Sexual Justice / Cultural Justice

Barbara Arneil, Monique Deveaux, Rita Dhamoon, Avigail Eisenberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781135984847
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This key volume explores the relationship between cultural justice and sexual justice in multicultural societies in a new light. The authors challenge the framing of 'feminism and multiculturalism' as one of inevitable conflict, as well as the portrayal of liberal sexual equality and cultural rights as irreconcilable, moving the debate beyond the culture/gender impasse.

Focusing on three theoretical themes from a feminist perspective:

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• the meaning and role of culture and identity in politics
• the problem of autonomy in relation to culture and identity
• the crucial role of democracy in addressing the theoretical and practical problems raised by this set of issues.

The diverse contributors break new theoretical ground by providing detailed engagement with the concrete experiences of women and minorities who are caught in the dilemmas of gender and cultural justice. The collected chapters address sexual/cultural justice in a range of different countries, offering illuminating case studies on Britain, South Africa, Canada, the Netherlands, Australia, Mexico, and the United States.

Sexual Justice / Cultural Justice will be of strong interest to students and researchers working in the areas of gender and feminist theory, politics, law, philosophy and sociology.

Part I
Defining and challenging “culture” and “cultural identity”

1 What is “culture”?

Anne Phillips

“Culture”, as Raymond Williams (1958) famously said, “is ordinary”, part of the process through which any social organisation develops and reproduces itself. Williams understood the term as referring to the shared meanings transmitted from one generation to another; and as a literary critic, he was especially keen to stress that culture is not just transmitted, but debated and amended in ways that express the creativity of the human mind. In this understanding of the term, culture is both ubiquitous and in a continual process of change.

Anthropologists have also stressed the ubiquity of culture, though they have been more preoccupied with questions of cross-cultural interpretation, and the difficulties of understanding what people are doing when they inhabit a culture very different from one’s own. This can lend itself to exoticism – the presumption that the study of culture is the study of strange peoples pursuing strange practices in lands far away – but there is no reason in principle why it should do so. Indeed, for much of the twentieth century, anthropologists were the ones insisting that all peoples have their own complex and internally coherent cultures, thus providing, as Etienne Balibar puts it, “the humanist and cosmopolitan antiracism of the post-war period with most of its arguments” (1991: 21). Typically, this was achieved through the study of remote cultural groups, whose initially puzzling practices and beliefs were then shown to have a coherence and rationality of their own. But some of the most interesting work in contemporary anthropology also turns the spotlight back on the Western countries whose colonial exploits had so shaped the discipline, and applies the methods of anthropology to the metropolis itself. Culture, again, appears as an attribute of all societies. The study of culture is not a matter of exotic others. It is also the study of one’s own society or group.

As is now widely noted, normative political theory has tended to employ culture in a more restrictive way.¹ Political theorists are consumed by questions of justice, equality and autonomy; and in a period dominated by the discourse of human rights, they have been particularly preoccupied by what rights, if any, can be claimed by minority groups. Culture then enters the field of investigation not so much as difference (how to understand the meaning of practices across different cultures?) but as inequality (how to determine what counts as just treatment of minority groups?). It was the recognition of unequal power relations between majority and minority groups, and the perception that states may unfairly disadvantage citizens from minority cultural groups when they impose a unitary political and legal framework, that gave the impetus to recent debates about multiculturalism. Political theorists are – to their credit – political. They think about inequality and power.

But this means that culture crossed their horizon already attached to distinctions between majority and minority, and already linked to territorial or legal claims. Will Kymlicka is barely a paragraph into Multicultural Citizenship before noting that “(m)inorities and majorities increasingly clash over such issues as language rights, regional autonomy, political representation, education curriculum, land claims, immigration and naturalisation policy, even national symbols, such as the choice of national anthem or public holidays” (1995: 1). These are the clashes he seeks to resolve, hence (I would suggest) his decision to employ “culture” as virtually synonymous with “nation” or “people”, referring to “an intergenerational community, more or less institutionally complete, occupying a given territory or homeland, sharing a distinct language and history” (Kymlicka 1995: 18). The definition conjures up a group of considerable solidity. It has its own institutions, its own territories, its own language and history, and by implication, its own potentially extensive claims on the loyalty of its members. We will not be surprised to learn that such groups are often in conflict with each other. In similar fashion, Ayelet Shachar adopts the term nomoi community to refer to a group that has “a comprehensive and distinguishable worldview that extends to creating a law for the community” (2001: 2n).² The groups that interest Shachar – those whose claims to accommodation she wants to consider and assess – are ones that are already staking extensive claims. They are distinguished not just by particular systems of meaning or specific codes of conduct that teach their members what is considered appropriate or rude behaviour. These are groups that seek to regulate through law the behaviour of community members.

In the political theorist’s understanding of culture, “cultural group” then becomes associated with a quasi-legal entity that has historically enjoyed or is now claiming jurisdiction over its members. This solidifies the group into something very substantial. The group is presumed, moreover, to play a large role in the loyalties of its members; hence the emphasis, from Charles Taylor onwards, on the responsibility states have to extend due respect and recognition to cultures. Taylor has linked this to a strong sense of what distinguishes one group from another: “with the politics of difference”, he argues, “what we are being asked to recognise is the unique identity of the individual or group, their distinctness from everyone else” (1994: 38). Sustaining that distinctness becomes a large part of what cultural politics is about. People’s loyalty to their group does not necessarily displace loyalty to a larger national community (indeed, both Kymlicka and Taylor tend to be rather reassuring on this score), but with distinctness so strongly emphasised, there is a tendency to see group identities as intrinsically oppositional.

Consider, as one illustration, Jacob Levy’s characterisation of ethnocultural identities, which links cultural belonging very firmly to a demarcation between kin and strangers:

Persons identify and empathize more easily with those with whom they have more in common that with those with whom they have less. They rally around their fellow religionists; they seek the familiar comforts of native speakers of their native languages; they support those they see as kin against those they see as strangers. They seek places that feel like home, and seek to protect those places; they are raised in particular cultures, with particular sets of knowledge, norms and traditions, which come to seem normal and enduring. These feelings, repeated and generalized, help give rise to a world of ethnic, cultural and national loyalty, and also a world of enduring ethnic, cultural, and national variety.

(Levy 2000: 6)

This is a pretty bounded notion of culture, which presumes not only a preference for but also a clear sense of who counts as your kin, and it makes culture almost by definition oppositional. “My” culture means “not yours”. Given this reading, it comes as no surprise that Levy does not share the optimistic take on cultural hybridity, which sees it as dissolving the rigidity of ethnic and/or cultural boundaries and defusing the conflicts of the multiethnic world. A hybrid cultural community, is still, for Levy, a cultural community and therefore as much a basis for bounded and exclusionary loyalties as any more pristine cultural group. To have a culture is to find your ways of doing things more “natural” than any other, and to feel greater allegiance to those you regard as your own.

These tendencies – reserving the term “cultural group” for quasi-legal entities, thinking of the “problem” of culture as intrinsically bound up with the status of minority groups, and associating cultural belonging with potentially exclusionary loyalties – reflect the political theorist’s awareness of inequality and conflict; and are not in themselves bad things. The downside is an overly solid representation of the cultural group, and this has had a number of unfortunate consequences. The first is that theorists of multiculturalism focus on conflicts between majority and minority groups but do not sufficiently consider conflicts (for example by gender, age or class) within each group. They take the “group” as more of an entity than it really is, and play down internal tensions. I will not dwell much on this aspect, for it has by now been roundly criticised, and is, in a sense, the starting point for this collection. Writing in the mid-1990s, James Tully already repudiated what he called the billiard-ball conception of culture, that represents each culture as “separate, bounded and internally uniform” (1995: 10);³ while more recently, Seyla Benhabib (2002) has provided a powerful critique of the “reductionist sociology” that reifies cultures as separate entities and overemphasises their internal homogeneity. A substantial feminist literature extends the now familiar critique of gender essentialism to make similar charges against “cultural essentialism”;⁴ and even those feminists who are said to be guilty of this cultural essentialism engage in a deconstruction of culture, if only in noting that the self-styled spokesmen of a cultural community cannot be taken as speaking for the women in “their” group.⁵ Pretty much all feminist writing on multiculturalism starts with a warning against the tendency to take the cultural “group” as more unified and homogeneous than it really is. The way cultural reification can obscure internal differentiation by age, gender, sexuality or class has by now been widely aired.

In this chapter, I want to focus on two other consequences of the overly solid depiction of the cultural group. The first is that culture comes to be seen as the major source of people’s identity, and major determinant of their actions and behaviour. The second – I see this almost as a direct result of the first – is that culture comes to be seen as something primarily associated with non-Western or minority cultural groups. As the political case for multiculturalism comes to rest, in part, on the importance people attach to their cultural identities, the hold that “culture” exerts over people is highlighted and exaggerated, and culture is thereby exoticised. Culture comes to be represented as something of enormous importance to the individual. It is treated as more important to our sense of ourselves than our sex or our class; and is attributed far more explanatory value. But the greater the importance attached to cultural belonging, the more likely it is that culture will be seen as something that matters to others, not me – for culture is, in most people’s lives, pretty “ordinary”. It is such a taken-for-granted background that we only become aware of the norms and assumptions that give meaning to our actions when we are confronted with cultures very different from our own. (This was the key insight of the ethno-methodologist, who asks us to disrupt taken-for-granted rules of conduct in order to bring them into sharper focus.)

Culture tends, moreover, to be least visible to those in the hegemonic culture, many of whom will readily acknowledge the influence of class or gender on their attitudes and behaviour, but rarely cite “culture” as explaining why they act the way they do. I am not convinced that culture is lived in such a different way by those who find themselves in a minority. But the experience of being in the minority makes people more conscious of the distinctiveness of their culture; while the sense of being pressured to conform to majority norms sometimes makes people more committed to sustaining their distinctiveness. Culture also operates as a resource in mobilising against majority dominance. With all this, it is hardly surprising if individuals occupying a minority position more commonly refer to their culture as a defining part of their identity and being.⁶

These different ways of living a hegemonic and non-hegemonic culture help sustain the notion that “culture” – in the sense of cultural traditions, practices or beliefs – is primarily a feature of non-Western or minority cultural groups. In Dislocating Cultures, Uma Narayan conjures up an imaginary Indian journalist who is trying to write an analysis of the way “American culture” kills women, a book that will do for domestic violence in the USA what analyses of “Hindu tradition” have done for dowry-murder in India. She concludes that this can only remain “an imaginary chapter in an improbable book”, for

while Indian women repeatedly suffer “death by culture” in a range of scholarly and popular works, even as the elements of “culture” proffered do little to explain their deaths, American women seem relatively immune to such analyses of “death or injury by culture” even as they are victimized by the fairly distinctively American phenomenon of wide-spread gun-related violence.

(Narayan 1997: 117)

The hard work of the anthropologists has not, it seems, borne fruit. Despite their best efforts, people seem unwilling to recognise that all groups have their cultural practices, expectations and traditions, and that each of us lives within a web of cultural references and meanings.

In the political theory of multiculturalism, this tendency to associate cultural tradition with minority cultural tradition is compounded by the very way the argument for multicultural policies has been pursued, for if the case for multiculturalism rests on the importance people attach to their cultural identities and belonging, it rests on something that is not widely experienced by the average political theorist. The academics who generate most of the writing on this topic live in an atmosphere of geographic and intellectual mobility; and however strongly they may defend the “right to culture”, they are likely to be less culturally embedded than those they write about. In popular thinking, culture has become almost synonymous with minority or non-Western culture. Much the same seems to be happening in normative political theory.

Exaggerating the significance of culture

So what is the implication of these observations for a collection that addresses issues of gender and culture? In the literature on multiculturalism, there is by now a well-developed understanding of two pitfalls that can beset us in considering tensions between gender equality and cultural diversity. We know it is dangerous to invoke something called culture as justifying or excusing harms to women, for we know that the cultural brokers who take on the role of interpretation may be a narrowly unrepresentative elite, employing what they claim to be the unbreakable traditions of their culture to reinforce the subordination of women. We also know – from the other side – that it can be problematic simply to invoke the rights of women against the claims of cultural groups. This can leave women with an unhappy choice between their rights or their culture, and seems to ignore the inequalities between majority and minority groups that first gave the impetus to debates on multiculturalism. In representing some cultures as more sexist than others, it can also give a perverse legitimacy to xenophobic and racist attacks. (This second “knowledge” is more contested than the first, but even those most closely associated with the notion of women’s rights as nonnegotiable have noted the risks of blundering into a situation under the banner of women’s rights, and in the process making women more vulnerable than they previously were.) Here, I focus on the further problem we should bear in mind in discussions of gender and culture: the tendency to make “culture” more important than it is in explaining events in non-Western or minority cultures, while minimising its significance elsewhere.

Some of the sharpest illustrations of this come from an issue much discussed in the literature on feminism and multiculturalism, the issue of “cultural defence”.⁷ A number of high-profile cases in the USA have raised fears that defendants will be able successfully to invoke the values and traditions of their culture in order to mitigate the seriousness of acts of violence against women. One much discussed case is that of Dong-lu Chen, a Chinese immigrant to New York, who killed his wife after discovering she was having an affair, but in the light of what the judge termed “traditional Chinese values about adultery and loss of manhood”, was sentenced to only five years’ probation (People v. Chen 2 December 1988). Another is the case of Kong Pheng Moua, who defended himself from a charge of rape and kidnapping by claiming he was acting in accordance with a traditional Hmong practice of marriage by capture, and was sentenced to four months in prison and a fine (People of the State of California v. Kong Pheng Moua 7 February 1985). These are highly disturbing uses of culture, but despite the anxiety they generate, defendants invoking some form of cultural defence have not got much of a hearing across North America or Europe. The most comprehensive sur...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: Defining and challenging “culture” and “cultural identity”
• Part II: Autonomy, culture and gender
• Part III: Gender, culture and democracy