Multiculturalism and the gender gap: the visibility and invisibility of Muslim women in Britain

Abstract

In this chapter I argue that Muslim women occupy a unique space of visibility and invisibility within the multicultural discourse in Britain. On one hand they ‘fall between the cracks’ of liberal multiculturalism, which, in its many shifting manifestations, has consistently functioned to privilege ‘race’, religion and ethnicity over gender. A gender-blind multicultural discourse means that Muslim women, who are located at the intersectionality of race, class, gender, sexuality, religion and patriarchy, remain largely invisible, locked into the private space of the home and family, where oppressive gendered cultural and religious practices are still played out. For example, Muslim women who are subject to culturally specific forms of violence against women, such as honour crimes and forced marriage, are caught up in the contradictions of the cultural relativism of British faith-based multiculturalism as well as the private-public divide of the family which characterizes mainstream approaches to violence against women more generally. On the other hand, since 11 September 2001 and, more recently, the 7 July 2005 bombings by young British Muslim men in the United Kingdom, there has been an overwhelming preoccupation with the ‘embodied’ Muslim women in our public spaces. In particular, the spotlight on Muslim women wearing the veil has preoccupied our western media (see also Ahmad and Ryan, Chapters 9 and 6 respectively of this volume). In the West’s ideological ‘war on terror’ the ‘Muslim woman’ has come to symbolize the ‘barbaric Muslim other’ in our midst. In the ensuing discourse of Islamophobia, produced by the global threat to security from Islamic extremism, Muslim women have become pathologized as voiceless victims of their ‘backward’ communities in need of ‘saving’ by the enlightened ‘West’ (Abu-Lughod 2002). My argument in this chapter is there are real consequences arising from the way in which Muslim women are constructed in the contested multicultural spaceoccupied by the post-colonial Muslim diaspora in Britain. Caught up in the ‘collision of discourses’, the concerns of Muslim women can easily ‘slip through the cracks’ of everyday policy and politics. At one and the same time, Muslim women are highly visible and pathologized as victims in the discourse of Islamophobia, yet they are largely absent and invisible in the normative (white) discourse on familial and communal domestic violence. In the discourse of multiculturalism they are ultimately at risk of not being fully protected by the state as equal citizens. Often, professionals, such as teachers, social workers or doctors find themselves ‘walking on eggshells’ – that is, in a state of paralysis, not wanting to offend the community’s sensibilities, afraid of accusations of racism, or feeling a lack of cultural expertise and knowledge about Islam (Mirza 2010). In this gendered post-modern multicultural malaise, Muslim women can suffer a lack of protection, or inaction, from individuals and organizations charged with their well-being. Understanding the tensions between recognizing gender oppression within Muslim communities and preserving the important but contested space of multicultural difference in Britain is at the heart of my concern in this chapter. It is a fine but important line to walk. Throughout this chapter I use the collective term ‘Muslim women’ to encompass black and other ethnic minority women from Asian, African, South American, Mediterranean, European, Arabic and Middle Eastern Islamic cultures who now live and work in Britain. While there are women of different faiths and cultures, such as Sikh, Hindu, Jewish, Buddhist and Christian women, who also suffer from the collision of multiculturalism and violence against women, it is the effects the Islamophobic discourse and the construction of ethnicized or racially objectified ‘Muslim woman’ within this context that I am interested in exploring here. The post-colonial Muslim feminist anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod argues that, while we need to be specific about the history, politics and development of different Islamic societies and cultures, we must also be vigilant concerning the West’s reifying tendency ‘to plaster neat cultural icons like “the Muslim woman” over messy historical and political dynamics’ (2002: 784).