MULTICULTURALISM WITHOUT CULTURE pdf download

Multiculturalism Without Culture by Anne Phillips

MULTICULTURALISM WITHOUT CULTURE

The first was my feeling that feminism was becoming prone to paralysis by cultural difference, with anxieties about cultural imperialism engendering a kind of relativism that made it difficult to represent any belief or practice as oppressive to women or at odds with gender equality.

The feeling became especially acute after Susan Moller Okin published her essays on the tension between feminism and multiculturalism, including an abbreviated version, under the title she later regretted, “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?”

1 One might have thought Okin’s contentions would be rapidly incorpo¬ rated into the common sense of feminism; indeed, Katha Pollittt com¬ mented that “coming in late to this debate, I have to say I’ve had a hard time understanding how anyone could find these arguments controversial.”

Okin noted that most cultures are suffused with gendered practices and ideologies that disadvantage women relative to men. For a feminist, this is not an especially controversial claim.

She asserted that while most cultures are patriarchal, some are more so than others, and that cultural minorities claiming group rights or multicultural accommodation are often more patriarchal in their practices than the surrounding cultures.

It would be easy to get into arguments about how to define patriarchy and whether it remains a useful term; but again, it seems uncontroversial to say that some practices are better for women than others, and hard to see why all cultures would turn out to be equally good or bad on the woman question.

Nor is it hugely contentious to suggest (as Okin did) that a practice like polygamy is less popular among women than men, or to point out that it is no longer regarded as an acceptable form of marriage in legal systems across Europe and North America

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