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3 - Multiculturalism and feminism: no simple question, no simple answers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2009

Susan Moller Okin
Affiliation:
Professor of Political Science and Marta Sutton Weeks Professor of Ethics in Society Stanford University
Avigail Eisenberg
Affiliation:
University of Victoria, British Columbia
Jeff Spinner-Halev
Affiliation:
University of Nebraska, Lincoln
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Summary

Most political theorists who have written recently about multiculturalism and feminism acknowledge that there are quite serious tensions between them. Since there is a vast range of beliefs and practices both within and among cultures about the appropriate status and roles of women, it seems almost inevitable that there should be some conflict between aiming to support and protect many cultures and aiming to promote the equal dignity of and respect for women. Ayelet Shachar's Multicultural Jurisdictions: Cultural Differences and Women's Rights (2001) is the lengthiest work on the subject to date. She devotes several chapters to analyzing and explaining the origins of “the paradox of multicultural vulnerability,” as she aptly calls it, before looking at ways in which it has been addressed within various, basically liberal regimes and offering thoughtful proposals about how it might best be addressed. Convinced that the rights and interests of vulnerable individuals – in particular, individual women, but also others, such as children and dissenters – can be jeopardized by group rights and other well-intentioned efforts to accommodate groups, Shachar writes:

Multicultural accommodation presents a problem … when pro-identity group policies aimed at leveling the playing field between minority communities and the wider society unwittingly allow systematic maltreatment of individuals within the accommodated group – an impact which in certain cases is so severe that it can nullify these individuals' citizenship rights. Under such conditions, well-meaning accommodation by the state may leave members of minority groups vulnerable to severe injustice within the group, and may, in effect, work to reinforce some of the most hierarchical elements of a culture.

(Shachar 2001: 2–3)
Type
Chapter
Information
Minorities within Minorities
Equality, Rights and Diversity
, pp. 67 - 89
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2005

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