Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?
Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?

Author: Susan Moller Okin

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 1999-08-09

Total Pages: 153

ISBN-13: 1400840996

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Polygamy, forced marriage, female genital mutilation, punishing women for being raped, differential access for men and women to health care and education, unequal rights of ownership, assembly, and political participation, unequal vulnerability to violence. These practices and conditions are standard in some parts of the world. Do demands for multiculturalism--and certain minority group rights in particular--make them more likely to continue and to spread to liberal democracies? Are there fundamental conflicts between our commitment to gender equity and our increasing desire to respect the customs of minority cultures or religions? In this book, the eminent feminist Susan Moller Okin and fifteen of the world's leading thinkers about feminism and multiculturalism explore these unsettling questions in a provocative, passionate, and illuminating debate. Okin opens by arguing that some group rights can, in fact, endanger women. She points, for example, to the French government's giving thousands of male immigrants special permission to bring multiple wives into the country, despite French laws against polygamy and the wives' own bitter opposition to the practice. Okin argues that if we agree that women should not be disadvantaged because of their sex, we should not accept group rights that permit oppressive practices on the grounds that they are fundamental to minority cultures whose existence may otherwise be threatened. In reply, some respondents reject Okin's position outright, contending that her views are rooted in a moral universalism that is blind to cultural difference. Others quarrel with Okin's focus on gender, or argue that we should be careful about which group rights we permit, but not reject the category of group rights altogether. Okin concludes with a rebuttal, clarifying, adjusting, and extending her original position. These incisive and accessible essays--expanded from their original publication in Boston Review and including four new contributions--are indispensable reading for anyone interested in one of the most contentious social and political issues today. The diverse contributors, in addition to Okin, are Azizah al-Hibri, Abdullahi An-Na'im, Homi Bhabha, Sander Gilman, Janet Halley, Bonnie Honig, Will Kymlicka, Martha Nussbaum, Bhikhu Parekh, Katha Pollitt, Robert Post, Joseph Raz, Saskia Sassen, Cass Sunstein, and Yael Tamir.

Women's Rights as Multicultural Claims
Women's Rights as Multicultural Claims

Author: Monica Mookherjee

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2011-03-24

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 0748687939

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This book attempts to reconfigure feminism in a way that responds to cultural diversity. The author contends that a discourse of rights can be formulated and that this task is crucial to negotiating a balance between women's interests and multicultural cl

Gender Parity and Multicultural Feminism
Gender Parity and Multicultural Feminism

Author: Ruth Rubio-Marín

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 0198829620

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This volume explores the connection between gender parity and multicultural feminism, both at the level of theory and in practice.

Gendered Paradoxes
Gendered Paradoxes

Author: Amy Lind

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2015-11-09

Total Pages: 186

ISBN-13: 0271076364

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Since the early 1980s Ecuador has experienced a series of events unparalleled in its history. Its “free market” strategies exacerbated the debt crisis, and in response new forms of social movement organizing arose among the country’s poor, including women’s groups. Gendered Paradoxes focuses on women’s participation in the political and economic restructuring process of the past twenty-five years, showing how in their daily struggle for survival Ecuadorian women have both reinforced and embraced the neoliberal model yet also challenged its exclusionary nature. Drawing on her extensive ethnographic fieldwork and employing an approach combining political economy and cultural politics, Amy Lind charts the growth of several strands of women’s activism and identifies how they have helped redefine, often in contradictory ways, the real and imagined boundaries of neoliberal development discourse and practice. In her analysis of this ambivalent and “unfinished” cultural project of modernity in the Andes, she examines state policies and their effects on women of various social sectors; women’s community development initiatives and responses to the debt crisis; and the roles played by feminist “issue networks” in reshaping national and international policy agendas in Ecuador and in developing a transnationally influenced, locally based feminist movement.

Gender, Culture and Human Rights
Gender, Culture and Human Rights

Author: Siobhán Mullally

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2006-05-26

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 1847311555

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In recent years, feminist theory has increasingly defined itself in opposition to universalism and to discourses of human rights. Rejecting the troubled legacies of Enlightenment thinking, feminists have questioned the very premises upon which the international human rights movement is based. Rather than abandoning human rights discourse, however, this book argues that feminism should reclaim the universal and reconstruct the theory and practice of human rights. Discourse ethics and its post-metaphysical defence of universalism is offered as a key to this process of reconstruction. The implications of discourse ethics and the possibility of reclaiming universalism are explored in the context of the reservations debate in international human rights law and further examined in debates on women's human rights arising in Ireland, India and Pakistan. Each of these states shares a common constitutional heritage and, in each, religious-cultural claims, intertwined with processes of nation-building, have constrained the pursuit of gender equality. Ultimately, this book argues in favour of a dual-track approach to cultural conflicts, combining legal regulation with an ongoing moral-political dialogue on the scope and content of human rights.

Sex, Culture, and Justice
Sex, Culture, and Justice

Author: Clare Chambers

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2010-11

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 0271045949

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Autonomy is fundamental to liberalism. But autonomous individuals often choose to do things that harm themselves or undermine their equality. In particular, women often choose to participate in practices of sexual inequality&—cosmetic surgery, gendered patterns of work and childcare, makeup, restrictive clothing, or the sexual subordination required by membership in certain religious groups. In this book, Clare Chambers argues that this predicament poses a fundamental challenge to many existing liberal and multicultural theories that dominate contemporary political philosophy. Chambers argues that a theory of justice cannot ignore the influence of culture and the role it plays in shaping choices. If cultures shape choices, it is problematic to use those choices as the measure of the justice of the culture. Drawing upon feminist critiques of gender inequality and poststructuralist theories of social construction, she argues that we should accept some of the multicultural claims about the importance of culture in shaping our actions and identities, but that we should reach the opposite normative conclusion to that of multiculturalists and many liberals. Rather than using the idea of social construction to justify cultural respect or protection, we should use it to ground a critical stance toward cultural norms. The book presents radical proposals for state action to promote sexual and cultural justice.

Gender and Multiculturalism
Gender and Multiculturalism

Author: Amanda Gouws

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-12-22

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13: 1317667530

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Multiculturalism is a concept that has been stretched to include a variety of political conditions, mainly in countries that have liberal democratic political systems and traditions. In this North/South ‘comparison’ we illuminate remedies pursued by governments and various political interests to address the binary. Tensions of culture and rights may not be the same everywhere. An interesting point of comparison is in the treatment of liberalism – often assumed in the global North to be the universal norms to be defended, whereas in the global South, liberalism itself may be viewed as the problem. Colonial histories are fraught with discriminatory legislation aimed at accommodating indigenous populations, often a trade-off for more structural redistributive justice through, for example, land reform. In Africa, for example, the codification of customary law has reinforced misogynistic and static interpretations of ‘African culture’. This book will show how varied and complex the embodiment of multiculturalism as a political practice, or policy discourse in different political contexts can be, and how often the outcome of multicultural discourses creates a binary between culture and universal human rights. The aim of this book is to grapple with dislodging this binary. This book was published as a special issue of Politikon.

Feminism and Multiculturalism
Feminism and Multiculturalism

Author: Joyce W. Warren

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781847180124

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The question of womenâ (TM)s role in Islam has been increasingly debated in recent years, even within the Muslim diaspora. This book explores cultural pluralities, their effect on womenâ (TM)s lives, and womenâ (TM)s role in questioning and/or shaping their identities. The questions that we are asking in this book about feminism and multiculturalism are questions that are being asked in many communities across the United States and throughout the world. How do feminism and multiculturalism work together? Can multiculturalism coexist with feminist principles? Does respect for cultural traditions take precedence over womenâ (TM)s rights? Should outsiders interfere with traditional cultural practices? How are transplanted cultures affected by or shaped by their transplanting? How do women of color create gender and racial identity in and outside of mainstream American culture? The contributors to this book represent some of the most important voices in this discussion and include Nurah Ammatâ (TM)ullah, Jane Kramer, Robina Niaz, Manizha Naderi, Katha Pollitt, Madhulika Khandelwal, Eugenia Paulicelli, and Gail Garfield. In this book they are in dialogue with each other, asking questions and responding to questions, giving different perspectives, and providing or attempting to provide answers. If readers do not find all of the answers they are looking for in these pages, they are certain to gain new perspectives on the questions. And sometimes that is the only way to begin to find answers.