Interrogating Harmful Cultural Practices

Gender, Culture and Coercion

Chia Longman, Tamsin Bradley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780367598457
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317113409
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This volume explores a variety of 'harmful cultural practices': a term increasingly employed by organizations working within a human rights framework to refer to certain discriminatory practices against women in the global South. Drawing on recent work by feminists across the social sciences, as well as activists from around the world, this volume discusses and presents research on practices such as veiling, forced marriage, honour related and dowry violence, female genital 'mutilation', lip plates and sex segregation in public space. With attention to the analytic utility of the notion of harmful cultural practices, this volume explores questions surrounding the contribution of feminist thought to international and NGO policies on such practices, whether western beauty practices should be analysed in similar terms, or should the notion as such from an anthropological perspective be rejected, how harmful cultural practices relate to processes of culturalization, religionization and secularization, and how they can be challenged, come to transform and disappear. Presenting concrete, empirical case studies from Africa, South East Asia, Europe and the UK Interrogating Harmful Cultural Practices will be of interest to scholars of sociology, anthropology, development and law with interests in gender, the body, violence and women's agency.

PART 1
Theorizing Harmful Cultural Practices

Chapter 1
Interrogating the Concept of “Harmful Cultural Practices”

Chia Longman and Tamsin Bradley

In this chapter we present a critical genealogy of the concept of “harmful cultural practices”. The emergence of the concept according to UN policymakers and related institutions is sketched, followed by a critical postcolonial take on the concept and its development which to date remain almost exclusively focussed on forms of gender discrimination and violence against women in the Global South, and among minority and migrant women in the Global North. Although recent tendencies to broaden the concept to include harm against children and LGBTQI individuals and western “traditions” potentially threaten to render the concept meaningless, HCPs upon women remain the focal point of many moral panics and are often instrumentalised in problematic discourses and policies on development and migration. The chapter continues with an exploration of possible theoretical angles, such as cross-cultural comparison and the agency-structure debate within feminist, postcolonial, post-development and post-secular theory in order to unpack the notion of HCP further. Although it is concurred that the concept is undergirded by a particular western secular-liberal notion of human agency and subjectivity, it questions whether the baby should therefore be thrown out with the bathwater, or alternatively, the debate on the viability of the concept of HCP for theorising and tackling global gender inequalities has only just begun.

The Emergence of a Concept

The concept of “harmful traditional practices” originated in United Nation circles as early as the 1950’s. Resolutions were adopted by the General Assembly such as a referral to “customs, ancient laws and practices relating to marriage and the family” considered inconsistent with the principles set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1954: “The resolution called on all States to abolish such customs, laws and practices by ensuring, complete freedom in the choice of a spouse; abolishing the practice of the bride-price; guaranteeing the right of widows to the custody of their children and their freedom as to remarriage; eliminating completely child marriages and the betrothal of young girls before the age of puberty, and establishing appropriate penalties where necessary”. (UN 2009: 3) In 1958 and 1961, the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) invited the World Health Organization (WHO) to study “customs subjecting girls to ritual operations”, making female genital mutilation or female genital cutting (FGM/C) into the HCP gaining the most attention, as remains so today (UN 2009, Cottingham and Kismodi 2009: 128). However, the concept of HCP starts to gain more currency in the eighties and nineties, following the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, considered a hallmark achievement of the second-wave feminist movement in the West.

Developed by the UN Commission on the Status of Women, CEDAW can still today be seen as one of the most important documents defending the human and equal rights of women. Ratified by some 188 countries, the treaty demands states undertake actions against all forms of discrimination against women, including “laws, regulations, customs and practices”. (art. 2f) The reference to discrimination embedded in cultural traditions is elaborated further in article 5a which stipulates that states must see to it that changes take place in the “social and cultural patterns of conduct of men and women, with a view to achieving the elimination of prejudices and customary and all other practices which are based on the idea of the inferiority or the superiority of either of the sexes or on stereotyped roles for men and women”. (CEDAW, UN 1979) As is well known, CEDAW was an important breakthrough in the implementation of a gender perspective in human rights, where next to legal equality and civil rights for women, demands were also formulated pertaining to the “private” sphere of reproductive rights and the “impact of cultural factors in gender relations”.

Since the convention was adopted in different working groups, consultations and rapports by the UN and related institutions (e.g., UNFPA, UNICEF, WHO …), the tendency towards grouping together phenomena such as FGM/C and honour-related violence increased. Many organisations dedicated to the eradication of HCPs, often focussing on one particular HCP such as FGM, have been launched across the globe. Initially, most often these practices were treated under the rubric of either “health” or “violence against women and girls”, themes that related to the specifically gendered way in which the human rights of women and children were violated. Then reports were produced by new organs such as the UN working group dedicated to the study of “traditional practices affecting women’s and children’s health” which was launched in 1985 in Geneva. There are also periodic reports by the Special Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequences since 1994.¹

In the South, organisations such as The Inter-African Committee on traditional practices affecting the health of women and children (IAC) were formed, at the initiative of African delegates at the UN working group sessions. In 1995 the UN Fact Sheet No.23, Harmful Traditional Practices Affecting the Health of Women and Children (UN 1995), is then published, in which a direct reference is made to the CEDAW treaty. In this document HCPs are described as follows (UN 1995: 1–2):

Traditional cultural practices reflect values and beliefs held by members of a community for periods often spanning generations. Every social grouping in the world has specific traditional cultural practices and beliefs, some of which are beneficial to all members, while others are harmful to a specific group, such as women. These harmful traditional practices include female genital mutilation (FGM); forced feeding of women; early marriage; the various taboos or practices which prevent women from controlling their own fertility; nutritional taboos and traditional birth practices; son preference and its implications for the status of the girl child; female infanticide; early pregnancy; and dowry price. Despite their harmful nature and their violation of international human rights laws, such practices persist because they are not questioned and take on an aura of morality in the eyes of those practising them.

What follows in the document is a clear and strong condemnation of HCPs, by no means eschewing feminist critique, noting that the “bleak reality” is that such practices exist for male benefit: “Female sexual control by men, and the economic and political subordination of women, perpetuate the inferior status of women and inhibit structural and attitudinal changes necessary to eliminate gender inequality”. (Ibid.: 2) In the Fact Sheet, governments and the international community are held accountable for not having challenged the “sinister” implications of these practices, among which violating rights to “health, life, dignity and personal integrity”. “Sensitive cultural issues” such as FGM have wrongly been avoided, it is claimed, and relegated to the “spheres of women and the family”. The rest of the document lists and discusses respectively: female genital mutilation, son preference and its implications for the status of the girl child, female infanticide, early marriage and dowry, early pregnancy, nutritional taboos and practices related to child delivery and violence against women.

Postcolonial Feminist Critique of HCPs

Several reflections can be made with regards to this brief genealogy of the concept of HCP, which will be elaborated on in more detail throughout this book. First, the growing attention to HTPs and HCPs from a gender sensitive human rights framework, we argue, cannot be seen apart from the transnational feminist activism that influenced international meetings on development, human and women’s rights and the world conferences on women that took place in the eighties and nineties. The concept of HCP evolved from an explicit feminist concern and struggle against the subordination of women. In the exchanges taking place in international meetings, in line with key second wave feminist insights, “personal” topics such as violence, body, health and reproductive rights were linked to structural gender inequality, sexism and the oppression of women. For the first time these key insights were put on the international (political) agenda. In her analysis of the developments concerning “body politics” in the field of gender and development during the past two decades, feminist development activist Wendy Harcourt (2009) argues that in the same period, women’s movements even became one of the main protagonists within the whole UN sphere. Harcourt’s analysis brings us to a second more critical reflection with regards to the genealogy of the concept of HCP and its geographical scope. For Harcourt also remarks that in those UN circles, attention to women’s rights was exclusively and simplistically focussed on women’s bodies as passive subjects of development:

Through the UN official texts, background reports, statistics and evidence, these experiences became the generic gendered female body – poor women with an expertly understood set of needs and rights. (Ibid.: 28)

Harcourt employs the Foucauldian notion of biopolitics to suggest how in this policy discourse the “passive, reproductive and sexualized female bodies” of “women in the Global South” was produced. She also notes how in the gender and development policy field, migrant and indigenous women, but also transgender persons and queer activists were completely ignored, a point to which in this chapter we will return. However, important to emphasize here, we find, is that Harcourt’s critical remarks clearly resonate with a tradition of work by Third-world feminists, and key insights from transnational feminist theory and multicultural and postcolonial scholarship in which the “average oppressed third world woman” devoid of agency and subjectivity is constructed as the mirror image of the educated and emancipated “western” woman (Narayan 1998). Chandra Mohanty’s influential and classic essay “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses” (1984, 2003) can be cited here, in which she holds a number of western feminist texts accountable for the way they portray an “ethnocentric universalist” and “colonial” homogeneous image of the “average third world woman” (the veiled woman, the powerful mother, the chaste virgin, the obedient wife, etc.):

This average third world woman leads an essentially truncated life based on her feminine gender (read: sexually constrained) and being ‘third world’ (read: ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradition-bound, domestic, family-oriented, victimized, etc.). This, I suggest, is in contrast to the (implicit) self-representation of Western women as educated, modern, as having control over their own bodies and sexualities, and the freedom to make their own decisions. (Mohanty 1984: 337)

Mohanty’s analysis is also one of the early examples to show how practices such as female genital mutilation and veiling often feature as exemplars in such colonial and culturalizing feminist discourses.

North-American feminists like anti-FGM activist and writer Fran Hosken (1920–2006) and radical feminist theologian Mary Daly (1928–2010), have similarly often been viewed as prominent culprits for colonial feminist representations of non-Western women as “victims” of tradition expressed in certain cultural practices. For example, feminist philosopher Uma Narayan (1998) critiques the way Daly in her work Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (1978) portrays the practice of “sati” (widow immolation) in India by creating the impression as if widow immolation is a widespread and persistent practice based on “centuries” old traditions and “religions” threatening many Indian women’s lives. According to Narayan, Daly does not pay any attention to the contextual aspects of sati. The practice was limited to certain castes and specific regions and unknown in many communities. Gayatri Spivak (1988) in the classic text of postcolonial studies, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” similarly argues that the British Colonial administration abstracted sati reconstructing it as a widespread practice which evidenced the brutality and backwardness of Indian culture. According to Narayan, in reality today, sati has almost disappeared and, rather, recent phenomena such as “dowry murders” must be situated in contexts of modernisation and social change (also argued by Bradley in this volume):

The effacement of cultural change within historical time [ … ] with the effacement of cultural variations across communities and regions [to] suggest a “Third World culture”, that is “frozen” with respect to both Space and Time. (Narayan 1997: 50)

Hence in line with Mohanty, Narayan has difficulties with representations such as these in which women of third world cultures are represented as victims of “tradition/religion/culture” as if these would be unchanging static complexes. Problems in the western world are never represented in this way. Whereas Mary Daly’s Gyn/Ecology has been often singled out as an exemplar of western feminist writing inattentive to and misrepresentative of the experiences of non-western, non-white women (see also Lorde 1979), it is interesting to note that besides sati, the other “five specific righteous rites which massacre women” she treats include Chinese foot binding, African female genital mutilation, yet also European witch burning and American gynaecology. In her radical feminist account of global patriarchy, she writes, “oppression of women knows no ethnic, national, or religious bounds” (Daly 1978: 111). Hence, whereas radical feminist work such as that by Daly attempts at making cross-cultural comparisons into the oppressions that women share, from transnational feminist theory, multicultural and postcolonial perspectives, such approaches are often held suspect of making too easy generalizations that reek of colonial and cultural essentialism.

However, this kind of critique has not been limited to academia. We argue that over time, critique of colonial feminist and culturalist representation of the “non-western other”, certainly also takes place within global feminist policy circles, as evidenced by a shift in terminology and expansion of the scope HCP. For example, in a lengthy UN rapport published by the “Special Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequences” in 2002, noticeably, the term “tradition” is no longer applied and only “cultural practices” or “harmful practices” are referred to (Coomaraswamy 2002). The author of the rapport presents a much longer and detailed list of harmful practices compared to earlier rapports, which next to the usual suspects, includes phenomena such as witch hunting, and a host of what are called “restrictive practices”, from foot binding to menstrual taboos and “forced” clothing codes from the hijab to the burqua which carry health implications or set limits on freedom of movement (Ibid.: 24–26) (see also the chapter by Longman and Coene). Although the focus of the rapport is still for the most part cultures of the “Global South”, it is striking how, even though briefly, mention is made of a typical cultural practice that would be discriminating to women in the “West”, namely “beauty”. Special rapporteur Coomaraswamy shortly describes how in the present West a beauty myth of thinness is imposed on women via the media. This ideal causes a “great deal of abuse to the female body” and it is emphasised that the increase of cosmetic surgery and eating disorders is worrisome. (Ibid.: 27).

The turn of the Orientalist gaze upon “oneself” towards a more comparative framework for practices harmful to women across societies to include what is referred to as the “West” or “Global North” in this document is striking, and will be discussed in the following paragraph. Nevertheless, until today both terms HTP and HCP remain commonly applied in many policy documents both from the transnational to national and local governmental and NGO levels. Organisations originating and located in the South similarly use these terms. As for UN policy action, recent initiatives (2011) include a call by the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and the Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) for input from organisations and individuals in view of drawing up a joint General Recommendation/Comment on harmful practices, broadening the emphasis to include female and male children. Some 32 submissions from all over the world were received and include reports and position papers on practices such as breast ironing, incest and rape of virgins, corrective rape of lesbian, bisexual and transgender girls, sexual violence against children and women with disabilities, acid violence, forced sterilization, virginity testing, trafficking of women and children, use of girls in prostitution and sexual exploitation and pornography, harmful initiation rites, but also practices such as the binding and back cutting of new-borns, bonded labour and girls as domestic servants, yet also “forced and coerced psychiatric interventions against women, men and children”, non-state sexualized, including commercially based, “torture” in industrialized countries, and the medicalization of sexual orientation and gender identity, including the “transgendering of children” due to perceived gender identity disorder.²

If the committees aim to broaden the scope of HCP even further on the basis of this input, we suggest this might not be an easy task. There are two main trends that may threaten to render the concept of HCP into murky waters or even altogether obsolete:

1. The shift from “women and girls” to a more intersectional gender approach: Can (child) boys, or even men, be victims of HCPs? What about harm against LGBTQI individuals or the disabled? Hence are HCPs always inherently sexualised and/or gendered and related to gender inequality and/or (universal) patriarchy?

2. The second trend involves the “postcolonial” shift in locating the prevalence of HCPs from the exclusive Global South to the Global North and to be inclusive of practices that today are no longer strictly bound to certain locations or “cultures’ but are dynamic, shifting, sometimes novel, hybrid and often transnational. This move raises ultimate challenges to the very understandings of concepts of “tradition” and “culture” implied in the current usage of the term. What does it take for a certain discriminatory, oppressive or violent practice to qualify as determined by or related to “tradition” or “culture” in a rapidly changing and globalizing world?

Yet to de-emphasize either the gender aspect of HCPs or the culture-related aspect of HCP wo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction to “Harmful Cultural Practices”
• PART 1 Theorizing Harmful Cultural Practices
• PART 2 Policy, Legal Developments and Political Discourse
• PART 3 From FGM to Cosmetic Genital Surgery
• PART 4 Globalisation and Emerging Harmful Cultural Practices
• Index