Gender and Culture E-Book

Anne Phillips

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 340

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

The idea that respect for cultural diversity conflicts with gender equality is now a staple of both public and academic debate. Yet discussion of these tensions is marred by exaggerated talk of cultural difference, leading to ethnic reductionism, cultural stereotyping, and a hierarchy of traditional and modern. In this volume, Anne Phillips firmly rejects the notion that ‘culture’ might justify the oppression of women, but also queries the stereotypical binaries that have represented people from ethnocultural minorities as peculiarly resistant to gender equality.

The questions addressed include the relationship between universalism and cultural relativism, how to distinguish valid generalisation from either gender or cultural essentialism, and how to recognise women as agents rather than captives of culture. The discussions are illuminated by reference to legal cases and policy interventions, with a particular focus on forced marriage and cultural defence.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Title page

Copyright page

Acknowledgements

1 Introduction

‘Culture’ and culturalism

Individuals and groups

Agency and complacency

2 Multiculturalism, universalism and the claims of democracy

Tensions between sexual and cultural equality

Equalizing women’s power

3 Dilemmas of gender and culture: the judge, the democrat and the political activist

Against intractable value conflict

Gender versus culture: not a matter of competing equality claims

Political dilemmas

4 What is ‘culture’?

Exaggerating the significance of culture

5 What’s wrong with essentialism?

Essentialism I

Essentialism II

Essentialism III

Essentialism IV

6 When culture means gender: issues of cultural defence in the English courts

Why is cultural defence a problem?

Cultural practice in England and Wales

Representations of culture

Conclusions

7 Free to decide for oneself

The problem: arranged and forced marriage

Pateman on property in the person

8 Consent, autonomy and coercion: forced marriage, public policy and the courts

The legal cases

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

Copyright © Anne Phillips, 2010

The right of Anne Phillips to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2010 by Polity Press

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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4799-9

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4800-2 (paperback)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5928-2 (Single-user ebook)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5927-5 (Multi-user ebook)

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Acknowledgements

Most of the chapters in this book were previously published as articles, and reappear here in revised form.

‘Multiculturalism, universalism and the claims of democracy’ was originally written for the Democracy, Governance and Human Rights programme of the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD), and was published as Programme Paper no. 7 in 2001. A later version was published in Maxine Molyneux and Shahra Razavi (eds.), Gender Justice, Development, and Rights, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 115–38.

‘Dilemmas of gender and culture: the judge, the democrat and the political activist’ was written for a conference on Minorities within Minorities, held at the University of Nebraska in 2002. A longer version appeared in Avigail Eisenberg and Jeff Spinner-Halev (eds.), Minorities within Minorities: Equality, Rights and Diversity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. 113–34.

‘What is “culture”?’ was written for a conference on Sexual Justice / Cultural Justice held at the University of British Columbia, 2004, and was published in Barbara Arneil, Monique Deveaux, Rita Dhamoon and Avigail Eisenberg (eds.), Sexual Justice / Cultural Justice, London and New York, Routledge, 2006, pp. 15–29.

‘What’s wrong with essentialism?’ was written for a conference on Essentialism versus Constructivism held at the University of Copenhagen in 2008, and is published in Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory, 2010.

‘When culture means gender: issues of cultural defence in the English courts’ first appeared, in a longer version, in the Modern Law Review 66/4, 2003, pp. 510–31.

‘Free to decide for oneself’ was written as a contribution to a Festschrift in honour of Carole Pateman, and was published in Daniel O’Neill, Mary Lyndon Shanley and Iris Marion Young (eds.), The Illusion of Consent, University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008, pp. 99–118.

‘Consent, autonomy and coercion: forced marriage, public policy and the courts’ was written for a conference on ‘Multiculturalism, Autonomy and the Law’, held in Vienna in 2008. A German-language version is published in Elizabeth Holzleithner, Christa Markom, Ines Roessl and Sabine Strasser (eds.), Multikulturalismus queer gelesen: Zwangsheirat und gleichgeschlechtliche Ehe in pluralen Gesellschaften, Frankfurt and New York, Campus, forthcoming, 2010.

I thank the relevant publishers for permission to reprint.

1

Introduction

Twenty years ago, a book titled ‘Gender and Culture’ might have suggested an exploration of the sex/gender distinction, an analysis of the cultural understandings of gender that get attached to (small) natural differences of sex, and illustration of this via the different understandings of masculinity and femininity in cultures around the globe. It is likely that the unwary reader would have found her expectations confounded. Feminists were already questioning that particular use of the nature/culture distinction, arguing that it falsely represents the body as passive recipient of cultural meanings, and that a seemingly biological distinction between female and male is as socially constructed as a gender distinction between women and men.1 Those debates continue, though they play only a supporting role in this book. Today, a rather different set of issues attaches to the coupling of gender with culture. Looking at the title, many readers will now anticipate (rightly, as it turns out) a discussion of tensions between feminism and multiculturalism, between the pursuit of gender equality and recognition of cultural diversity.

The notion that gender equality is in conflict with multiculturalism is now a staple of public as well as academic debate. Much of the recent retreat from multiculturalism – especially notable across Europe, and speeding up markedly from the beginning of the century – has invoked the patriarchal treatment of girls and women in minority cultural groups as a key justification for abandoning more inclusive models of multicultural citizenship. Multicultural policies are said to have shored up the authority of socially conservative cultural leaders and sacrificed the rights of women to the preservation of cultures. In the name of equality between cultures, the guardians of conservative gender roles have been provided with public funds and offered an amplified voice on the public stage. Exaggerated notions of cultural sensitivity are said to have paralysed teachers, social workers, even police officers, and encouraged public officials to turn a blind eye to abuses of women and girls. Mistaken notions of cultural respect are said to have silenced criticism of sexually inegalitarian practices.

It is not only feminists who have noticed the opportunism in this, and the implausible blossoming of support for gender equality in societies that find it difficult to deliver even on long-established promises like equal pay. Women tackling problems of violence against women – and particularly those working within minority cultural communities – were among the first to sound the alarm on multiculturalism, noting that respect for cultures too easily became power for cultural spokesmen. Having anticipated the arguments was little consolation, however, when their warnings were turned to such different effect. Much of the feminist criticism had still taken as its background assumption that feminism and multiculturalism were natural allies. Both, after all, spoke for groups marginalized in existing hierarchies of power. Both challenged simplistic associations of equality with sameness, arguing that the pursuit of equality sometimes meant treating people differently rather than the same. Both exposed the complacencies of a formalistic liberalism that seemed to consider the official equality of rights as much as anyone needs. Even Susan Moller Okin, the feminist most commonly cited as considering multiculturalism bad for women, still saw the two projects as ‘in some ways, related struggles’, because both sought ‘the recognition of difference in the context of norms that are universal in theory, but not in practice’. ‘What we need to strive toward’, she argued in 1999, ‘is a form of multiculturalism that gives the issues of gender and other intragroup inequalities their due – that is to say, a multiculturalism that effectively treats all persons as each other’s moral equals’.