> In dialectical response to imperialists' feminist disguise which masks
> its own sexist agenda, patriarchal anti-colonialists offer themselves
> as protectors of women from Western corruptions. Women's bodies, quite
> often, become the battleground over which two contending political
> rhetorics clash. Women's own voices, in the war of pseudo-feminisms,
> seldom get heard -- sometime because women's voices are distorted
> beyond recognition in the echo chambers of sexist imperialism and
> patriarchal anti-colonialism, sometimes because no viable political
> vehicle exists which can carry their voices, sometimes because others
> refuse to listen to women who are speaking, even shouting at the top
> of their lungs.
I was witness several months ago to an instance of this. A group of Canadians composed largely of women refugees from political Islam in Iran had organized a weekend conference as part of a lobbying effort to prevent shari'a from being given official recognition in the administrative functioning of civil courts in Ontario. The proposal is to do this by setting up shari'a based arbitration panels to settle disputes in matters of contracts, divorce and inheritance. The arguments these women made had to do largely with the ways shari'a law was inconsistent with the idea of universal human rights.
The women were repeatedly lectured by a non-Iranian Canadian identity discourse theorist (currently at Harvard) on their misunderstanding both of justice and of Canadian constitutional law. Justice required, and Canadian constitutional law in the form of its idea of "multiculturalism" allowed, "community rights" to take precedence in some contexts over "individual rights." The proper approach therefore was to abandon the universal human rights argument, accept the creation of such panels as a legitimate protection of community "identity," and lobby to insure that members of such panels would interpret the law appropriately. An illustration of the possibilities available from this approach was offered by a male Islamic panel member supporting the proposal who pointed out that a man's right to beat his wife didn't specify whether this was with a cloth or a club. He had no answer when asked by a male Iranian Canadian opponent of the proposal how the law could be deconstructed so as to eliminate the power relation implied in it.
Ted