Culture Beyond Gender
Saskia Sassen
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The framing of an argument matters. Susan Okin's case against group rights
hinges on the fact that group rights tend to be cultural rights and that the
norm in most cultures is inequality between men and women to the overwhelming
disadvantage of women. Framed this way, the debate between supporters of group
rights and feminism is resolutely won by the feminist side, with strong support
from an enormous body of evidence.
Even when we consider group rights as a way of protecting the importance
of "culture" for one's sense of self and for the richness of experience/norms/rituals,
I agree with Okin that the price for women and girls of ensuring this "richness"
through an oppressive culture is not worth it, and many women in such cultures
have in some way said so.
Consider the case of immigrant women in the United States. Left alone with
the array of individual rights available here, immigrant women can become
empowered and develop stronger senses of self. Moreover, a large literature
shows that immigrant women's regular wage work and improved access to various
public realms often influences their gender relations.1 Women gain greater personal autonomy and independence while
men lose ground; women gain more control over budgeting and other domestic
decisions, and greater input from men in domestic chores; and women's access
to public services and other public resources gives them a chance to become
incorporated in the mainstream society. (Some women no doubt benefit more
than others from these circumstances; we need more research to establish the
impact of class, education, and income on these gendered outcomes.) To achieve
this greater sense of self and confidence, these immigrant women have not
needed group rights.
But shifting the frame of Okin's argument introduces some new questions.
What if "culture" cannot be made to pivot as exclusively on the oppression
of women as Okin suggests? Having worked with a number of disadvantaged, poor
immigrant groups here in the United States, mostly originating in the types
of cultures that Okin centers on, I find that the oppression of the men and
boys is in some cases so severe (on their jobs, in school) that cultural concerns
are focused on the engagement with or escape from the dominant culture. This
focus can engender solidarities between men and women that foster survival
in a hostile or discriminating host culture. The presumption of moral superiority
I have seen deployed by some middle class women as mothers in the United States
and Germany vis-ý-vis poorer emigrant women as mothers also focuses attention
on engagement with or escape from the dominant cultures. For many immigrants
in Europe (and in the United States before the new 1996 immigration law, which
discriminates even against legal immigrants) not to become citizens is a form
of protest against racism--and this holds for both men and women. In these
cases, the dynamics of engaging the dominant culture and validating one's
own culture can be distinguished from a culture's internal gender dynamics.
Through their extreme and distorted features, these cases may be showing
us that culture cannot be centered exclusively on the organization of gender,
even if the latter is enormously important. Because women remain at an enormous
disadvantage in most of these cultures, I do not conclude that Okin is wrong
in her major claim about group rights. Rather, I emphasize that overlooking
the other key elements that constitute a dominant (or host) and a minority
culture may mean overlooking the many sources of pain and rage produced by
engagements with a dominant culture which may lead in turn to the "need" (in
both men and women) to take refuge in one's own culture. Further, the pain
and rage produced by the engagement with the dominant culture may alter de
facto key aspects in the organization of gender in the minority culture, as
I indicated earlier.
Though group rights are, then, a problematic (and mostly) unnecessary instrument,
we must be cautious about centering culture on the organization of gender
to the exclusion of other realms, especially when men and women of many minority
cultures may both feel oppressed. Recognizing the importance of non-gender
dynamics in a context of discrimination/persecution against one's group may
well be strategic for eliminating or reducing the conditions that lead to
the demand for group rights in the first place. And this recognition may turn
out to be crucial in the fight against the norms that legitimate the oppression
of women in many of the minority cultures described by Okin.
1 I discuss this literature in "Toward a Feminist Analytics
of the Global Economy," Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 4,
1 (Fall 1997): 7-41.
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