On dropping one’s trousers and reclaiming relativism: a reply to ‘The prosecution of Dawoodi Bohra women’ by Richard Shweder

Abstract

People do the kinds of things with vulvas and penes that they do with other meaningful forms: they include them directly or indirectly in meaningful gestures—by showing, hiding, touching, or altering their appearance, or by speaking about them—to establish and negotiate and sometimes end relationships, to express or live up to a certain picture of the kinds of persons they are or ought or desire to be, and to make claims about the world. The meanings of semiotic deployments involving genitals are tied to people’s lives among other people, in particular personal and historical circumstances. They are multiple, varied, social, intensely personal, and contingent—in a word, they are relative—as are the moral, aesthetic, and epistemic criteria with which we and others gauge them.