ABSTRACT
It is often not the content of one’s thought but the tone of its delivery that most affects its reception by others. This was most certainly the case with the now infamous piece by Susan Moller Okin, “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?”1
In a more sober tone many of the claims that Okin made in that polemic would have seemed unexceptionable. For instance, liberal theorists have long noted that caution must be exercised when cultural rights are granted to groups that themselves may be illiberal. Furthermore, the fact that it is often women and children who suffer the most egregious harms within patriarchal societies (which by Okin’s acknowledgment means almost all societies) surely comes as no surprise. While subject to some debate, many commentators would even concede Okin’s claim that liberal democracies, with their emphasis on individual rights based on principles of equality and autonomy, have provided workable models for citizenship that are less gender-discriminatory than others and more conducive to modern life. And again, Okin’s call for greater attention to the degrees of “freedom” or “autonomy” that women can actually exercise vis-à-vis the demands put upon them by their cultural upbringing, and her related call for a political theory that does not grant immunity to the “private” sphere of women’s lives (since that is the sphere in which they are often most constrained), are both bound to resonate not only with critics who have wrestled with these issues but also with the women who actually live the lives that so interest Okin. So it is not so much the substance of Okin’s claims that seems to have troubled many of the commentators on her essay as it is her tone. From her description of a Peruvian law as “barbaric” (1999: 15) to her suggestion that women in “more patriarchal minority cultures” who have moved to “less patriarchal majority cultures” might be better off if “the culture into which they were born” became “extinct” (1999: 22), Okin’s rhetoric bears a dangerous resemblance to a long legacy of Western moral imperialism. While in its older guise such rhetoric was a convenient alibi for colonialism – remember Frederick Lugard’s “dual mandate” in Africa – in its contemporary mode such rhetoric risks condoning ethnocentrisms and xenophobias in a world that has become increasingly interconnected.2 And yet to reject some of the substantive and urgent tensions between cultural claims and gender claims on the basis of this problematic rhetoric alone does not seem to me to be an adequate response. Rather, I think it might be of some use to take a closer
