Blood Loss and Slow Harm in Times of Scarcity

For women who have stopped cutting, the success of interventions against cutting in northern Ghana is also an index of a troubled economy and consequent bodily vulnerability and precarity. Chapter 5, Cutting in Times in Scarcity: Blood Loss and Slow Harm after NGOs, recasts the aftermath of governmental achievements in light of the perspectives of rural women in the Bongo district targeted by NGO and state interventions. Taking their concerns about lack of blood as a starting point, I explore how they problematize harm and make sense of the end of cutting. Cutting is now seen as unworthy of blood loss, and as a critical event that generates a lifelong susceptibility to illness. Cutting had to stop, they say, given how the struggles of the contemporary moment have meant that women can no longer afford to lose blood. Furthermore, while NGOs and the state seek to isolate cutting in a hermetically-sealed world of rural northern Ghanaians who resist change, these women link the end of cutting to national and pan-African concerns and idioms, joining a chorus of voices that criticize national blood shortages and emphasize the associated failures of biopolitical care.