Since 9/11, the question of “accommodating Islam” in Western societies has lent a sense of urgency to what were often already incendiary debates about multiculturalism in the US and Europe. Amidst this atmosphere, Sarah Song's Justice, Gender, and the Politics of Multiculturalism is a timely book that offers an important contribution to this subject. Song offers here what she describes as a “right-respecting accommodationist approach,” one specifically designed to recognize and mediate between minority and majority cultures while respecting the individual rights of women.

One of the distinctions of Song's argument is to insist that women's rights are vulnerable to abuse at society's margins and in its mainstream, and her description of how patriarchal forces in both often collaborate with one another to restrict women's freedoms illuminates debates central to feminist and multicultural thought. While acknowledging that some minority cultural practices are loaded against women, the book responds to feminist critics of multiculturalism by raising the spectre of Gayatri Spivak's colonial scenario of “white men saving brown women from brown men.” The accommodation of minority-group traditions can of course exacerbate inequalities within minority groups, but justice cannot live up to its name by remaining wilfully blind to cultural difference.

The first section of Song's book, while couched in a rather dry sociological register which tends to be overly abstract, makes some crucial points. Song questions the oft-held assumption of proponents of multiculturalism that culture is a basic good; thus her sense that cultural differences should be recognized in the legal context is tempered by an awareness that cultures are not always “contexts of choice” for all of their members. Song also emphasizes the role of the state in constructing cultures – a fact that has bedevilled the interaction of Native American communities and the US federal government – thus challenging the notion that the evolution of cultures is somehow “natural,” their regulation “artificial.”

It is, however, via her examples that Song really brings these issues to life. In her examination of the “cultural defense” in American criminal law, Song outlines the case of a Chinese immigrant who killed his wife on discovery that she was having an affair. As a result of testimonies from “experts” on Chinese culture who claimed that Chinese men would on the whole react more violently than a “reasonable” American male, the defendant obtained a reduced sentence. Song recounts similarly astonishing leniency shown to a Hmong man who abducted and raped a 19-year-old Hmong woman, and whose defence pleaded that “marriage by capture” was a Hmong tradition. Song convincingly argues that the verdicts in these cases do not point towards a sensitivity to cultural differences, but rather show one patriarchal tradition recognizing and thus accommodating similar values in another. For American criminal law already “reinforces the possessive norms rooted in a code of male honor” (99).

This is a vivid example of what Song describes as “the congruence effect.” Song's designation of “the diversionary effect” runs through her chapter on the campaign against Mormon polygamy, where historically the insistence that the practice denigrates women has served as a smokescreen for the fact that the far more widespread practice of monogamous marriages has hardly laid the foundations for female liberation.

“The majority culture is,” Song writes, “in certain respects not less patriarchal than minority cultures, just differently so” (170). The book's many examples both richly illustrate this point and underscore the fact that such generalizing can only take us so far.