Multicultural Feminism: Finding
our Way between Universalism
and Anti-essentialism
Sawitri Saharso
School of Management and Governance,
University of Twente, The Netherlands
s.saharso@utwente.nl
1
Is Multiculturalism bad for
women?
• Susan Moller Okin (1999)
• Many of the cultural minorities that claim
group rights are more patriarchal than their
surrounding cultures. Cultural group rights
can then function as a licence to oppress
minority women
• Feminism vs. Multiculturalism debate
• Minorities within Minorities debate
2
Responses
• Genealization: absurd to refer to one
Middle Eastern culture (S. Benhabib)
• Western regimes simply “less patriarchal”
than other regimes, rather than worse in
some respects and better in others (Honig)
• Non- western women as misguided victims
who need to be rescued by Western
feminists (A. Al-Hibri, B. Parekh)
3
Intercultural dialogue
• Risk we use double standards
• Risk we use essentialist notions of
culture
• Risk we speak for and thereby deny the
autonomous agency of minority women
• Shut up?
• Explore: is it possible to speak across
cultures?
4
Is feminist solidarity across
cultures possible?
• Structure of the lecture:
• Sketch political landscape in which the
discussion takes place
• Use female genital cutting as a case to
discuss:
Cultural respect, autonomy and
feminism across cultures
5
What is the relationship
between gender and culture?
• Culture as a pretext for women’s oppression:
‘my culture made me do it’.
• Cultural prescriptions limiting women’s
freedom may be functional for the
preservation of of the minority’s culture:
- biological reproduction controlled by family
law
- Rules for women as a marker for group
identity
- Under conditions of inter-group dynamics:
when group boundaries become politicized, it 6
is usually at the expense of women
Gender relations as a group
marker for dominant culture
• The message of Paul Scheffer’s ‘The
Multicultural Drama’ (2000): apartheid is
imminent
• Because of the rise of an economic
underclass
• Because that underclass does not
respect liberal egalitarian values
7
Paul Scheffer:
“Tolerance must be defended against
religious coercion. There should be no place
in public life for movements opposed to the
separation of church and state or equal
rights for men and women. Religious
symbols such as headscarves belong in
private life and not in official bodies like the
police force”
8
Pim Fortuyn
• Islam is a backward culture
• Well-educated Islamic young women
leave their sisters in the cold:
“... putting on a headscarf out of some kind
of protest. Hang it on the willow trees and
see to it that your sisters get their rights”
(De Volkskrant Feb. 9 2002)
9
Wouter Bos
leader Labour Party and vicechancellor
• Issues that tear society apart, like ‘integration’
should not be stifled
• It is about morality. Where do you stand? And
to dare to say so.
• I find it important that the Cabinet has said no
to the burqa and forbids it because of public
order. Of course I know it only concerns 150
cases in the Netherlands. What counts is to
set a norm. (De Volkskrant March 1 2008).
10
Feminists join the debate
• Ciska Dresselhuys chief editor feminist
magazine Opzij:
“[I] as a feminist want to offer help to those
Muslim women who in their hearts very much
would take off the symbol of their inequality – the
headscarf – but who (as yet) do not dare that. That
is the least that these women may expect from
me.” (Opzij, April 2001)
To explain her refusal to hire an editor
wearing a headscarf
11
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
“(I am convinced) that the emphasis on a
Muslim identity with corresponding “group
rights” is detrimental to Muslim women”.
“Muslim women in the West will benefit more
from the dominant Western culture” (Hirsi
Ali 2006, p. 6)
12
Evaluation intervention Hirsi
Ali
Mixed blessing:
• Put issues like honour killing and FGM on the
political agenda
• But alienated herself from many of the Muslim
women for whom she claimed to speak
• By suggesting that emancipation is only
possible by rejecting Islam, her intervention
did not create more space for Muslim women
to develop and express as Muslimas their
ideas on emancipation.
13
Back to Europe
“The degree of civilization of a society is
ultimately measured by the place women occupy.”
Former French president J. Chirac, December 17
2003
Governments across Europe more active in tackling
gender inequalities within minorities
Went together with retreat from multiculturalism and
growing Islamophobia
14
Consequences for feminism
across cultures
• Gender relations are used to mark group
boundaries
• Both by minority and majority groups
• Combined effect:
• Hampers minority women to emancipate on
their own terms
• Hampers feminist coalition-building across
cultures
• We must be wary that a feminist agenda not
be hijacked by anti-multiculturalists.
15
Battlefield: Female Genital
Cutting
All procedures that involve the partial or
total removal of the external female
genitalia or other injury to the female
organs for cultural or other non-therapeutic
reasons (World Health Organization 1999)
16
What’s in a name?
• Female circumcision
• Female genital mutilation
• Female genital cutting
17
Facts
• Practiced mainly in Africa; in at least 28
African countries, but also in Asia and Middle
East
• Mainly in Islamic countries, but not prescribed
by Islam
• A women’s affair: victims, carrying out the
procedure, mothers authorizing it
• Generally repudiated as human rights
violation, but difficult to ban
18
Why do women practice fgc?
• Religious motives: believed to be religiously
prescribed
• Health factors: fertility, virility, health baby
• Hygienic motives: female genitals considered
as unclean
• Ethnic interest: promoting identification with
cultural group
• Socio-economic reasons
• Gender related reasons: fe/male identity
19
Why do we think it is wrong?
• Gender
discrimination
• Autonomy
• Harm
• Bodily integrity
Policy objectives:
• General ban
• Ban for children,
allow consenting
adult
• Ban mutilating
forms, allow nonmutilating forms
• Idem
20
Dilemma:
Eradicate the practice and
respect women’s choices
• B. Parekh: accept voluntary choice
• M. Friedman:
• Distinction substantive and procedural
conception of autonomy
• Substantive: focus on content of choice
• Procedural: how did choice come about?
21
2 advantages
• Focus on context of choice: less risk of
cultural bias
• Recognise the autonomy of women living
under oppressive conditions:
“However oppressive their conditions might be
and however much change is morally required,
traditionally
subordinate
feminine
lives
nevertheless can and do often nonslavishly
embody and express values worth caring about.”
(M. Friedman 2003, p. 25).
22
FGC and Breast Implants
• Social norms can make it rational for individuals
to want things which profoundly threaten their
well-being (C.Chambers 2004)
• No need for assumption FGC practising women
are non-autonomous or FGC forced choice
• Solution: not to educate women, but to alter the
social circumstances which stimulate the harmful
practice (see Tostan project)
23
Intercultural conversations:
who has the right to speak?
‘Much of the ‘anti-FGM discourse’, as currently
formulated, overly homogenizes diverse practices,
is locked in a colonial discourse that replicates the
‘civilizing’ presumptions of the past, and presents
a universalized image of female bodies that relies
upon particularized assumptions of what
constitutes ‘naturalness’ and ‘normality’.
W.N. Njambi (2004)
24
Let us acknowledge:
• In 19th century America clitoridectomy as a
‘cure’ for hysteria, nymphomania,
lesbianism and excessive masturbation.
• Trimming: normalizing ambiguous female
genitalia
• Cosmetic surgery and rise of the ‘designer’s
vagina’ in US and Europe
25
A colonial civilizing discourse?
‘Can the mothers of these girls make an informed
choice as to the value of female sexual pleasure?
They have been immersed in traditional beliefs
about women’s impurity; lacking literacy and
education, as a large proportion do, they have
difficulty seeking out alternative paradigms. …
their situation is made more difficult by fear and
powerlessness. … they are highly likely to have
experience marriage and sexual life as a series of
insults to their dignity, given the ubiquity of
domestic violence and marital rape. Should they
believe that FGM is a bad thing for their daughters
… they have no power to make their choices
effective’.
M.C. Nussbaum (1999)
26
What then? Stand by and watch?
• Political paralysis. (K. Davis)
• Silences women who experience FGC as
violence. Are they part of western discourse?
(C. Castenada)
• If I reject FGC is that because I am an
outsider, black yet not African-based? (M.
Henry-Waring)
• Moral outrage also motivated by empathy and
desire to accept resonsibility to fight
domination of women globally (K. Davis)
27
Conclusion
“To say that a practice endorsed by tradition is bad
is to risk erring by imposing one’s own way on
others, who surely have their own ideas of what is
right and good.
To say that a practice is all right whenever local
tradition endorses it as right and good is to risk
erring by withholding critical judgement where
real evil and oppression are surely present.
To avoid the whole issue because the matter of
proper judgement is so fiendishly difficult is
tempting but perhaps the worst option of all.”
28
(Nussbaum 1999)
Cross cultural coalitions: tools
• Cross cultural comparison
• Contextualized analyses
Examples:
• Prostitution and Sex Selective Abortion:
“their own choice”?
• Bimbo culture and honour killing
29
Bridging Cultures: a third wave?
Immigrant and native women, Muslim and non-Muslim
women, together challenge both conservative-religious
ideas on female sexuality and the libertine raunch
culture as the “excrescences of the same symptom,
namely that women are still attempting to meet the
norms of chastity, sexuality and beauty imposed upon
them by men.”
Stine Jensen & Çilay Özdemir, Together against honour
killing and the slenderness ideal (Samen tegen eerwraak
en slankheidsideaal) (NRC Handelsblad, May 2, 2007).
30