ABOUT US
Empowering Authors, Ending FGM.
Our mission
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UnCUT/VOICES Press is unique among publishers for its dedication to ending female genital mutilation (FGM). By educating readers, we are part of a global movement to ensure that the thousands of girls who would daily be cut remain intact. Multiple genres and voices reveal ways to stop the blades. Memoirs, fiction, drama, stories, poetry, reportage, scholarship and more have been penned by survivors, scholars and global allies concerned to see young women at risk reach adulthood unscathed.
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Book sales support projects that work toward this aim.
The Founder: Dr. Tobe Levin von Gleichen
A multi-lingual scholar and activist, Tobe Levin von Gleichen earned a PhD. in comparative literature from Cornell University and MA's from NYU in Paris and the Université de la Sorbonne nouvelle - Paris III. A Professor emerita of the University of Maryland Global Campus (formerly UMUC), she has been an Associate of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research under the directorship of Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. at Harvard from 2006 to the present, a visiting professor at King's College University of London (2018-2020), and a visiting research fellow at the Five Colleges Women’s Studies Research Center at Mt. Holyoke College (2004), at Brandeis University (2006) and Cornell University (2010). Visiting Research Fellow, Lady Margaret Hall at the University of Oxford welcomed her as a visiting research fellow in 2014-2016; she continued as an Associate of the Gender Studies Centre until 2019. To learn more, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobe_Levin
Along with more than 100 academic and popular articles, Tobe Levin has brought out three edited volumes: Violence. ‘Mercurial Gestalt’ (Rodopi, 2008); Empathy and Rage. Female Genital Mutilation in African Literature. (co-edited with University of Ghana professor Augustine H. Asaah. Ayebia, 2009); and Waging Empathy. Alice Walker, Possessing the Secret of Joy, and the Global Movement to Ban FGM (UnCUT/VOICES Press, 2014). Finally, with Maria Kiminta, she co-authored Kiminta. A Maasai’s Fight against Female Genital Mutilation (UnCUT/VOICES Press, 2015).
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Credited with being among the first in Germany to act against FGM, she founded a registered charity in 1998, FORWARD – Germany (currently FORWARD for Women). Tobe Levin von Gleichen has been recognized by the Ingrid Gräfin zu Solms Human Rights Award (25 November 2002); by a Certificat de Reconnaissance (Certificate of Gratitude) for Services Rendered to the Republic of Mali at the Embassy of Mali in Berlin, 22 September 2010; by the Women’s Institute for Freedom of the Press ‘Women and Media Award’ in Washington, DC. 6 April 2014; and by the Global Woman P.E.A.C.E, Foundation Award for anti-FGM Advocacy in Literature on 21 October 2017.
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She blogs at www.uncutvoices.wordpress.com.
TOBE LEVIN
Founder UnCut/Voices Press
FIGHTING TO END FGM FOR OVER 40 YEARS
Munich, July 1977: imagine a new German feminist magazine, EMMA, and a graduate student eagerly inspecting it. She stops, taken aback, at the headline: Klitorisbeschneidung – clitoridectomy. What can that be? She learns, along with 150,000 other subscribers whose mail-sacks of letters overwhelm the editors. The journalist had concluded with an appeal from Khartoum: “Here no one talks about it. The media are silent. Our only hope lies in an outcry from abroad.” It came. What can we do, EMMA’s readers asked. What they did: between 1977 and the early 80s in eight West German cities, groups formed to support African activists. The German women’s medical association invited Dr. Asma el Dareer to address their annual convention; the physician’s dissertation marked the first epidemiological study of infibulation in the Sudan. Senegalese Awa Thiam, founder of CAMS – Commission for the Abolition of Sexual Mutilation -- in Paris, became the first keynote speaker for Terre des Femmes, today’s leading German NGO for women’s human rights; and Efua Dorkenoo in the UK, who founded FORWARD in 1983, provided the template for FORWARD – Germany (founded 1998). Fast forward to today: finally overcoming the three main obstacles to ending FGM – inadequate communication, lack of a feminist analysis, and miserly funding – a broader world movement is rapidly evolving thanks to government aid, social media, and the continued dedication of NGOs and individuals calling for an end to this widespread abuse.