Serenity Valley of Feminist Mormon Housewives has a nice piece about the conflict noted (strongly!) by Shulamuth Firestone’s 1968 “The Dialectic of Sex” between feminism on the one hand and multiculturalism on the other.

I’ve just been doing some reading for school, and I came across this article by Susan Moller Okin: “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?”, published in a volume by the same name and edited by Okin, Joshua Cohen, Matthew Howard, and Martha Nussbaum. In this piece, Okin defines feminism as the belief that “women should not be disadvantaged by their sex, that they should be recognized as having human dignity equal to that of men, and that they should have the opportunity to live as fulfilling and as freely chosen lives as men can.”

Read the quote in context here.

Valley (and others elsewhere in the blogosphere) have rightly pointed out Orkin’s point that deference to cultural traditions that subordinate women are problematic. Activist Kimberle Crenshaw (who I posted about here) and others have clearly articulated how “rescue” policies are often no more helpful, or respectful, or less oppressive than sub-cultural oppression itself.

And any number of people have pointed out the complications of equality-based rhetoric when speaking about women in any culture, dominant or not. While in Kyriarchy it may be impossible to eliminate oppression and othering I think it’s possible to drastically limit the scope of such complications.

Orkin says “that [women] should be recognized as having human dignity equal to that of men.” I’m… pretty sure an awful lot of the ambiguity about how, exactly, different cultures might interpret terms like “human dignity,” “equals,” and “that of men” by replacing the clause, and underlying sentiments … and indeed much of Orkin’s preceding and following clauses, with “women should be recognized as human beings.” Or, even more tersely, accurately, and evidently radically: “women are human beings.”

This collapse of language to it’s indivisible core has twin benefits: It Disambiguates what “the same human dignity as…” might really mean. And it pitches the “accusing” or “rescuing” cultures into the same pot as “accused” or “in-need-of-rescuing” cultures since “other” cultures are not alone in reducing of some of its members to the status of objects, nor of sacrificing those members for the convenience of more intra-culturally valued, objectifying members.

To the… best of my knowledge none would defer to a subculture that claimed it needed to bring itself good luck by strangling servants in oak groves. We would not defer because servants are human beings and we would have to note that strangling in oak groves would be extraordinarily bad luck for those servants!

Similarly you can’t sew women’s pee-pees shut and claim “but it’s for the traditional pleasure of men in our culture” because it rather curtails the traditional pleasure of other human beings in that culture. Nor can you legislate that some human beings die involuntarily from preventable complications of late-term pregnancy to salve the consciences of different human beings who treat their own children abominably because that conflicts with the right of human beings not to die involuntarily.

Given this understanding multiculturalism can be in conflict with feminism only to the extent that we fail to recognize women as human beings. Not “like” human beings. Definitely not “having dignity equal to human beings.” As human beings. (Radical I know. Get used to it.)