This is a thoughtful consideration of the impasse between the recognition of multicultural diversity and the liberal feminist demand for gender equality and parity. Sarah Song's goals in the book are threefold. First, the author wishes to reformulate the debate surrounding multiculturalism by troubling the claim that cultures are monolithic entities with clear boundaries and comprehensive worldviews. Instead, she argues through a self-professed constructivist lens, cultures are often contingent, polyvocal, and impacted by cross-cultural influences. Importantly, these cross-cultural influences affect the gender norms of minority cultures.
Second, Song offers a “rights-respecting accommodationism” model for adjudicating between minority claims for cultural preservation and liberal demands for equality and freedom. Rather than taking a strong multiculturalist stance where the end goal is cultural preservation at all costs, or espousing a liberal feminist claim that gender equality must be furthered no matter the cultural context, she argues for an accommodationist model that takes seriously the basic rights of the individuals within minority cultures. Thus, accommodation is contingent upon the minority group's proving that all members have the “freedoms of conscience, expression, association, and the right to participate in the exercise of collective power to which one is subject” (p. 47).
Song's final goal of this book is to offer an alternative deliberative model for adjudicating between majority policies and minority claims. Here, she argues that through a process of deliberation, we must investigate whether or not a law is in fact a burden to the minority group and whether the rationale for the law serves a public interest that outweighs the burden of the minority group.
Song elaborates her arguments in two sections. The first is a theoretical exploration of the limitations of the multiculturalism-liberalism debate. Here, she offers one of the best formulations of this literature, convincingly asserting her constructivist critique and accommodationist model. The second section uses her model to assess particular case studies and is in many ways more interesting.
Chapter 4, for example, examines the “cultural defense” in American criminal law. Here, Song convincingly argues that in cases in which male assailants from minority groups attack women and claim the cultural defense, the American legal system gives legal recognition to masculinist and patriarchal norms that are as much a part of the majority culture as they are of the minority culture. This claim is especially persuasive in her analysis of the doctrine of provocation and its relationship to cultural defenses. Why, she asks, are courts willing to accept cultural claims as reflective of the minority culture at large? What might happen if we were attentive to the complexities and contestations of cultural production? Despite the ways in which the legal system participates in the patriarchal justifications of cultural claims, Song argues, we must not simply throw out culture as a defense in toto. Instead, she argues for what she calls a “qualified defense of the ‘cultural defense’” (p. 100) in which the claims of culture are investigated. Such a defense would require that we garner more information about whether those cultural claims are justifiable within particular contexts and to investigate whether these claims are contested within the minority culture. For example, is “marriage by capture” truly a Hmong practice accepted by all, or is it a practice that is characterized by contestation? In turn, we must also asses the ways in which the dominant culture, in this case American law, formulates and reinforces patriarchal cultural norms that clearly affect and manipulate claims made by cultural minorities.
Chapters 5 and 6 are case studies of Santa Clara Pueblo sovereignty and polygamy in America, respectively. In both chapters, Song offers a nuanced analysis of the ways in which majority cultural influences, including patriarchal norms, have biased minority responses to public policy and law. In the case of the Santa Clara Pueblo, she offers an astute historical account of the Pueblo rules of membership as partially an effect of U.S. endorsements of patrilineal property rights. This invariably marks the way in which the tribe's refusal to grant membership to children of Pueblo mothers who married non-Pueblo men is an effect of intercultural interactions and not an inherent and long-standing cultural prescription. The author also illuminates the way in which the effects of such a refusal of membership effectually delimit the basic rights of group members and thus necessitate intervention by the state. Her analysis of polygamy offers a rich historiography of U.S. antipolygamy laws, demonstrating that they have been historically contingent on the majority state's patriarchal desire to limit women's equality.
All three case studies offer fascinating examples of 1) how cross-cultural influences, including patriarchal norms, affect minority cultures and 2) how cultural claims are often contested within ostensibly holistic cultures. Song also makes quite a compelling case that the adjudication of these contestations should be predicated on more nuanced understandings of cultural production that take seriously the basic rights of the individual members.
What is less clear, however, is whether and in what ways deliberation and cultural contestation can change political outcomes. Song argues that deliberation can both bring attention to cultural contestations and spark public debate about whether particular cultural practices are good or appropriate. But while deliberation and debate might prompt more understanding, most policymakers and enforcers are members and part of the majority culture. Thus, in all cases it is the majority culture that makes the final decisions about minority cultural contestations. If these majority liberal institutions are imbued with patriarchal norms, and if those within the institutions ostensibly see themselves as neutral and committed to basic rights, how is the majority culture able to evaluate their own participation in both sexist and racist understandings of the minority culture? Put differently, how do these deliberative practices illuminate the deeply embedded preferences of liberal institutions that are the final arbiters of cultural claims? How do we dissipate what are often insidious patriarchal and racist norms masked by the liberal state's claim to neutrality? Song believes that a turn to an accommodationist approach focused on deliberation and that emphasizes basic rights will ameliorate these tensions.
