Exclusion, Internalization, Harm

Abstract

The article outlines a way in which internally pluralistic political communities might deal justly with apparently harmful gender-specific practices. It begins by demonstrating the inability of Walzer's recent theory of thin minimalism to integrate concerns for gender equality and cultural recognition. By focusing on the case of widow immolation in India, I show that an important problem lies in Walzer's failure to demonstrate that this is a `hard case'. This is due to his inability to identify two types of harm in this practice; namely, harmful exclusion and harmful internalization. On the basis of these harms, I redefine widow immolation as a `contrastive hard case'. Deriving from the recent work of Tully and Nussbaum, this reconceptualization is more attractive than Walzer's account, since it provides a culturally sensitive defence of minority women's capacity to contest the entailments of their religious beliefs in public.