Justice, gender and the politics of multiculturalism
نویسنده
چکیده
Arguably, the greatest recent contributions to the (somewhat exhausted) political philosophy of multiculturalism have come from feminists. The debate was famously sparked by Susan Okin’s warning that multicultural accommodation could legitimize and aggravate the oppression of women within traditional, cultural and religious groups (Okin, 1999). Critics retorted that the ‘internal minorities’ objection, as articulated by Okin, tended to assume that minorities were essentially and comprehensively illiberal, and majorities the paragons of liberal egalitarians values – the very ethnocentric assumptions that had made accommodation a demand of justice in the first place. Soon, however, the debate moved on from its rather simplified, early formulations (gender equality vs cultural rights) and went on to illuminate areas that the academic discussion of multiculturalism had bizarrely left unexamined. Feminist contributions over the last decade or so have made three crucial contributions (Shachar, 2001; Deveaux, 2007; Phillips, 2007; Chambers, 2008). First, in line with the critical project of feminist theory, they have been sensitive to the way in which ‘cultures’ do not pre-exist, but are largely shaped by social interaction, are far less homogenous, normative, static and coherent than political theorists have assumed, and cannot be understood through the choice/chance ‘luck egalitarian’ paradigm. Second, feminists have shown how gender hierarchies structure all cultures, Western and non-Western, and explored the troubling fact that the status of women seemed to be at the heart of most cultural conflicts in the West. Third, feminists have suggested that such conflicts are not only animated by concerns about justice but also about more strategic political concerns on the part of both majority and minority representatives. Methodologically, the new feminists have exploited the rich area of comparative law theory (and cases such as traditional marriages, female genital cutting, veiling, honour killings, tribal inheritance rights, sex trafficking) and critically highlighted the role played both by the stereotyped culture attributed to non-Western minorities and the less visible, taken-for-granted, gendered cultural assumptions of majority groups in maintaining and justifying the silencing of women. Because cultural norms are contingent and variable, manipulated by elites, and bear an uncertain relationship to Book Reviews
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تاریخ انتشار 2009