Can female genital cutting (FGC) be analyzed using critical theory? The point of departure of this paper is Rahel Jaeggi’s Critique of Forms of Life, which accounts for social change as a process of problem-solving. Forms of Life theories are valuable for their sophisticated approach to analyzing social problems, and for bringing continental critical theory an applied, pragmatic formulation that competes with Rawlsian liberalism. More empirical, norms based approaches to framing FGC as a social problem are also valuable for showing critical theorists how actual social change might occur, and how and whether criticisms of social units such as the family can be complicated and decolonized by turning towards grassroots activist interventions in local communities and away from grand theoretical statements about the family and its failures to create a habitable form of life. In this paper, I argue that these approaches are mutually informing. Critical theorists’ assumptions about progress in history should be challenged from a non-Eurocentric and decolonizing perspective, and empirical social scientific approaches can be given powerful theoretical language by critical theorists with a pragmatist bent, in order to make clear the normative stakes and the harms involved in social practices that no longer solve the problems originally posed in a given form of social life, resulting in uninhabitable forms of life.
