Sarah Song

Justice, Gender, and the Politics of Multiculturalism

Arguably, the greatest recent contributions to the (somewhat exhausted) political philosophy of multiculturalism have come from feminists. The debate was famously sparked by Susan Okin’s warning that multicultural accommodation could legitimize and aggravate the oppression of women within traditional, cultural and religious groups (Okin, 1999). Critics retorted that the ‘internal minorities’ objection, as articulated by Okin, tended to assume that minorities were essentially and comprehensively illiberal, and majorities the paragons of liberal egalitarians values – the very ethnocentric assumptions that had made accommodation a demand of justice in the first place. Soon, however, the debate moved on from its rather simplified, early formulations (gender equality vs cultural rights) and went on to illuminate areas that the academic discussion of multiculturalism had bizarrely left unexamined. Feminist contributions over the last decade or so have made three crucial contributions (Shachar, 2001; Deveaux, 2007; Phillips, 2007; Chambers, 2008). First, in line with the critical project of feminist theory, they have been sensitive to the way in which ‘cultures’ do not pre-exist, but are largely shaped by social interaction, are far less homogenous, normative, static and coherent than political theorists have assumed, and cannot be understood through the choice/chance ‘luck egalitarian’ paradigm. Second, feminists have shown how gender hierarchies structure all cultures, Western and non-Western, and explored the troubling fact that the status of women seemed to be at the heart of most cultural conflicts in the West. Third, feminists have suggested that such conflicts are not only animated by concerns about justice but also about more strategic political concerns on the part of both majority and minority representatives. Methodologically, the new feminists have exploited the rich area of comparative law theory (and cases such as traditional marriages, female genital cutting, veiling, honour killings, tribal inheritance rights, sex trafficking) and critically highlighted the role played both by the stereotyped culture attributed to non-Western minorities and the less visible, taken-for-granted, gendered cultural assumptions of majority groups in maintaining and justifying the silencing of women. Because cultural norms are contingent and variable, manipulated by elites, and bear an uncertain relationship to Book Reviews

Majority Norms, Multiculturalism, and Gender Equality

Although many scholars have discussed the conflict that can arise between multiculturalism and gender equality, both critics and defenders of multiculturalism have largely overlooked a variety of interactive dynamics between majority and minority cultures that have important implications for the theory and practice of multiculturalism. Examining cases in the U.S. context, this essay argues for an interactive view of the dilemmas of gender and culture that is attentive to interconnections between majority and minority cultures. What is of particular concern for debates on multiculturalism is that the mainstream legal and normative frameworks within which minority claims for accommodation are evaluated have themselves been informed by patriarchal norms, which in turn have offered support for gender hierarchies within minority cultures. The interactive view defended here suggests the need to scrutinize both minority and majority norms and practices in evaluating the claims of minority cultures.

Democracy and noncitizen voting rights

The boundaries of democracy are typically defined by the boundaries of formal status citizenship. Such state-centered theories of democracy leave many migrants without a voice in political decision-making in the areas where they live and work, giving rise to a problem of democratic legitimacy. Drawing on two democratic principles of inclusion, the all affected interests and coercion principles, this article elaborates this problem and examines two responses offered by scholars of citizenship for what receiving states might do. The first approach involves expanding the circle of citizenship to include resident noncitizens. A second approach involves disaggregating the rights conventionally associated with citizenship from the legal status of citizenship and extending some of those rights, including voting rights, to resident noncitizens. This article argues that both approaches fall short of satisfying the democratic principles of inclusion, which call for enfranchising individuals not only beyond the boundaries of citizenship but also beyond territorial boundaries.

The boundary problem in democratic theory: why the demos should be bounded by the state

Democracy is rule by the demos, but by what criteria is the demos constituted? Theorists of democracy have tended to assume that the demos is properly defined by national boundaries or by the territorial boundaries of the modern state. In a recent turn, many democratic theorists have advanced the principles of affected interests and coercion as the basis for defining the boundaries of democracy. According to these principles, it is not co-nationals or fellow citizens but all affected or all subjected to coercion who constitute the demos. In this paper, I argue that these recent approaches to the boundary problem are insufficiently attentive to the conditions of democracy. Democracy is not merely a set of procedures; it also consists of substantive values and principles. Political equality is a constitutive condition of democracy, and solidarity is an instrumental condition of democracy. The affected interests and coercion principles create serious problems for the realization of these conditions — problems of size and stability. Building on this critique, this paper presents democratic considerations for why the demos should be bounded by the territorial boundaries of the state, grounded in the state’s role in (1) securing the constitutive conditions of democracy, (2) serving as the primary site of solidarity conducive to democratic participation, and (3) establishing clear links between representatives and their constituents. I examine and reject a third alternative, a global demos bounded by a world state, and conclude by considering some practical implications of my argument.

What Does It Mean to Be an American

David Greenberg The presidential debates as political ritual 6 Hsuan L. Hsu & Martha Lincoln Health media & global inequalities 20 Sarah Song What does it mean to be an American? 31 Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen Anti-intellectualism as romantic discourse 41 Ajay K. Mehrotra The intellectual foundations of the modern American 1⁄2scal state 53 John Jacob Kaag Pragmatism & the lessons of experience 63 Christopher Klemek The rise & fall of New Left urbanism 73 Jason Puskar Risking Ralph Ellison 83 Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh Reconciling American archaeology & Native America 94 Sharon K. Weiner Competing organizational interests & Soviet wmd expertise 105 Paul K. MacDonald Rebalancing American foreign policy 115 Crystal N. Feimster The threat of sexual violence during the American Civil War 126