Advancing an Alternative to the Clash between Culture and Women's Rights

• In Event: Gender Dynamics and Rights Issues

Abstract

What should democracies do when culture and women’s rights clash? For over forty years politicians, pundits, activists, and scholars have debated this question. But is a clash ever really necessary? To answer this question, my book project compares three dissimilar controversial gender practices: veiling in France, polygyny in South Africa, and the marrying out rule for Indigenous women in Canada. In this concluding chapter, I explain how to advance an alternative to a presumed clash. I begin by providing a brief overview of the key arguments of the book, explaining why a clash is never necessary, why so many think it so, and how to improve the lives of the marginalized women at the center of these policy debates. The remainder of the chapter builds on the central payoff of the book by explaining how to advance the compatibility paradigm. I explain that compatibility stories told by marginalized women in democracies around the globe need not remain forgotten. Instead, drawing on the theory developed in the book that the clash paradigm is reproduced through the interaction of clash stories, unjust political procedures, and colonial environments that reinforce imperial thinking, I argue that advocates of the compatibility paradigm need to tell compatibility stories, challenge unjust political procedures, and reimagine colonial environments by adopting intersectional thinking and assailing imperial sexism. I conclude by turning to the mainstreaming of intersectionality over the past decade, drawing lessons from its triumphs and pitfalls to outline an agenda for making the compatibility of culture and women’s rights the new conventional wisdom.

Author

• Denise Marie Walsh, University of Virginia