Culture, Tolerance and Gender: A Contribution from the Netherlands (original) (raw)
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European Journal of Women's Studies, 2003
Defenders of multiculturalism have been recently criticized for failing to address gender inequality in minority cultures. Multiculturalism would seem incompatible with a commitment to feminism. This article discusses two empirical cases that pose a problem for public policy in the Netherlands: a conflict over wearing headscarves (hijab) and requests for surgical hymen repair. These cases evoke widespread public controversy, in part because they are presumed to express or accommodate traditions in violation of women's rights and thus raise the question of tolerance. While recognizing the potential discrepancies between feminism and multiculturalism, the author argues that committed feminists can be multiculturalists as well, and that good feminism might well require acts of multiculturalism. In addition, she advocates a contextual approach to tolerance. Her argument is that general justice arguments are too indeterminate to make for good judgement in concrete cases. The national political culture and institutional setting in which multicultural conflicts take place should be considered as morally relevant factors and co-determine our moral considerations. The dispute over feminism and multiculturalism cannot be settled in abstracto. Using a contextual approach, the author argues that wearing a headscarf and hymen repair are justifiable and consonant with feminist concerns in the Dutch educational and medical contexts.
Feminist Ethics, Autonomy and the Politics of Multiculturalism
Feminist Theory, 2003
Should the liberal state accommodate the cultural traditions of minority groups even if these traditions infringe upon the rights of women? This article discusses two empirical cases that pose just this problem for public policy in the Netherlands: requests for surgical reconstruction of the hymen and gender-selective abortion. While hymen reconstruction is linked to a cultural norm that young women, but not young men, remain virgins until marriage, sex-selective abortion is linked to a cultural preference for sons. The autonomy of women is at issue in these cases in two ways: the traditions limit their autonomy, yet it is the women who demand the medical intervention. The cases illustrate the complexities of women's agency under oppressive social conditions. The author develops a moral argument concerning these two cases that understands the women in question as moral agents, while taking into account these complexities. The article does not pit multicultural and feminist concerns against each other. Instead, it is argued that good feminism may well require acts of multiculturalism. It is not desirable, so it is argued, to restrict access to abortion or to ban hymen repair.
2020
In this article, we analyze headscarf debates that unfolded in the first decade of the twenty-first century in France, the Netherlands, and Germany. Through a socio-historical overview looking at newspaper articles and policy and legal documents, we show how the headscarf has become a site for negotiating immigrant-related, postcolonial difference. We argue that certain feminist understanding of gender liberation and postcolonial difference in the headscarf debates reveal the continuity of control mechanisms from the colonial to the postcolonial era. We highlight the possibilities for decolonial thought and practice by centering the situatedness of headscarf. This allows us to show how Muslim citizens are active participants in producing contemporary Western European histories even as some of their practices face overt rejection.
Social Politics, 2008
As European nations grapple with when and how to extend inclusive citizenship to their Muslim minorities, the parameters of Muslim women's citizenship have jumped to the forefront of feminist concern. Much of the debate internationally has revolved around veiling, but we argue that this is only one element of how ethnic, religious, and other differences among women are addressed. In this paper, we choose two cases which highlight political choices surrounding intersectionality for German feminists: headscarf laws and antidiscrimination laws. Both laws are inherently intersectional, with significant and differential impact on Muslim women, but German feminists have engaged in these two issues quite differently. The so-called headscarf debate has drawn intense feminist involvement but changes in antidiscrimination law are rarely discussed in feminist media. We attempt to explain this difference by focusing
This dissertation discusses the different ways in which French, Dutch and German politicians have deliberated and regulated the issue of Islamic head and body covering, which became a salient issue in all three countries at different times since the 1990s. In order to explain country-specific policies on the hijab, this dissertation analyses the ways in which the hijab was framed in the political realm as a paradigmatic symbol of problems requiring a policy response. The central thesis of this dissertation is that national institutional and policy histories offer specific opportunities and constraints, which shape how issues are constructed as problems within the political realm, giving rise to particular policy solutions. However, going beyond static, structural approaches towards understanding countries’ different policy outcomes, this dissertation takes a political-process approach that focuses on the actors involved in those framing contests, the shifting power they have to push for their construction of reality, and the legal-institutional setting in which these policy-formation processes take place. This dissertation focuses on three institutional settings as particularly relevant structures in shaping policy processes on the hijab: institutionalised state-church relations, institutions of citizenship and migrant incorporation, and gender machineries and policies, as well as their underlying cleavages. The policy debates and policy responses will be analysed from the onset of the debates in each country (starting with the Netherlands in 1985) until 2007, a period that includes several important national and international events such as September 11, 2001. Such a comparison over time allows for an explanation that is sensitive to changes in policy debates and responses within countries and hence to possible trends of convergence between countries. This thesis therefore aims to answer the following two research questions: 1. What differences and similarities exist in the framing and policy responses to the hijab in France, the Netherlands, and Germany and how have these developed over time from 1985 until 2007? 2. To what extent can institutional structures, divergent policy pasts of state-church relations, migrant incorporation and women’s emancipation, and shifting party constellations explain differences in the framing and regulation of the hijab? The study uses similar data for all three countries: a qualitative frame analysis of all parliamentary documents on this issue, complemented with jurisprudence that shaped policy responses and media extracts.
Gendering the diversification of diversityThe Belgian hijab (in) question
Ethnicities, 2008
This article presents an analysis of the recent headscarf debate in Belgium, and explores in particular to what extent issues of gender equality and feminist arguments were central to the discussion. It is argued that compared to France, concerns about secularity and state-neutrality, national identity and equality, all find resonance in the Belgian context, but are articulated in a more ambiguous and less 'principled' way. This partly explains the paradoxical situation in which, despite a widespread resistance to a general law banning the wearing of religious symbols in public schools, in practice, headscarf prohibitions are on the rise throughout various regions of the country. Although issues of gender equality and cultural diversity often cut and flow across debates and policies in European nation states, the Belgian hijab question provides a unique case, because of various lines of fracture and processes of increasing diversification that characterize Belgian society.