This book invites consideration of the internal dimensions of “cultural groups,” which, for Monique Deveaux, encompass “a broad range of groups whose members share an identity based on ethnic, linguistic, racial, or religious characteristics” (p. 1). Specifically, Deveaux's work explores the possible points of tension between minority cultural group rights and gender equality within minority groups. Variously identified as the problem of “internal minorities” or “minorities within minorities,” real or possible points of conflict between multiculturalism and gender equality have generated much debate among liberal scholars in the past decade. Rather than seek to answer the question that liberals typically pose—namely, what the liberal state should and should not tolerate—the author's primary concern is developing a normative framework that can mediate cultural and gender claims and justice. In advancing this framework, she successfully moves the debate beyond the paradigm of tolerance, bringing into sharp relief the contested character of culture and cultural traditions, the manifold ways that power as well as (women's) agency may operate, and the potential contained in democratic deliberation when minorities are empowered. This then, is a book that is a valuable contribution to the theoretical debate over liberal multiculturalism.
Following an introductory overview in Chapter 1, the first half of the book is devoted to elaborating and critiquing existing positions among liberal scholars, as well as provisions in international human rights legislation. Chapter 2 addresses liberal approaches to culture, moving beyond the belief, argued by the late Susan Moller Okin, that multiculturalism is “bad” for women. This chapter is especially strong for illustrating the ethnocentrism that may lurk behind a fixation on specific cultural practices, as well as the problems introduced by a focus on a priori assertions of what is intolerable for a liberal state. Chapter 3 considers the potential and pitfalls of human rights legislation, since it provides an indeterminate response to claims made on grounds of gender and/or culture. In light of the limitations of liberal and human rights approaches, Deveaux ultimately insists that an appropriate approach needs to consider how cultural communities, themselves marked by internal diversity, may evaluate and even transform their own practices.
Chapter 4 turns to address how amended deliberative democratic procedures may even empower minorities if norms of nondomination operate both between and within groups, if there is political inclusion of various positions and views, and if there is a sense that deliberations may continue—that is, that there is a norm of revisability. An especially critical insight Deveaux advances is that the question that kick-starts deliberation matters: discussions may progress differently when the question is not what the liberal state should prohibit, but rather “a series of questions about the disputed custom and the social contexts in which it is practiced.” (p. 90)
The second half of the book is devoted to addressing cases where tension between gender equality and cultural rights came to the fore, and the lessons that might be gleaned from these cases in light of the mediating framework that Deveaux advances. Chapter 6 addresses Canada's (failed) constitutional negotiations of the early 1990s, and specifically the conflict that emerged between indigenous peoples seeking constitutional recognition of an inherent right to self-government and some indigenous women, largely left outside the negotiation process, voicing concerns about the fate of Canada's constitutionally protected provisions for gender equality under conditions of self-government. Here, the goal is to illustrate why “internal minorities” may have good reason to seek political inclusion.
Chapter 7 examines the lead-up to the 1999 establishment of a “Forced Marriages Working Group” in Britain, a group that came to focus on an extreme practice impacting a minority of South Asian (Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim) immigrants and their descendants. Deveaux's analysis raises useful insights concerning the meaning of arranged versus forced marriage, autonomy, and the agency of women affected by controversial customs. Chapter 8 takes as its focus South Africa's 1996 Constitution with its strong racial and sex equality provisions, and ensuing efforts to reform customary marriage practices. This chapter highlights the value of negotiated compromises attending to both cultural justice and gender equality. Chapter 9, the concluding chapter, summarizes the findings and identifies the need to democratize legitimacy as a way to ensure the meaningful inclusion of all those affected by deliberative outcomes.
In moving between theory and cases (in Canada, Britain, and South Africa) Gender and Justice in Multicultural Liberal States should be greeted not only as a contribution to scholarship but as an important addition to senior undergraduate or graduate courses in political theory, gender and politics, and multiculturalism and identity politics. Additionally, it offers policymakers some potentially helpful guideposts about how to foster more deliberative and inclusionary dialogues on controversial matters.
That being said, the book would be even further strengthened by greater consideration of the work that “culture” is made to do within liberal theory and, more broadly, within the international sphere post-September 11. The book advances the extant work on liberal multiculturalism by showing how cultural practices can be contested and can shift. However, Deveaux does not reject the use of the term “culture.” Yet one could ask whether culture can reasonably be interchanged with such other concepts as ethnicity, religion, language and race. For example, might our analytic understanding and even possible deliberations have proceeded differently if the focus had shifted from addressing “cultural minorities” to “racialized minorities”? Deveaux also focuses primarily on the politics within nation-states, yet we are living in an era when the idea of a “clash of civilizations” has assumed a greater presence in both scholarly and policy-making circles because of the events of September 11 and the U.S.-led war on terror. As such, terms like “liberalism,” “democracy,” and even “gender equality” may also be appropriated in cultural or civilizational discourses that characterize contemporary geopolitics.
Deveaux's work usefully contributes to the turn that liberal theorists made toward looking at internal minorities in multicultural liberal states, but there remains much to theorize about the international sphere and the implications of civilizational discourses for gender equality and cultural justice in multicultural liberal states and globally.
