Religion, state, and the problem of gender: new modes of citizenship and governance in diverse societies.

• Author: Shachar, Ayelet
• Position: Canada

The use of gendered and idealized images of women as symbols of group identity is prevalent in modern conflicts between minority and majority cultures. As a result, the position of women within minority cultures may be particularly vulnerable. The internal feminist critique of multiculturalism offers the most promising framework for reducing tensions between religious accommodation and gender equality. Two topical examples are examined in this article: the controversy in France over whether Muslim girls have the right to wear traditional headscarves (hijab) in public schools, and the debate in Canada over the establishment of a private Islamic arbitration tribunal (Darul-Qada). Both examples highlight the fact that minority group members may wish to benefit from affiliation with more than one legal and cultural system. The new jurisprudential approach promoted in this paper brings to light the false dichotomies that are often presented to vulnerable groups within a minority, such as the choice between adhering to the requirements of one's minority tradition or benefiting from those advantages offered to wider society (which include, for example, public education or egalitarian legal proceedings). This new approach seeks to align the benefits of enhancing justice between groups with reducing injustice within them. The author analyses the proposed Dar-ul-Qada and offers concrete suggestions on how the current proposal might he adapted to ensure both religious accommodation and sufficient protections of equality.

L'utilisation comme symboles identitaires pour decrire les femmes de references idealisees et basees sur le sexe est courante dans les conflits actuels entre cultures minoritaires et majoritaires; consequemment, les femmes ont au sein de cultures minoritaires un statut particulierement vulnerable. La critique feministe interne du multiculturalisme est celle qui offre le plus grand espoir de reduction des tensions entre valeurs religieuses et egalite des sexes. Deux exemples d'actualite sont etudies : la controverse au sujet du port de voile (hijab) dans les ecoles publiques par les jeunes filles musulmanes en France et le debat au sujet de l'institutionnalisation d'un tribunal d'arbitrage islamique prive (Dar-ul-Qada) au Canada. Ces deux cas illustrent la volonte eventuelle de membres de groupes minoritaires de beneficier d'une affiliation a plus d'une tradition culturelle ou juridique. La nouvelle approche jurisprudentielle defendue dans cet article revele les fausses dichotomies souvent presentees aux groupes vulnerables dans une minorite, tels que le choix entre accepter les exigences dictees par les traditions d'une minorite et profiter d'avantages offerts a la societe dans son ensemble (tels que l'education publique ou l'equite des procedures juridiques). Cette nouvelle approche cherche a concilier les benefices d'une justice accrue entre les groupes a la reduction des injustices en leur sein. L'auteure analyse la proposition de Dar-ul-Qada et propose des suggestions concretes afin d'assurer a la fois le respect des valeurs religieuses et une protection suffisante du droit a l'egalite.

Introduction I. Definitions: Women, Culture, and "Reactive" Assertion of Communal Identity II. Foundations: The Multicultural Citizenship Model III. An Update from the Frontiers of the "Feminism and Multiculturalism" Debate A. Illustrations: The Gendered Dimension of Intercommunal Strife and Its Legal Manifestations 1. The French Debate over Muslim Women's Right to Wear the Hijab in Schools 2. The Canadian Debate over the Establishment of a Private Islamic Arbitral Tribunal B. "Re-designs" The Public Policy Implications of the Feminist Critique C. Innovations: The Sharia Tribunal as a Case Study IV. The Rejection of Multicultural Citizenship: Liberal, Civic-Republican and Ethnocultural Variants A. The Liberal Model B. The Civic-Republican Model C. The Ethnocultural Model Conclusion: Recovering Multiculturalism with Feminist Insights? Introduction

From the controversy in France over whether Muslim girls have the right to wear a headscarf (hijab) in public schools to the recent controversy over the establishment of a private Islamic arbitration tribunal (Dar-ul-Qada) in Canada, state and religion currently appear to clash on a regular basis in virtually every region of the world. (1) While disputes over the scope and limits of religious accommodation are not novel, what is distinctive about this new brand of secular-religious quandary is that so many of the central issues raised revolve around the regulation of women, gender or sexuality and the family.

For complex and numerous reasons, which I have explored in depth elsewhere, women and the family often serve a crucial symbolic role in constructing group solidarity vis-a-vis wider society. (2) Under such conditions, women's indispensable contribution in transmitting and manifesting a group's "culture" is coded as both an instrument and a symbol of group integrity. As a result, idealized and gendered images of women as mothers, caregivers, educators, and moral guardians of the home come to represent the ultimate and inviolable repository of "authentic" group identity. This valorization occurs through carefully crafted binary codes of "respectable" behaviour: the female group member ought to be veiled (versus exposed), modest (versus promiscuous), loyal (versus morally corrupt), married (versus sexualized), fertile (versus childless), and so on. These images of "idealized womanhood" become cultural markers that help erase internal diversity and disagreement, while concurrently allowing both minority and majority leaders to politicize selective and often invented boundaries between the "self" and the "other". (3)

The hardening of the borders of inclusion and exclusion, accompanied by fear of the challenges presented by assimilation and secularization, often serve as a readymade rationale for conservative group leaders to impose a rigid and strict reading of a tradition's personal status laws in the name of a collective effort to preserve the group's distinct identity in the face of real or imagined external threats. I label this phenomenon "reactive culturalism". (4) The conflation of "reactive" claims of culture, intercommunal tensions, and gendered images of idealized womanhood has become a focal point for the current global spate of state-and-religion conflicts over foundational collective identity and basic citizenship questions. (5) It is crucial to understand this dynamic in order to better comprehend the pressures that are imposed on women within minority cultures. With greater understanding comes the potential for innovation and improvement.

In my previous writings, I have focused primarily on the unjust gendered costs that strong multicultural accommodation policies often impose on women within a minority community. (6) In this article, I continue to explore the centrality of gender and the family in recent instances of cultural and legal struggles over group recognition in the public sphere and the resulting implications for broader theoretical debates over the merits and pitfalls of multicultural or "differentiated" citizenship. To illuminate these broader trends, I refer primarily to two pressing contemporary illustrations: the debates over the Muslim hijab in France and the proposed Dar-ul-Qada in Canada. These examples serve to emphasize the importance of this topic and to place it in the context of the real world, where concrete legal struggles over who may regulate minority women's expressions of gender and sexuality have come to manifest deeper societal dilemmas concerning the scope and limits of the accommodation of cultural and religious identity. I will argue that in light of the prominence of gender and the family in real-life collective identity struggles, the feminist critique of multiculturalism provides the most appropriate analytical framework for comprehending, with the hope of redressing, the serious challenges posed by the new wave of cultural wars in multicultural societies.

The discussion proceeds in four parts. After a few terminological comments in Part I, I briefly outline in Part II the thrust of the first wave of multicultural literature, and explain why it is insufficient for understanding the controversies at the heart of the new cultural wars. I then identify two major strands of critique that are emerging in response to claims of culture that pivot around gender and the family. For the sake of analytical clarity, I classify these new additions to the debate over differentiated citizenship into two distinct categories: internal and external critiques of multiculturalism.

Part III focuses on the internal critique, as represented here by the feminist critique of multiculturalism. (7) This critique emphasizes the potentially negative effects of accommodation policies on the precarious position of women and members of sexual minorities in religious groups, particularly those groups that have reacted to historical and current assimilationist pressures through a form of "reactive" or "revivalist" assertion of communal identity. The feminist branch does not claim that differentiated citizenship inevitably produces detrimental effects. Rather, its proponents hold that law and public policy-makers must be vigilant in attending to intragroup diversity to ensure the representation of women and sexual minorities during the consultations or negotiations leading to a formal juridical realignment of the relationship between minority communities and wider society. Such a focus avoids the ironic result of unwittingly endorsing a multiculturalism that empowers those who are already well-established in the group at the expense of silencing alternative voices and points of view, especially where the latter reflect more moderate and reformist understandings of the group's own tradition. In addition, attention must be paid to avoiding the...