April is the month traditionally associated in Islam with circumcision. In Satun province the bidan (traditional midwife) and tok mudeng (male circumciser) were the people performing the operation on, girls and boys respectively. Both rituals were usually performed at home. Nowadays, while the first is still kept very private for the second a new public form is organized by the central mosque, during which medical personnel in front of a wide audience circumcise up to 100 boys aged 7-12. However, many families still prefer the private form also for boys. This paper aims at comparing the different traditions and how the new male circumcision presents a combination of medical technologies, bureaucracy and theatre, staging different kinds of powers on the body to a degree hardly seen before. While traditionally only males were allowed to be present at a male circumcision and only females at a female one, the public male circumcision crosses this hiatus, opening up male nudity and body to female scrutiny. The intersection of medicine and religion in the three different situations opens to considerations of how the politics involved exert their power on individual bodies.