Item Detail
-
11963
-
0
-
0
-
English
-
Culture, Gender, and Equality
-
New Haven, Connecticut
-
Yale University
-
Ph.D. diss.
-
'This dissertation explores the tensions between multicultural recognition for minority groups and equal protection for vulnerable minorities within minority groups. On the one hand, justice sometimes requires special protections for cultural minority groups in order to protect some of their urgent interests against the claims of the majority. Yet, some of the ways of protecting minority groups from oppression by the majority makes it more likely that those minority groups are able to oppress vulnerable members. Justice requires special protections for minority groups, but justice also requires protecting vulnerable minorities within minorities from oppression by a group's more powerful members. Who then should decide how such cultural dilemmas should be addressed? This dissertation presents and defends a democratic egalitarian approach to such cultural dilemmas. From the standpoint of democratic equality, treating individuals with equal respect requires that each person affected by a particular rule or practice have a voice in its governance, while ensuring that the basic interests of the most vulnerable parties are protected. The central idea is linking voice in decision-making to existing power relations: protecting the vulnerable against domination requires giving them a greater say in the governance of practices that affect their basic interests. This dissertation provides three detailed case studies which embody the tensions between multicultural recognition and equal protection, focusing in particular on cases in which minority women are made more vulnerable to oppression by multicultural recognition. The cases include the 'cultural defense'in American criminal law, sovereignty accorded to American Indian tribes, and Mormon polygamy. In contrast to existing approaches, this dissertation scrutinizes both minority and majority cultures in considering responses to these cultural dilemmas. It shows the ways in which the majority culture's own struggles toward gender equality are incomplete and ongoing, and how the majority culture's gender norms have shaped its responses to the gender practices of minority groups. Rather than cast the problem as majority versus minority cultures, the approach defended here focuses on the sites of congruence and interaction between the gender norms of the majority culture and those of minority cultures in evaluating the claims of culture.' (author's abstract)