Multiculturalism and the Gender Gap: Issues for Muslim Communities in Britain

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Multiculturalism and the Gender Gap Issues for
Muslim Communities in Britain

• Professor Heidi Safia Mirza
• Centre for Rights, Equalities and Social Justice
  (CRESJ)
• Institute of Education
• University of London

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normalised absence/pathologised presence
approach

• Muslim women are caught up in a collision of
  invisibility and visibility that means they slip
  through the cracks of everyday policy and
  politics
• Pathological presence
• If Muslim women are visible they are are
  constructed as problematic and in negative ways
• OR
• Normalised absence
• muslim women are largley invisible from
  mainstream multicultural and gender discussions

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The Muslim menace women in the spotlight

• Since September 11th, and more recently the 7/7
  bombings in the UK, there has been an
  overwhelming preoccupation with Muslim women in
  the press.
• it is the work of the postcolonial feminist to
  ask the simple question what does this mean?
  and begin to plot a history (Gayatri
  Spivak,1988297).

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race and gender stereotypes

• The civilising mission of the Empire was often
  underpinned by so called masculine heroic acts of
  white men saving brown women from brown men (
  Spivak 1988297)

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Race and gender stereotypes

• In the latent ethnocentrism of the west,
  Muslim women are presented as voiceless,
  stereotyped, racialised victims rather than
  active agents working to determine and engage
  their rights as individuals (Chandra Talpade
  Mohanty 1988)
• Represented as a single objectified category
  the ubiquitous, stereotypical Muslim woman.
•  OR
• characterised by a particular form of cultural
  relativism that highlights only specific cultural
  issues to do with these othered women ( e.g
  forced marriage etc) .
• .

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Multiculturalism

• race and gender matters in the way it affects
  social divisions
• but the new multicultural vision of
  Britishness as described by Tony Blair and
  Gordon Brown is made up of gender neutral ethnic
  communities that (despite a few recent remedial
  meetings with Muslim women), privileges male
  minority leaders.

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...the community interference began in earnest.
I had a phone call form a local Asian Councillor
asking me if I could explain why I had taken mum
and children away and broken up this respectable
family. I then had phone calls and visits from
countless community elders including a local
religious leader. He did not waste any time
castigating my actions and telling me what I had
done was sinful. He told me how I should be
personally held responsible for the familys loss
of face, and the distress I had caused them
(Haider 20034).

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Multiculturalism and the collision of discourses

• Honour and shame (morality and purity)
• Multiculturalism and Islamophobia (Britishness
  and national identity)
• Public and private ( the state and family)
• East and west ( colonialism and modernity)
• Fear and risk (terror and order)
• Traditionalism and globalisation (culture and
  social change)
• Patriarchy and religion (masculinity and belief)
  
•  

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• Women are the bearers of the races and
  guardians of culture .
• They are central to the ideological construction
  and reproduction of national identity and hence
  the (multicultural) State.
• (Yuval- Davis 1997)