© Columbia University Press
Women's Rights as Multicultural Claims: Reconfiguring Gender and Diversity in Political Philosophy
February, 2009
Cloth, 224 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-7486-3279-4
Edinburgh University Press
$95.00
How can one negotiate and integrate the claims of feminism and multiculturalism through a discourse of rights? The apparent opposition between feminist and multicultural justice is a central problem in contemporary political theory. It also excites a deep suspicion about invoking a political discourse that has been accused of being either eurocentric, androcentric, or both. In this book Monica Mookherjee develops Iris Young's idea of "gender as seriality" in order to reconfigure feminism in such a way that it responds to cultural diversity. A discourse of rights can be formulated, she argues, and this task is crucial to balancing women's interests and multicultural claims. Mookherjee works out her claim through a series of difficult dilemmas in modern liberal democracies: the resurgence of controversy over the Hindu practice of widow-immolation (sati); Muslim divorce laws that are gender-discriminatory, as made famous by India's Shah Bano incident; forced marriage in the UK's South Asian communities; the right of evangelical Christian parents to exempt their children from secular education; and the right for Muslim girls to wear the hijab in state schools in France. This valuable and innovative perspective will spark debate over issues that are crucial in contemporary political philosophy, such as human rights and capabilities, toleration, citizenship practices, cultural rights, the ethic of care, communitarianism, and the politics of recognition.