Refugee Women

Beyond Gender versus Culture

Leah Bassel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781138020139
• eBook ISBN: 9781136850554
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Debates over the headscarf and niqab, so-called 'sharia-tribunals', Female Genital Operations and forced marriages have raged in Europe and North America in recent years, raising the question – does accommodating Islam violate women's rights? The book takes issue with the terms of this debate. It contrasts debates in France over the headscarf and in Canada over religious arbitration with the lived experience of a specific group of Muslim women: Somali refugee women. The challenges these women eloquently describe first-hand demonstrate that the fray over accommodating culture and religion neglects other needs and engenders a democratic deficit.

In Refugee Women: Beyond Gender versus Culture, new theoretical perspectives recast both the story told and who tells the tale. By focusing on the politics underlying how these debates are framed and the experiences of women at the heart of these controversies, women are considered first and foremost as democratic agents rather than actors in the 'culture versus gender' script. Crucially, the institutions and processes created to address women's needs are critically assessed from this perspective.

Breaking from scholarship that focuses on whether the accommodation of culture and religion harms women, Bassel argues that this debate ignores the realities of the women at its heart. In these debates, Muslim women are constructed as silent victims. Bassel pleads compellingly for a consideration of women in all their complexity, as active participants in democratic life. The book will appeal to students and scholars throughout the social sciences, particularly of sociology, political science and women's studies.

1 Introduction

This book should be read as a plea. The plea is to open up the space for a broader politics of democratic citizenship. The reader looking for a set of prescriptions as to how we should live together will be disappointed. In an era of -isms and phobias, the attempt here is instead to open a path to articulate and to challenge the power relations that structure the possibility of politics.

Nowhere is the politics of citizenship more visible and fraught than in the ‘clash’ of Islam and ‘the West’. In a reiteration of colonial debates, a narrative of civilization versus barbarity has resurged with a vengeance since at least the 1990s with internationally mediatized controversies such as the Rushdie affair emblematic of a broader battle. The reasons for the resurrection of this so-called clash are best left to scholars of religion, the questionable future of secularization and geopolitics. The concern of this book is political in a different sense.

We could begin, as many do, by casting this struggle as a gendered politics of the body. To say that these wars have been fought over women’s bodies is a colossal understatement. Veiling, the burqa, forced marriage, polygamy, ‘Female Genital Mutilation’ (FGM)¹ and the international rise of shari'a courts form the battleground over which modernity is pitted against ‘culture’ and ‘tradition’, and the (enlightened) secular against the sacred. In the liberal democracies of Europe and North America, these questions have crystallized in the struggle between and within nation-states to gain the moral authority to set the legitimate limits of toleration and accommodation. Political, policy and academic debates have revolved around the perils of accommodation and, specifically, over multiculturalism - which may in fact be ‘bad’ for women.²

This is well-travelled terrain. While the answers vary over time and territory, the questions remain the same along with the disproportionate focus on Islam, or rather practices, attitudes and beliefs that are ascribed to Islam and to Muslims. Proponents of multiculturalism assert that equal treatment of disadvantaged groups may require special, specific measures to level the playing field, publicly recognize and promote cultural heritage and combat Islamophobia and other forms of discrimination.³ Critics counter that cultural group rights lead to abuse of women in the name of ‘culture’, such as in cases where ‘my culture made me do it’ (Honig 1999) passes as justification and through toleration of practices in the private or domestic sphere such as forced marriage, polygamy and ‘FGM’. For these critics, group rights may clash with gender equality giving powerful men political support to impose ‘traditions’ on women, who are often particularly vulnerable. Accommodation of minority group traditions may, therefore, exacerbate inequalities within groups, marginalizing or disadvantaging vulnerable subgroups known as ‘internal minorities’ or ‘minorities within minorities’.⁴ Instead of prioritizing group rights, they argue, women must be protected through universal, undifferentiated measures.

Many voices have been raised in the fray and no sphere is exempt; these debates have raged in political, academic and policy spaces as well as in more general public fora such as newspapers, talk shows and televised debates. Nor are these questions unique to one country. This book will focus on two of these debates: the ‘headscarf debate’ in France and the controversy over religious arbitration, so-called ‘shari'a tribunals’, in the province of Ontario, Canada. But other countries including Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom have all experienced highly publicized and wrenching debates over Islam, women’s rights and the limits of accommodation, with a marked degree of confusion over what is ‘culture’ and what is religion. The challenges this book aims to address speak beyond French or Canadian borders to address the larger issues at stake.

Roadmap to a new politics

In October 2003, two sisters were expelled from a French state school for wearing headscarves, echoing the ‘Affaire du Foulard’, the Headscarf Affair, of 1989. Five months later, the French Parliament voted in a law banning the wearing of religious signs in state schools in the National Assembly. Across the Atlantic in the autumn of 2003, the Islamic Institute of Civil Justice had demanded the establishment of shari'a tribunals following the example of Jewish rabbinical courts and Ismaili Muslim arbitration panels operating under the 1991 Arbitration Act in Ontario, Canada. Less than two years later, the province no longer permitted any form of religious arbitration to be legally enforced.

Both cases caused massive national and international uproar and intensified debates over the limits of accommodation of cultural and religious diversity in Europe and North America. Republican France and multicultural Canada were pitted as ideological rivals, representing the perils of over-accommodation and hard-line assimilation and exclusion, respectively. Who would win the moral high ground in the battle for a defensible response to accommodating diversity without jeopardizing women’s rights?

In both these cases, much ink has been spilled in prescribing the correct boundaries to toleration, as this book will discuss. These two debates can be understood as paradigmatic because the countries are generally viewed as incarnating opposite ‘models’ of accommodation of difference. Canadian multiculturalism publicly recognizes and promotes cultural and racial diversity in the public sphere while French republican assimilation recognizes only identical, equal individuals, assigning other elements of identity to the private sphere.

Do models matter?

In general terms, some claim these debates bring to light respective merits of ‘opposing’ philosophies, ‘models’ and policies of citizenship and integration, which may be creatively re-read or in a process of ‘civic re-balancing’.⁵ Others see evidence of the convergence of policies toward restriction - such as antiveiling laws - indicating that multiculturalism is in retreat and that integration models are converging (Joppke 2007b, 2007c), a reading that appears to be reinforced by statements by political leaders in Germany and the United Kingdom,⁶ though this narrative of ‘rise’ and ‘fall’ is questioned (Kymlicka 2010). Still, others point to the emergence of a new mode of incorporation alongside assimilation and multiculturalism - ‘diversity’ - though it lacks a solid rights base (Faist 2009).⁷

In the debates we examine, some similarity in policy outcomes is evident -in France, religious signs in state schools and the ‘full veil’ in public spaces were banned, and in Canada, a (qualified) ban on the legal enforcement of religious arbitration came into effect. But because they are constantly changing, ‘models’ can at best be described as belonging to a handful of ‘loosely connected syndromes’ (Freeman 2004), which mutate into caricatures or tenacious stereotypes (Lloyd 1995). Moving beyond the ‘models’ approach permits us to step out of the respective frameworks they presuppose to consider how debates are framed, what is considered to be a legitimate subject of contestation and by whom. In fact, we will see that despite diverse contexts and distinct national inflections, broader similarities underlie the processes at work and their democratic consequences, which a focus on the models obscures. In practice, therefore, these overly schematic understandings of multicultural versus republican ‘models’ of citizenship and accommodation may not tell us much about the realities of integration on the ground.⁸

In France and Canada, and in the European and North American debates more generally, the frames in question are not best understood as ‘republican’, ‘multicultural’ or even ‘secularizing’ (secularism is only one of the regulating principles at the heart of the contestation) but instead as a broader frame - one inflected by national narratives but more generally premised around the problematic of gender, culture and religion and nothing more.⁹

Outline of the book

I focus on two countries that are supposed to represent ‘opposite’ multicultural and assimilationist models respectively. Instead of a comparison of ‘models’, however, this book brings to light the contrast in both cases between the ways in which the challenges of Muslim women’s ‘integration’ are framed in public debate and government consultation, and women’s experiences.

This approach can be contrasted to previous scholarship on deliberative democracy that I discuss in Chapter 2. Over several decades, scholars have unleashed a flood of complicated questions about how to reconcile women’s rights and multiculturalism. Answers range from a cultural relativist stance that ‘we’ should refrain from interfering if values and practices are endorsed by a particular culture to the universalist response that some principles surely apply across the board, particularly when the result of a given practice is physical harm or death (Phillips 2000). The status of the universal is extensively questioned both nationally and in global human rights politics, maligned by critics either for being imperfectly applied in ‘Western cultures’ or falsely universal (Young 1989, 1990), and the product of particular views of sexuality, gender roles and the family. The implication is that it is necessary to recognize and respect differences if the concern is with true equality with those who are different.

Underlying the question of how we should react lie different sets of assumptions about the women who are at the heart of these controversies. In an echo of Gayatri Spivak’s essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (Spivak 1988) critiquing the nineteenth-century British abolition of sati , or widow sacrifice, the ability of women at the centre of these debates to know what they want and to act on this knowledge is persistently questioned. Are they victims or agents?

This is a contested narrative. Dilemmas of intervention revolve around the quality of consciousness ascribed to affected women, particularly those who are perceived as defending the conditions of their own subjugation. Women may internalize dominant norms and become the agents of their own and other women’s oppression, the argument goes. In several cases women have defended Female Genital Operations, for instance, and it is generally women who perform them on other women. Many feminists argue that this internalization occurs because desires and preferences have been socially con-structed.¹⁰ This is sometimes called ‘false consciousness’. Therefore, those most oppressed by a practice may be the least well-equipped to recognize its inegalitarian character (Phillips 2000: 15) and may express adaptive preferences when consulted (Nussbaum 2000; Sen 2001). How are feminist scholars, activists and policy makers to react?

A ‘hands-off’ approach could condone harm and injustice (Chambers 2008), but intervention puts ‘outsiders’ in the position of telling a woman in a group that they know what is best for her. That this kind of interference will be unwelcome is to say the least, not only because it is victimizing but also because it incorporates what many view as the uncomfortable tendency to racism.

Sherene Razack summarizes this tendency as ‘fighting sexism with racism’ (Razack 1995).¹¹ When feminism is opposed to multiculturalism, racism quickly pervades what become efforts to save non-Western women from their cultures (Razack 2007).¹² The terms are simply recast from the language of colonialism to that of liberal democratic multiculturalism: it is women in (often recently arrived) minority groups that now must be protected.¹³ ‘[T]wo categories of women are brought into existence: those who have successfully made it out of community and culture, and others who are to be assisted into modernity’ (Razack 2007: 15).

Laudable efforts have been made in recent international research to address dangers of ‘fighting sexism with racism’ while still speaking out against the potential and actual abuses of women’s rights in the name of ‘culture’.¹⁴ In Chapter 2, I consider two important approaches that are characteristic of this effort: one complicates culture and another recognizes agency. Though positive contributions, I contend that because they are embedded in deliberative models they ultimately do not respond to the plea made in these pages to open up the spaces for more radical democratic politics. These approaches continue to reduce spheres of contestation and political subjectivity to the gendered politics of the body because they do not fully take into account the power relations that frame participation and democratic politics. Politics, and women’s agency, are restricted to the interface between gender and religion/culture, and to within national borders.

Instead, I propose that the agonistic democratic tradition and the insights of ‘intersectionality’ and critical frame analysis, explored in Chapter 3, open a path to articulate (and, indeed, challenge) the power relations that structure this politics. A more radical democratic politics requires the ability to challenge or ‘shatter’ the frame of existing debates, which in turn presupposes a different form of political subjectivity, a different way of ‘being political’ (Isin 2002). Active citizens, drawing on Engin Isin’s work, engage in politics, ‘relatively enduring and routinized ways of being’ (Isin 2008: 36). This involves impersonal organization, administration and juridical actions that define citizenship in the neutral disengaged language of rights, membership, policy or law (Nielsen 2008: 276, 279). In contrast, activist citizenship ruptures these routinized ways of being, and involves the acts ‘when, regardless of status or substance, subjects constitute themselves as citizens or, better still, as those to whom the right to have rights is due’ (Isin and Nielsen 2008: 2).

Drawing on this distinction, we can understand citizenship as formal, legal status but also as acts of interruption, rupturing routine and, for our purposes, shattering the dominant frame of debates that pit women’s rights against culture/religion. An assumption of ‘fittedness’ underlies the frame, in which subjects are pre-given and have set preferences based on stable identities (Dryzek 2002: 58).

The insights of ‘intersectionality’ provide an alternative path into questioning the construction of the speech situation in the debates that are our focus, by drawing attention to simultaneous and interacting axes such as race, class, gender and religion.

Broader dimensions to claim-making can thereby be identified, not just within existing frames but also claim-making against the frame, instead of it, as well as in between social positions and identities. These dimensions highlight what Bonnie Honig calls ‘remainders’: the product of the impossibility of a ‘fit’ between institutions and identities, and formations of subjects (Honig 1993).

These ‘remainders’ are created and masked by the settlements that are the result of politics within the dominant frame, that is, in the course of consultations such as the Stasi Commission in France and the Boyd Inquiry in Canada, discussed in Chapters 4 and 5 respectively. The ‘Commission for reflection on the application of the principle of laïcité in the Republic’, more commonly named the ‘Stasi Commission’ after head Commissioner Bernard Stasi, was created by French President Jacques Chirac to make concrete recommendations regarding laïcité, or secularism - in his words a ‘non-nego-tiable’ principle (Le Monde 2003b). In Ontario, Canada public consultation led by former Attorney General Marion Boyd sought to gather and articulate the concerns of Ontarians on the use of religious arbitration under the Ontario Arbitration Act.

In these processes of consultation, remainders are articulated when women insist that they are not ‘just Muslim’, thereby rejecting a framing that places them at the heart of these debates but within tightly defined parameters. The insight of intersectionality is to highlight the remainder and its disruption, in other words, the emergent political possibilities when ‘other’ identities and claims exceed the fit between the framing of these debates and women’s experiences.

A novel approach of this book, therefore, is to combine democratic theory with ‘intersectionality’ to consider the ways in which women are able not only to participate in these debates but also to challenge their terms. The exploration will show that it is not enough to make these debates broader and more inclusive and the terms of inclusion ‘thinner’, as many have suggested. Rather, this study breaks from a long tradition of scholarship to argue that the women whose oppression or liberation is at the centre of these debates may in fact make quite different claims, and make them differently. A step further is taken to suggest these debates themselves constrain the exercise of agency and that a more radical conception of citizenship is needed.

This is an open-ended politics. The focus is squarely on the parameters of democratic participation for the women in question and their potential to exercise a more radical democratic agency, as political subjects who may challenge the terms of debate, rather than seeking to negotiate within a framework bounded by gender, culture and religion. This move is both analytical and political: it rejects the closure of subjectivity in ascribed identities or pre-given scripts of collective political projects, whether ‘multicultural’, ‘republican’, ‘feminist’, ‘secular’ or ‘faith-based’. This is democratic agency because it emphasizes claims, the demand for equality. It is agency because the claimant is not ‘pre-given’ and free-standing but embedded within existing social relations, and both constitutes and is constituted by them.

Through politicizing the act of framing we can map the potential spaces for citizenship politics in between social positions and identities, such that women at the heart of these debates can go beyond the tropes of victims or agents within/against culture and religion and thereby clear a space outside...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Refugee Women
• Routledge Advances in Sociology
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Content
• Preface
• Acknowlegment
• 1 Introduction
• PART I Theoretical perspectives and tools
• PART II Politics within
• PART III Politics in between
• Appendix: details of fieldwork
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index