Abstract
Communitarian and liberal individualist approaches to culture bear contrasting implications, especially about whether people should have distinct non-negotiable rights or equalities that must be respected in the pursuit of multicultural citizenship. Especially challenging for a liberal society is to determine how much latitude culture should be given to inculcate values and offer experiences to its members. Engaging her contemporaries on these contrasting approaches over gender and culture Anne Phillips offers a collection of eight essays that present her distinctive arguments on multiculturalism. What preoccupies Phillips is the determinism present in scholarly writings that reject cultures as separate but represent minority or non-Western cultures as more determining of behaviour and beliefs than other variables. While arguing for an anti-essentialist reading of culture she repudiates exaggerated presumptions of cultural difference that embrace a justification for group-differentiated rights and public policies that derive these from the value of cultural diversity.
Given that many of the issues raised in this volume are not new, the most important contribution of Phillips’ work is her engagement with conflicts over cultural practices in domestic constitution and EU law which offer resources for people to mobilise against traditional cultural practices. She examines cases where reliance on cultural tradition is widely regarded as legitimating crimes against women. The case of forced marriage provides a vivid example of the contests generated over women's agency. She views public policies that interpret a narrow definition of forced marriage as discriminatory while at the same time infantilising people belonging to minority cultural groups. Lying further beneath these arguments is her concern for responsive legal frameworks to address cultural collisions escalating due to high levels of mobility across national borders.
The main solution she endorses lies in formulating strong policies for gender equality that do not ‘feed into cultural stereotypes’ (p. 14) or to ‘reframe discourses of sex equality so as to detach them from projects of cultural or racial superiority’ (p. 14). However, this solution sets limits on what institutions no matter how designed can achieve in themselves as it entails reinterpreting the notions of dignity, autonomy, bodily integrity and sexuality of women that are embedded in the religious and cultural norms of different societies. While sorting through the promise and peril of group rights, this volume raises the need to reconcile commitments to individual agency and to communal traditions and meanings. Overall the author draws attention to a whole new set of questions about the relationship between gender and culture and provides directions for future research in this area.