LIBERALS have a way of occupying the high moral ground while keeping the lower depths finely covered, moving convincingly from “causes” to cases, balancing theory and practice. What are the possibilities of maneuver in the midst of such fluency? I welcome Susan Okin’s central argument that “there is considerable likelihood of tension . . . between feminism and a multiculturalist commitment to group rights for minority cultures,” which persists even when the latter are claimed on “liberal grounds.” This is a useful corrective to the prevailing orthodoxy that establishes “equivalences” between disadvantaged groups, aggregating “communities of interest” without doing the hard work of specifying rights and interests, shying away from conflicts within, and between, minorities.
Let me, however, tweak the sacred cow by the tail (rather than indulging in the phallic fandango of taking the bull by the horns) and suggest that the force of Okin’s feminist advocacy rests on a restricted understanding of the “liberal grounds” on which feminism and multiculturalism might negotiate their differences about rights and representations. Okin’s view of the interface between feminism and multiculturalism is so focused on the “conflict” generated by the antifeminist and patriarchal effects of criminal cultural defense that, against her own best advice, she allows herself to produce “monolithic,” though gender-differentiated, characterizations of minority, migrant cultures—kidnap and rape by Hmong men, wife-murder by immigrants from Asia and the Middle Eastern countries, mother-child suicide among Japanese and Chinese provoked by the shame of the husband’s infidelity.
The cultural defense plea is the ethnographic evidence that, for Okin, invokes the basic idea that the defendant’s cultural group regards women as subordinates whose primary purpose is to serve men sexually and domestically. By contrast, “Western liberal cultures” (a phrase Okin uses to identify which side she is on) may discriminate between the sexes in practice, but the protection of domestic law produces an enabling and equitable familial culture for girls and women. Writing as I am from London, I can most readily address the British experience. The British civil liberty group Liberty would demur at Okin’s description of the egalitarian and empowering “Western” domestic scene. Human Rights and Wrongs, an alternative report to the UN Human Rights Committee, concludes that one-third of all reported crimes against women in Britain result from domestic violence and take place at home; in London, in 1993, one woman in ten had been assaulted by her partner. Adult women and children are overwhelmingly more likely to become the victims of violence at home than on the street or at the workplace.
But I am, here, less concerned with the domestic perspective than with the more global cultural assumptions that animate Okin’s arguments. Her narrative begins by pitting multiculturalism against feminism but then grows seamlessly into a comparative and evaluative judgment on minority cultures (largely represented by cultural defense cases) delivered from the point of view of Western liberal cultures (represented by the eloquent testimony of academic feminists). In my view, however, issues related to group rights or cultural defense must be placed in the context of the ongoing lives of minorities in the metropolitan cultures of the West if we are to understand the deprivation and discrimination that shape their affective lives, often alienated from the comforts of citizenship. Minorities are too frequently imaged as the abject “subjects” of their cultures of origin huddled in the gazebo of group rights, preserving the orthodoxy of their distinctive cultures in the midst of the great storm of Western progress. When this becomes the dominant opinion within the liberal public sphere—strangely similar to the views held by patriarchal elders within minority communities whose authority depends upon just such traditionalist essentialisms and pieties—then minorities are regarded as virtual citizens, never quite “here and now,” relegated to a distanced sense of belonging elsewhere, to a “there and then.”
Entreating us to pay attention to the less formalized institutions and spheres of social life, to regard the “internal differences and . . . the private arena” within which the unequal relations of gender become visible, Okin surprisingly chooses to characterize gender roles within immigrant communities largely on the basis of information submitted as evidence for criminal cultural defense procedures. By relying so heavily on the context and discourse of the courtroom, where cultural information is being mobilized for very specific ends (to answer a criminal charge, to argue for the mitigation of a sentence), Okin is in danger of producing the monolithic discourse of the cultural stereotype. Cultural stereotypes may well have the ring of truth and accurately register aspects of a cultural tradition. However, they are reductive insofar as they claim, for a cultural “type,” an invariant or universal representability. Stereotypes disavow the complex, often contradictory contexts and codes—social or discursive—within which the signs and symbols of a culture develop their meanings and values as part of an ongoing, transformative process.
However rhetorically effective, or politically expedient, it may be to found an argument on “citations” gleaned from cultural defense cases, they cannot provide Okin with an understanding of “patriarchy” as it is played out in culturally diverse societies or experienced within migrant communities in racially biased Western liberal cultures. Put “patriarchy” in the dock by all means, but put it in a relevant context; sentence sexism but specify it too. “Patriarchy” in India, for instance, intersects with poverty, caste, illiteracy; patriarchy in liberal America is shored up, among other things, by racism, the gun culture, desultory welfare provision; patriarchy and gender-relations in migrant communities are complicated by the fact that women, young and old, are often caught between the benevolent patronage of a Western liberal patriarchy and the aggressivity of an indigenous patriarchal culture—threatened by the majority culture and challenged by its own “second” generation. Okin’s ahistorical view of “patriarchy” (“most of the peoples of Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and Asia . . . are quite distinctly patriarchal”) and her monolithic, deterministic notion of Culture itself (“[Muslim] Law allows for the whipping or imprisonment . . . and culture condones the killing or pressuring . . . ”) combine to form a dangerous presumption that many of the world’s other cultures—cultures that are not “Western majority cultures”—exist in a time warp. They are represented as having no local traditions of protest, no indigenous feminist movements, no sources of cultural and political contestation. For an argument that rightly suggests that we should take our moral and political bearings from the “internal differences” that mediate power relations within communities, Okin’s casts a gaze on “non-Western” peoples that comes resolutely from above and elsewhere. Her version of liberal feminism shares something of the patronizing and stereotyping attitudes of the patriarchal perspective.
Indeed, her monolithic distinction between the West (liberal) and the Rest seems to consign the South to a kind of premodern customary society devoid of the complex problems of late modernity. The opposite is often the case. It is the fragile political and economic fate of postcolonial societies, caught in the uneven and unequal forces of globalization, to suffer in a heightened and exaggerated form the contradictions and ambiguities that inhabit the Western world. Take, for instance, the proposals for new divorce laws in China.1 Formulated to make divorce difficult, to punish male adultery, and to protect wives who are increasingly cast aside for mistresses known as “little honeys,” the proposed laws have met a mixed, contested response within the feminist community. China is certainly not my idea of a liberal society, but this has not prevented a debate within the Chinese women’s movement that has taken up a number of “liberal” positions and pitted them against other radical and emancipatory alternatives. As the Times reports, “Women’s advocates have been bitterly split by the proposals, with some calling them needed protections for women while many younger feminists and sociologists call them a regressive move in a country where the Communists have a history of paternalistic meddling. . . . ” “We need to make a distinction between law and morality,” as an expert on sex issues at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences said. Whether married women should seek “progressive” state protection or aggressively reject the surveillance of such a pastoral (patriarchal) state is an argument that has many resonances with such discussions in the “West.” We can make common cause with such a controversy—on one side or the other—but not without undertaking the work of cultural translation that would enable us to specify the concept of “paternalistic meddling” in relation, say, to the American liberal understanding of patriarchical influence, when discussing policy issues concerned with family law, the role of women, and the regulatory norms of the State.
I do not wish to press the tired and overused charge of “Eurocentrism” against such an argument. What is considerably more problematic than the inappropriate application of “external” norms is the way in which the norms of Western liberalism become at once the measure and mentor of minority cultures—Western liberalism, warts and all, as a salvage operation, if not salvation itself. With a zealousness not unlike the colonial civilizing mission, the “liberal” agenda is articulated without a shadow of self-doubt, except perhaps an acknowledgment of its contingent failings in the practice of everyday life. If the failures of liberalism are always “practical,” then what kind of perfectibility does the principle claim for itself? Such a campaigning stance obscures indigenous traditions of reform and resistance, ignores “local” leavenings of liberty, flies in the face of feminist campaigns within nationalist and anticolonial struggles, leaves out well-established debates by minority intellectuals and activists concerned with the difficult “translation” of gender and sexual politics in the world of migration and resettlement.
Okin’s concluding suggestion that “non-co-opted” younger women should be represented in negotiations about group rights (so that they may be protected from the more collusive, co-opted older women) smacks just a little of “divide and rule.” It may be useful to recognize that for many postcolonial peoples, who now count as the “minorities” of Western multiculturalism, liberalism is not such a “foreign” value nor quite so simply a generational value. Asian and Middle Eastern feminists, for instance, from the 1920s onward, have been deeply engaged in those contradictions of the liberal tradition that become particularly visible in the colonial and postcolonial contexts, and carry over into the contemporary lives of diasporic or migratory communities. Such an agonistic liberalism, with a colonial and postcolonial genealogy, has to struggle against “indigenous” patriarchies—political and religious—while strategically negotiating its own autonomy in relation to the paternalistic liberalisms of colonial modernity or Westernization. An agonistic liberalism questions the “foundationalist” claims of the metropolitan, “Western” liberal tradition with as much persistence as it interrogates and resists the fundamentalisms and ascriptions of indigenous orthodoxy. An awareness of the ambivalent and “unsatisfied” histories of the liberal persuasion allows “us”—postcolonial critics, multiculturalists, or feminists—to join in the unfinished work of creating a more viable, intracultural community of rights.