Multicultural Feminism Research Paper

Because no term satisfactorily captures all these dimensions, the designation ‘multicultural feminism’ is by no means settled but loosely shares the field with other terms like ‘cross-cultural’ or ‘transnational’ feminism (Grewal and Kaplan 1994, Mohanty 1988). In addition, feminists particularly troubled by liberal feminism’s lack of attention to the inequities that women disadvantaged by hierarchies of race and class suffer have called for a ‘revolutionary’ or ‘materialist’ feminism to transform existing national and global structures of power, which they see as accommodating only a minority of relatively privileged women (Hooks 1984, Delphy 1980). In any event, insofar as most feminist critics of liberal feminism argue for a close analysis of the concrete, complex, and variable contexts of women’s lives, the term ‘multicultural feminism,’ expansively understood, adequately if imperfectly covers the terrain of their concerns.

It should be noted that multicultural feminism eschews, in the main, the universal versus relativist debate that marked the discussion of human rights at the end of the twentieth century (Brems 1997). It insists, instead, on context, not as a device for evading discussions of the human rights of women, but as the necessary framework within which to conduct them. Indeed, multicultural feminism mediates two sets of tensions: the one that has lately arisen in countries of the North between the value of individual human rights and that of multiculturalism (Taylor 1994), and that which, in countries of the South, too often pits the discourse of nationalism against that of feminism (Chatterjee 1993).

1. The Critique Of Liberal Feminism

The dominant feminist discourse in the world today is properly termed Western or liberal because, like the general human rights matrix that surrounds it, the discourse springs from, and is marked by, the European Enlightenment, which, as is well known, consecrated the value of individual liberty. To that, the American and French Revolutions added the concept of equality. In reality, the promise of these two concepts was realized in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in parts of the West for only a section of its population: propertied men. It took the liberal feminist movement the better part of the twentieth century to extract the fruits of that promise for some women as well: those from dominant classes and/or ethnic or racial groups. Multicultural feminism, which found its voice in the last quarter of the twentieth century, now comes along to challenge liberal feminism on two principal counts: its identification with a privileged constituency in the North, and its concomitant tendency to conflate liberty with individualism, and equality with uniformity.

Liberal feminists in the North, for their part, have begun to voice the concern that the cultural diversification which globalization has brought to their countries could work to erode the rights of women therein. Many believe that non-Western immigrant communities oppress or discriminate against women, and fear that proponents of multiculturalism will persuade the liberal state to shield such practices from the reach of laws solicitous of individual autonomy and gender equality. By contrast, feminists who reside in the South tend to support, rather than fear, the increasing juxtaposition of liberal and communitarian discourses in their countries. This, no doubt, is because they experience their societies as multidimensional and hence capable of evolution where needed; and also because juxtaposition sanctions their own selective adoption of liberal feminist tenets (Toubia 1998).

A recent essay by Susan Moller Okin (1999) in the USA sums up the anxiety that the subject of multiculturalism evokes in some liberal feminists. Okin fears that Americans, whom she describes as prone to romanticize egalitarianism, will be tempted to extend the principle of equality, which currently protects individuals only, to safeguard cultural groups as well. She advocates strongly against such extension where groups invoke culture to rationalize their control over the bodies and lives of women. Denial of protection for such groups’ practices, Okin continues, must be absolute, even if it results in the extinction of their cultures.

Third World patriarchies, she asserts, forbid women to be independent from men, to be lesbian, and to refuse to bear children. They are, furthermore, sites of clitoridectomy, polygamy, forced marriages, and other practices that Okin finds sexist and abhorrent. The French government, in her view, erred gravely when it allowed African men to enter France with more than one wife, all of whom the state consequently recognized as legitimate spouses. Okin believes that the liberal state cannot thus validate polygamy for immigrants, and not for the native-born, without undermining its own existence. Finally, she accuses proponents of multiculturalism of seeing culture in monolithic terms whereas, she asserts, it constitutes a field in which women contest their oppression.

All in all, Okin’s essay displays, in forthright fashion, the reductionism and presumption that non-Western feminists decry in much of Western feminism’s gaze on its Other. To begin with, the approach conflates diverse Third World histories and cultures. It then reduces these to what Westerners perceive as their most ‘exotic’ practices. Finally, it prescribes a repudiatory role for the West, and for Third World women, vis-a-vis the miscast practices and, if need be, their associated cultures. At its most problematic, the approach re-enacts the gestures of ignorance and arrogance, as well as the strategy of divide-and-rule, that marked the West’s colonial and missionary enterprises in much of the non-Western world through the mid-twentieth century.

Not surprisingly, Third World feminists, whether in the South or in diasporic communities in the North, regularly challenge Western feminism’s depiction of their cultures, to correct the record certainly, but also to distance themselves from a caricatural vision and an improbable program that too often engender animosity rather than support for the advancement of women in their communities. Chandra Talpade Mohanty (1988), for example, rejects liberal feminism’s fundamental assumption that a universal patriarchy has operated across all time and space to subordinate women, and that the phenomenon remains most entrenched in the South. She and others observe that human cultures are far too complex to all fit under the rubric of patriarchy. In the case of the Indian subcontinent, Mohanty notes, the world of women instead abounds with legacies and experiences of domination as well as subordination that fluctuate with age, marital status, presence of children, proximity to kin, and other factors that condition that of gender. Commenting on the Middle East, Deniz Kandyoti (1991), Lila Abu-Lughod (1998) take issue with the prevailing Western view that an undifferentiated Islam oppresses women there. They write that the latter’s situation in fact varies significantly with their countries’ specific histories—indigenous, colonial, and postcolonial. Marnia Lazreg (1994) likewise emphasizes that Algeria is more than Islam. It is not religion, she points out, but changing historical circumstances, that most influence the production and reproduction of gender difference and inequality.

The general multicultural critique, then, is that liberal feminism habitually essentializes the cultures of Third World communities in its account of the oppression of their women (Harris 1990, Romany 1991). In the process, it assigns univalent meanings to the unfamiliar cultural symbols and practices that it encounters. Thus, all veiling, all instances of purdah, all forms of female genital modification are read automatically to signify the subordination of women, when they may in fact alternately or additionally represent an assertion of identity, an opportunity for female bonding, and a rite of passage to maturity respectively. In consequence, liberal feminism dismisses both the complexity of culture, and the agency of Third World women (Moraga and Anzaldua 1983). Misperception and reductionism of course characterize all cultural groups’ construction of their Other; however, the power to affect the life of the Other through such distortion is not given equally to all. To the extent that women in the North hold greater power in the international arena than women in the South to affect the future of all women, the former’s errors in its construction of the lives of the latter are not merely regrettable, but sometimes downright dangerous.

Azizah al-Hibri (1996) illustrates this in the context of international human rights conferences. She relates that, to the dismay of women from the South, women from the North used their organizational know-how at the 1981 UN Mid-decade for Women Conference in Copenhagen, the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna, and the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo to dominate their proceedings and speak in the name of all women. In Copenhagen, women from the North announced that the gravest concerns of Third World women were veiling and clitoridectomy; in Cairo they said that these were contraception and abortion. When women from the South spoke on their own behalf in Cairo, they asserted, instead, that their highest priorities were peace and development! Nevertheless, liberal feminists’ single-minded reproductive agenda in Cairo, which many in the developing countries saw as racist, had the spillover effect of delegitimizing some women from the South who participated in that conference in their own countries. More, it provoked a conservative backlash in a number of Muslim countries so that women there, al-Hibri writes, subsequently found it more difficult to obtain abortions.

The tension noted above between North and South women highlights the individual versus communitarian character of their respective agendas. For liberal feminists, who enjoy substantial peace and usually also independent access to material wealth in their societies, a focus on a woman’s right to control her body and sexuality, and otherwise enjoy personal autonomy, may indeed make sense. For Third World women however, most of whom, in tandem with their communities, suffer strife and/or poverty, the collective pursuit of peace and development appear far more urgent (Davies 1983 1987). Moreover, in all cultures, sexuality is fraught with profound social as well as personal implications; and invites strong, albeit divergent, social control. As such, sexuality represents a particularly difficult subject for transnational discussion and action. Western feminists’ early and disproportionate emphasis on the subject thus erected barriers rather than bridges to women in the South.

Multicultural feminists also critique the West’s essentialist gaze on its at-home Other (Lam 1994, Lorde 1984, Razack 1998). Sherene Razack identifies the cultural reductionism at work in Canada when cases of gender violence involving persons of color are discussed. While violence against women perpetrated by white men is generally depicted as manifestations of individual deviance, that by men of color is typically vested with cultural significance. Furthermore, although class-and race-based inequities contribute to the genesis of violence in communities of color, this dimension of the problem is regularly ignored in the public discourse on the subject. The cultural story of female vulnerability, that is, trumps that of political injustice.

Audrey Lorde, in her influential work Sister Outsider, faults white middle-class liberal feminists in the USA for failing to educate themselves on the situation and needs of women who do not share their circumstances. She rejects the notion that the victim class must educate the victimizer class, and insists instead that the latter itself seek out knowledge and undertake self-reflection. Victims, she writes, need to conserve their energies for self-organizing. The liberal feminist call for universal sisterhood, Lorde points out, assumes a homogeneity of experience that simply does not exist. Black women, for example, bear the special responsibility of distinguishing between the oppressor’s need to oppress black men from their own legitimate conflicts with them. It is a tension that confounds women who do not share a history of devastation with their men—be it of slavery, genocide, colonialism, the Holocaust, or apartheid. Lorde calls on these women to appreciate the viewpoint of those who live the tension, and to respect the solidarity that they extend to victimized men.

Third World feminists often hear, in liberal feminism’s call for global sisterhood, intimations of the divide-and-conquer campaign that the West waged in colonial times (Ahmed 1992, Gandhi 1998, Lazreg 1994, Spivak 1998). Leela Gandhi finds echos of that strategy in certain moves sanctioned by liberal feminism in the North: the essential zing of Third World women as marginal and victimized; the use of liberal feminist criteria to validate civilizing missions to the Other; liberal feminists’ execution of such missions. Bluntly put, where white men once purported to save brown women from brown men, Gandhi and others now see white women doing the same.

Marnia Lazreg recalls that Westerners regularly used the ‘condition of women’ in the colonies to illustrate the ‘doomed’ nature of native cultures. Yet, in Algeria, she writes, Frenchmen regularly showed contempt for those Algerian women who shed tradition; they referred to them as prostitutes, and otherwise unveiled their own hidden perspective on women. Many Algerians thus saw in the colonists’ text for the advancement of Algerian women a pretext for the fragmentation of their country’s revolutionary independence movement. Leila Ahmed adds that the West continues to profoundly distrust Islam, and consequently to exaggerate, and exacerbate, the gender divide in Muslim countries. For her part, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in a well-known essay, finds Western feminists to be troublingly fixated on the figure of the Third World Woman. They have reified the latter, she writes, into a veritable paradigm in the West’s recreation of a new Orientalism. Once again, Spivak notes, the locating of ignominy at the margin supports self-exaltation at the center. Already, under colonialism, white women acted as agents of the civilizing mission of empire. This gave them a public significance in the colonies that they did not previously enjoy in the metropolis, but which they managed to successfully transport back there.

Notwithstanding the civic personhood and individual rights that Western women gained from the modernization that colonialism helped to underwrite in their countries, Laura Nader (1989) observes that they became the first victims of the social transformation involved. For modernity, on a first order, doubles the work of women by adding wage labor to unpaid domestic work. It also nuclearizes the family, thereby disconnecting women from their extended kin and increasing their dependence on their husbands. The road away from tradition then, Nader writes, leads to alienation rather than liberty. Modernity, moreover, replaces the rough equality that prevailed between preindustrial extended households with a hierarchy of wealth that pits individuals directly against each other. Women entering the modern world thus find themselves trapped by an amplified male authority even as they also confront sudden aloneness and insecurity.

Societies in the North, where modernity has had a longer run than in the South, in time developed laws and institutions that mitigate, for women positioned to take advantage of them, the harshness that modernity otherwise inflicts. Liberal feminists tend to be so positioned, and to forget those who are not. The criticism that Okin levels at the French government’s recognition of polygamous immigrant families, for example, and her readiness to assign certain cultures to oblivion, exhibit such forgetfulness, which multicultural feminists challenge. They question a feminism that would split up an existing polygamous family when this would likely leave some co-wives and their children without support. They reject a feminism that would accept the extinction of a whole culture to suppress some perceived misogynist practices therein when the women of that culture, like the men, draw the very shape and value of their personalities and lives from the totality of its signification, such that its eradication must somehow also implicate their own existence.

While multicultural feminists emphasize the constitutive nature of culture, they by no means assert its homogeneity, determinism, coherence, or even ahistorical validity. What they do assert is that, apart from gross violations of human rights, the pace and direction of change in a culture must be determined by the relevant cultural community itself. Moreover, they are confident that impulses for change exist in any cultural community precisely because a culture, unlike a cult, is not built around uniform values and limited interests but rather accommodates an ongoing adjustment of the wide-ranging and sometimes conflicting needs and desires of the many individuals and groups that make up the community. Finally, internal impulses for change are also triggered by external stimuli (which differ from dictates), of which there are plenty in today’s closely connected world.

The effect that the interplay of internal and external forces can have on cultural change, or its arrest, is illustrated by a set of events occasioned by the influx of Somalian immigrants into Seattle in the mid-1990s (Coleman 1998). Sometime in 1996, a number of Somalian women about to give birth at a state hospital in that city asked its staff to circumcise their soon-to-be-born sons as well as daughters. In the case of the latter, they requested a small cut to the prepuce or hood over the clitoris, but no removal (and hence no scarring) of tissue. The women related that the procedure would replace the more extensive traditional cutting that they would otherwise have to procure, given their religious beliefs and cultural practices, for their daughters outside the hospital and, possibly, outside the USA. While reluctant at first, the hospital in time agreed to perform the procedure under local anesthesia for girls old enough to add their consent to those of their parents.

In explaining its decision, the hospital stated that the procedure represented a far safer alternative to the more invasive traditional methods that the Somalian girls would otherwise be subject to—illegally in the USA, or legally in Somalia if they were sent back there for the purpose, as many were. Nevertheless, when news of the hospital’s decision broke, reaction from feminist ranks in the USA was swift, vehement, and condemnatory. A female member of the US Congress who was prominent in liberal feminist circles publicly pronounced the proposed procedure barbaric, baffling, and horrifying in addition to illegal. The media largely concurred. Pressed from many sides, the hospital reversed its decision. Lost in the brouhaha was the considered voice of an earlier group of Somalian immigrants in the USA who supported the proposed procedure because they saw it as a bridge over which this generation of Somalians could walk on their way to a future in the USA where their own children would likely not re-enact the practice of female genital modification.

2. The Critique Of Nationalism

Although multicultural feminists appreciate the constitutive nature of culture, they also recognize its frequent misuse, particularly in the discourse of nationalism, to rationalize the oppression of women. The ideology of nationalism, which promotes the welding together of ethnicity and power in the form of the nation-state, clearly fueled the Third World’s bid to liberate itself from the West in the last century. At the same time, the ideology imposed serious constraints on a number of groups, notably indigenous or tribal peoples, minorities, and women. The constraints were prompted by the anticolonial movement’s need to unify peoples and glorify histories as it sought to generate and amass the political energy required to evict colonizers and build independent modern states. Unification, nationalism taught, demanded the suppression of ethnic difference. The glorification of the past, in turn, provoked an exaggeration of gender distinctions (Chatterjee 1993). That is, the more colonialism, and later independence, drew Third World men out of their traditional milieu into the ambivalent workplace of an imposed and later borrowed modernity, the more it fell to women to assure the reproduction of what passed, in an already irreversibly transformed society, for the authenticating and reassuring domain of tradition.

Third World womanhood, as a result, became a potent symbol of the sacred ‘us’ versus the profane ‘them’ (Lazreg 1994). Where colonialism had invented the lowly status Third World woman, then, nationalism now imagined a noble Third World figure. In both versions, reification distorted culture and hid from view the concrete situations of real women. Religious or cultural fundamentalists in the Third World today who police the behavior of its women are thus engaging, as Arab feminists regularly point out, not in a return to tradition, but in the postcolonial construction of an alternate modernity which these feminists strongly contest (Abu-Lughod 1998, al-Hibri 1996, Kandyoti 1991, Lazreg 1994). In the case of Islam, the feminists emphasize, the tradition of ijtihad in fact invites every Muslim, male and female, to conscientiously engage in the personal interpretation and adaptation of religious texts to their lives which are understood as unfolding in social contexts that are complex and fluid. Though religious law, or shari’a, binds, its meaning is thus not determined by an ultimate clerical authority, as is Catholic doctrine for example, but results from consultation, or shuria. The emancipation of contemporary Muslim women, then, entails their reclaiming of ijtihad and shuria (Majid 1998).

Some Arab feminists are also skeptical of calls for the emancipation of women that their governments sometimes issue (Kandyoti 1991). They hear it as the state’s attempt to substitute its power over women for that of kin groups, to mobilize cheap female labor, and to satisfy the international financial institutions (IFIs) of the global capitalist economy. Indeed, where Third World states early on invited women into the modern arena by enrolling them in national schools, it was generally done for the purpose of advancing the state, and not women: the latter were taught to become scientific managers of homes that would turn out compliant citizens. In the same vein, earlier colonial administrations had wanted to free women from their traditional contexts so that colonizers could train them to mold the future subjects of the colonies to the colonizers’ liking.

The view that global capitalism, rather than local patriarchies, is the primary cause of the present poverty and subordination of women, particularly in the Third World, received a late hearing in academia (Boserup 1989, Enloe 1990, Jayawardena 1986). Multicultural feminists today, nevertheless, generally insist on this perspective. They point to the present superexploitation of women in garment, electronic, and tourist (including prostitution) industries in every region of the globe. Their campaign on behalf of women consequently focuses less on promoting individual rights to liberty and equal treatment than on challenging the political and economic structures, national and international, that break down local communities and cultures in order to make way for a single global economy to freely exploit, oppress, and degrade women. In important respects, the multicultural feminist campaign thus recapitulates the multidimensional fight waged 100 years ago in the West against the excesses of laissez-faire capitalism. Only this time, the source of excess is ubiquitous, and far more powerful: laissez-faire global capitalism (Basu 1995, Davies 1983 1987, Vinding 1998).

3. The Multicultural Feminist Perspective

Multicultural feminism is neither a unified theory nor a single political movement. It is a name for a perspective on the situation of women that highlights the contexts of their lives and supports their self-directed liberation from subordination, whatever its origin. Third World women in the South and in diasporic communities in the North are the principal, but not exclusive, architects of this perspective. Men from the South, together with men and women from the North, have offered important formulations of, and support for, the perspective (An-Naim 1991, Minow 1990, Taylor 1994). Multicultural feminists’ emphasis on context leads them to value both the dignity of the individual and her need for the support of a meaningful community (which they see in any event as mutually constitutive), especially in light of the spreading global capitalist economy which commodifies individuals and scatters communities. Multicultural feminists thus seek out diverse and flexible ways in which women can be supported in their communities. In the area of individual human rights, for example, they support the formulation of core values, but generally find the rigid allocation of specific rights and responsibilities premature in a world of diverse cultures and unequal power. The rights of Third World women cannot be fully honored, they further hold, if the status of their communities in the global econony and polity is not elevated. In sum, multicultural feminists support the empowerment of women in the concrete, if evolving, realities of their lives.

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