I seek to engage the authors in a deeper interrogation of their claims, particularly that societies can mitigate the evolutionary legacy of patriarchy by limiting the influence of religious/cultural enclaves and instead promoting universalism, as exemplified in CEDAW and international law. I challenge and politicize this alleged “choice” between universalism and cultural/religious enclaves/relativism, as it ultimately rests on a series of too-easy dichotomies (secular/religious, western/nonwestern) that may inadvertently stymie collaborative attempts between “western” and “non-western” feminists to challenge inequitable family law and gender violence. Hudson, Bowen, and Nielsen (Reference Hudson, Bowen and Nielson2011) do offer critiques of western states. They are careful to point out nuances, subtleties, and complexities with their concept of religious/cultural enclaves. They also convincingly broaden the concept of gender equality beyond formal political rights to the kind of social, legal, and economic justice encapsulated in equitable family law and freedom from violence. And, they provoke an examination of why and how gender equality and gender violence are linked. But I suggest that their empirical research might have better traction by taking seriously two problematic implications of championing the “universal” as necessarily progressive: the failure to recognize patriarchy as part of universalism; and the inattention to why and how religious/cultural enclaves are patriarchal.
Most scholars discuss universalism as a reference to rights, values, and international laws that appeal and apply to all subjects. The “universality of women's human rights” indicates a uniformity and consistency of the principle that women, as individuals, deserve certain rights and protections regardless of context. A key moment in the article arrives with these words: “The international system, as represented by the United Nations, and the states of the world cannot avoid deciding between the concept that women's rights are universal and the concept that individuals should be free to practice their deepest-held beliefs” (485). The authors then cite the United Nations Economic and Social Council's concern that “women … are often the first and main victims” of the conflict between “asserted rights” and the right to freedom of religious/cultural practices (486). The “choice” must be made for the sake of women, in other words.
While it is beyond the scope of this short essay to analyze the genealogy of universalism, I am primarily interested in the idea of universalism as different from, untouched, and uncorrupted by religion, culture, and other such constructs. Universalism, then, is indubitably sutured to secularism. I posit that international law and certain states promulgate secular universal values that are constructed in contradistinction to religious/cultural values, representing secular universalism as naturally and inherently better for gender equality and religion/culture as being synonymous with gender hierarchy and oppression. Talking about religion/culture in this way distracts from an examination of whether universalism is necessarily gender-equal.
Has the United States failed to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and CEDAW because of the influence of religious and cultural enclaves? Possibly and probably. But we must also explore how it has failed to do so because of how the state is exercising its sovereignty, which evolved as a secular, universal ideal. Feminist international relations theorists have demonstrated that states, institutions, and legal regimes are “gendered,” meaning that they rely on constructs such as sovereignty, national security, and the law that are not neutral but deploy certain meanings of gender, such as patriarchy and masculinity, to signify strength, order, and power. Thus, political players, even in so-called liberal democracies, privilege men over women, require men and women to behave in certain ways to uphold the current political order, and benefit from disciplining and controlling women, queer bodies, and certain male bodies. Examples include forced conscription, prohibiting marriage rights for same-sex couples, preventing access to reproductive rights, and sanctioning transphobia and homophobia. “Universalism” works to gloss over and justify these gendered processes by appealing to ideas of rationality and neutrality.
As such, it is not enough to pressure states to stop condoning or allowing family law created by religious authorities/enclaves; the state actively engages in patriarchy even and especially while upholding the universal application of laws. As Htun and Weldon (Reference Htun and Weldon2011) argue, the way the state deals with family law, by either eradicating or making bargains with other authorities, such as religious leaders, has to do with the kind of power it is seeking. If equitable family law is not due to the inherent gender equality of secular universalism or the influence of international law but rather to politically expedient reasons, then gender equality will only endure until the state seeks to exercise a different kind of power.
Feminist political theorist Wendy Brown (Reference Brown2010) points out that secular universalism cordons off a separate “privatized” and “depoliticized” space for “religion” and the “family.” As such, the family and household attain a special, sacred, and holy status, held together with patriarchal religious norms. This “sacralized” family is not subject to political change and democratization unless it is in the state's interest to do so (such as increasing women's rights as workers when it can benefit from women's participation in the labor force).
Secular universalism, then, gets to feign a commitment to gender equality while ensuring the centrality of the heteronormative family, in which women may have political and legal equality but still make less money than men, do more unpaid reproductive and household labor than men, and in part as a result of this structural inequality, suffer from oppressive and violent gender norms and practices in both work and family spaces. Nonconforming men, women, couples, and families constitute a threat to the state's vision of itself as egalitarian and liberal. In effect, the “private sphere” is simultaneously cast out from public debates and is a site for state control.
If we must politicize and historicize what the “universal” is, then we must also question representations of religion and culture as the freedom to express “deepest-held beliefs” rather than as political sites. What are the effects of not inquiring about the politics of religious and cultural enclaves? The first is actually to protect and enable religious and cultural patriarchy. Sunder (Reference Sunder2003) notes that the more that the law presents itself as universal and separates out religion with its own separate authority, the more that the law inadvertently enables particular religious leaders with gender-oppressive interpretations to gain absolutist authority, immune from both internal and external critique and challenge because they somehow represent the entire “collective” or the right to practice religion.
The second effect is to make women's bodies the terrains for competing discourses about religion and universalism. Is the choice really between being a part of a patriarchal, harmful religion or culture in order to be a part of a collective with religious/cultural freedom or standing as an isolated individual enjoying gender equality in the embrace of secularism's freedom? Women's lives and decisions are more complicated than that, and to force a choice between collectivism and individualism seems to be an impossible task. Many women find identity, nationalism, resistance, feminist empowerment, and coping skills through religion in combination with certain appeals to secularism. But religion and culture are presumed to be static and regressive, fulfilling people's need for tradition but not possibly serving as sources of joy, activism, change, or solidarity. In addition, we must question why demands for religious laws have increased; why have religious minorities sought equality via these laws (460)? If legal pluralism helps to “diminish conflict” (460), then do these demands speak more to the failure of postcolonial or postconflict states to hold together than to the alleged power of cultural/religious tradition? I offer that these questions are a better place to start than to pose the universalism-religion choice.
The third effect is to reinforce global hierarchy, or the positioning of states and communities in a particular order as “better” or “worse” than each other according to certain indicators such as treatment of women (Towns Reference Towns2010). “Universalism” discursively functions to maintain a division between civilized, gender-friendly states and communities and those that are backward and gender-oppressive. Secular universalism allegedly offers protection for women from the discrimination, mutilation, barbarism, ignorance, irrationality, and corruption of religious and cultural enclaves. But as postcolonial feminist theorists have reminded us, this promise of gender freedom also justifies colonial encounters and militarized intervention. Even if secular states with universal values might offer more gender equality in terms of family law and freedom from violence within their countries, they still participate in violent actions in the name of the universal in other countries. Accordingly, forcing a choice and emphasizing the triumph of the secular universal individual can be read by those on the receiving end as imperial and imposing. Indeed, western and some nonwestern feminists, human rights activists, and postcolonial states alike often frame women's rights in the postcolonial and/or developing world as not simply secular and universal but also western values. Even commentators sensitive to western intervention argue that western countries should not impose their “values,” such as “women's rights,” thus still presuming that it is the (secular, universal) west in which respect for gender equality is firmly lodged. Accordingly, they miss how patriarchy functions in secular universal projects and simplify how both gender inequality and women's rights activism vary across political, religious, and economic contexts.
If the patriarchal evolutionary legacy is to be mitigated, then it requires the work not just of domestic women's and human rights movements but also of transnational feminist advocacy networks and movements. As such, any perception of a forced choice between universalism and religion/culture can create a wedge between so-called western and nonwestern states, communities, and feminists, thus distracting from the complex politics of women's experiences and foregoing the multiple possibilities for challenging gender discrimination and oppression. Indeed, women's resistance to universalist rhetoric might be more about postcolonial politics and responses to global hierarchies than about a rejection of gender equality or an uncritical embrace of particular religious practices.
This is not to say that there are no differences between universal laws and cultural/religious-based justifications for legal systems, but rather, to politicize both systems and to question their alleged distinctions. Doing so might engender feminist questions about what universal women's human rights actually comprise. Do or can such rights include more radical socioeconomic equality (such as access to health care or recognizing household and childrearing labor), a challenge to militarization, neoliberalism, and masculinity (all of which shape why and how gender violence occurs), inclusion of queer identities, or a focus on transnational labor and migration flows that matter in household economics? In addition to inquiring whether women would rather be governed by secular family laws (438), we need to recognize better how so-called “universal women's human rights” are too easily coopted and appropriated to make states look better or worse than others. The authors and I share a vision to democratize the family and the home and to prioritize women's rights and security, but such changes require questions about how the state, international law, secular and religious authorities alike, and global hierarchies collude to delimit the possibilities of women's lives.
