies, politics, discourses and cultures. Mutilation is therefore a word of tremendous biopolitical power. I present here examples of the hegemonic framing and governing power of this word as it plays out in Australia (and elsewhere) today. I do so as a response to the call Levitt and Cruel (2018) to consider ways to produce alternative ways of producing, classifying and dissemination knowledge.