Investigating the Secular Body: The Politics of the Male Circumcision Debate in Germany

Abstract

In the fall of 2012, Germany witnessed a heated debate on male circumcision, triggered by a four-year-old Muslim boy who had suffered complications following a circumcision conducted by a doctor in Cologne. Engaging with Charles Hirschkind's posed question “Is there a secular body?” the article uses this controversy as a starting point to push recent critical scholarship on secularism a little further. It argues that in order to understand the powers of secular governmentality, we need to take more seriously the entanglements between modes of power operative by the secular nation-state and the embodied attachments to the secular, as articulated both in social practices and in epistemological underpinnings of knowledge production bound and enabled by modern nation-state structures. Accordingly, the article suggests that the debates on male circumcision reflect a broader discursive framework in which the ongoing division between proper and improper religious practice is part of the (re)production of a secular body politic and embodied forms of secularity. Its genealogy can be traced back to the nineteenth century and has currently gained a reconfigured currency through the Muslim question in Europe.