A rose by any other name?

As the Instructor of the “Sexuality and Health” class in our school, this paper by Robert Darby and J.steven Svoboda (2007) strongly triggered my attention. Following most of the other sex educators, I will definitely introduce the circumcision surgery to my students from both the culture and medical perspective. Very seldom, I talked about the female genital mutilation and explain it as very negative tradition in some isolated tribes. And as a medical person, my opinion used to be very straight forward that the circumcision already been taken as a normal medical procedure because it has obvious benefits: especially for the patients who have long foreskin and defect their sex behavior.

This paper triggered some other thinking of me under culture:

(1) Human rights under tradition: People claim that genital mutilation to the infants before they can make consent decision defects their right, so their parents should not have this right. But how about the baby shower and other church related activities that children was involved by their parents? Should we also claim that the new born children have the right to choose their own religion to become either a Christine, catholic or Muslim? Should we challenge certain things people do under their culture or religion? Or furthermore, the “normal behaviors” under social norms?

(2) Besides the physical and sexual damages caused by the surgery, the reason that people do this since they want to manipulate people’s sexual behavior which could refer to masturbation. The whole story is behind people’s sexual attitudes. 50 years ago, the main culture of American society thought that any other orgasms outside of the marriage between a man and a woman are immoral. Which bring out my problem that no matter how we talk about this two surgery and their concepts, should we think about the cultural influence of people? What’ their attitudes to sex behavior? To me, it is more important to change people’s sexual attitudes than accuse their behavior that were highly concerned and discussed. Last, how can we as an outsider influence other culture and value? Should we show the respect by sealing the mouth?

At the end, where should a message deliver like me stand on this topic?

The Haka, the Hurt, and the Work We Owe

The Haka, the Hurt, and the Work We Owe An Indian in Aotearoa reflects on resistance, complicity, and the solidarities we have yet to build Mohan Jyoti Dutta I watched the haka. I watched it several times, in fact. Each time, I tried to sit with what I was feeling before reaching for what I was supposed to think. Let me be honest about who I am in this conversation, because that matters. I am an upper caste, upwardly mobile Indian man. I am a professor at a university in Aotearoa. I carry the accumulated privileges of Brahminical socialisation, of English-medium education, of institutional access that was never designed for the communities I now write about and alongside. I say this not as confession but as orientation — because where you stand shapes what you see, and I have learned, through years of working with communities at the margins, that the refusal to name your own location is itself a colonial habit. The haka directed at Parmjeet Parmar did not offend me. It ...

Whiteness, NCA, and Distinguished Scholars

In a post made in response to the changes to how my discipline operates made by the Executive Committee of the largest organization of the discipline, the National Communication Association (NCA), one of the editors of a disciplinary journal Rhetoric and Public Affairs (RPA), Professor Martin J. Medhurst, a Distinguished Scholar of the discipline, calls out what he sees as the threat of identity (see below for his full piece published in the journal that he has edited for 20+ years, with 2019 SJR score of 0.27). In what he notes is a threat to the "scholarly merit" of the discipline, Professor Medhurst sets up a caricature of what he calls "identity." In his rhetorical construction of the struggles the NCA has faced over the years to find Distinguished Scholars of colour, he shares with us the facts. So let's look at the facts presented by this rhetor. It turns out, as a member of the Distinguished Scholar community of the NCA, Mr. Medhurst has problems with w...

The Substack and the Slur: How a Manufactured Crisis Toppled a Wahine Māori Political Editor

The Substack and the Slur: How a Manufactured Crisis Toppled a Wahine Māori Political Editor On the architecture of the Aotearoa culture-war machine, and the danger it poses to a democracy heading into 2026 There is a particular cadence to the afternoon on which the career of a senior Māori journalist at TVNZ is finished. It is unhurried. It begins with a tweet — in this case, a single image of a typed statement, posted by Maiki Sherman, the now-former political editor of TVNZ, on the afternoon of Friday, 8 May 2026, announcing that she had parted ways with the broadcaster. The post was terse, dignified, and final. As RNZ later reported , Sherman wrote that the scrutiny of the previous week had placed enormous pressure on her and rendered her role "untenable." The first wahine Māori to lead a major broadcaster's political team was gone. The story that finished her had not, ten days earlier, existed in any newspaper, on any wire, on any website you would consider mai...

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