Multiculturalism without Culture

INTRODUCTION

THIS BOOK AROSE out of two preoccupations. The first was my feeling that feminism was becoming prone to paralysis by cultural difference, with anxieties about cultural imperialism engendering a kind of relativism that made it difficult to represent any belief or practice as oppressive to women or at odds with gender equality. The feeling became especially acute after Susan Moller Okin published her essays on the tension between feminism and multiculturalism, including an abbreviated version, under the title she later regretted, "Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?"1 One might have thought Okin's contentions would be rapidly incorporated into the common sense of feminism; indeed, Katha Pollittt commented that "coming in late to this debate, I have to say I've had a hard time understanding how anyone could find these arguments controversial."2 Okin noted that most cultures are suffused with gendered practices and ideologies that disadvantage women relative to men. For a feminist, this is not an especially controversial claim. She asserted that while most cultures are patriarchal, some are more so than others, and that cultural minorities claiming group rights or multicultural accommodation are often more patriarchal in their practices than the surrounding cultures. It would be easy to get into arguments about how to define patriarchy and whether it remains a useful term; but again, it seems uncontroversial to say that some practices are better for women than others, and hard to see why all cultures would turn out to be equally good or bad on the woman question. Nor is it hugely contentious to suggest (as Okin did) that a practice like polygamy is less popular among women than men, or to point out that it is no longer regarded as an acceptable form of marriage in legal systems across Europe and North America. Okin also maintained that when claims are made on behalf of cultures, they should be carefully interrogated to see who is going to benefit, and that the "requirements" of the culture will often turn out to be the interests of the more powerful men. This is a view almost any feminist could endorse.

Okin made her arguments, however, in a way that gave many hostages to fortune, drawing her examples eclectically from sometimes sensationalist newspaper sources, and offering a much-criticised formulation about some women perhaps being better off if the culture they were born into were "to become extinct."3 As the debate developed, Okin came to be regarded as representing a hegemonic Western discourse that considered non-Western cultures as almost by definition patriarchal. Like many feminists, I had problems with what she argued, but I also had problems with what seemed to be a backing away from normative judgment among those most hostile to her analysis. As the critics identified implicit hierarchies of culture and rejected what they saw as the arrogant assertion of one true road to gender equality, they often found themselves unable to articulate criticisms of female genital cutting, child marriage, or religious conventions that gave men, but not women, the unilateral right to divorce. Cultural difference had become overlaid with too many distorting assumptions and stereotypes, to the point where any criticism of a cultural practice evoked the image of the "do-gooder" outsider, secure in the superiority of her own culture, telling the insiders what they ought to do. Faced with this unattractive proposition, it looked for a while as if feminists would abandon the language of universals and give up on normative critique.

My second preoccupation--almost the mirror image--was the perception that outside of feminist circles, principles of gender equality were being deployed as part of a demonisation of minority cultural groups. Overt expressions of racism were being transformed into a more socially acceptable criticism of minorities said to keep their women indoors, marry their girls off young to unknown and unwanted partners, and force their daughters and wives to wear veils. People not previously marked by their ardent support for women's rights seemed to rely on claims about the maltreatment of women to justify their distaste for minority cultural groups, and in these claims, cultural stereotypes were rife. It was, of course, partly this perception that made Okin's critics so determined not to give sustenance to views about minority cultures that could be abused in this way. But with the equality agenda seemingly hijacked to promote cultural stereotypes, and feminists curbing their criticisms in order not to support this move, it looked as if things were going badly wrong.