Julie Ajinkya
"Culture, Gender and the State: How Immigrant Women Negotiate Political Identities in Britain and the United States"
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Abstract
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How do immigrant women reconcile their cultural identity with their gender identity? This study looks at the mobilization of South Asian women in Britain and the United State to address the puzzle of how individuals reconcile two marginalized identities when they both come into conflict. Specifically, I will research the significance of three main gendered debates in multicultural discourse—veiling, forced marriage, and honor killings—to these women, as each debate pits their gender against their culture. Despite their gendered relevance, the discourse over each practice has been monopolized by either the State agenda that blames the minority community’s ‘backwardness’ or the male-led community agenda of restricting its women’s rights as a measure of cultural preservation. I will conduct case studies of thirteen organizations (varied on group type, membership, location, activity and founding) in order to investigate under what conditions South Asian women determine which identity to prioritize in political behavior: gender, culture, or the intersection of both. It is hypothesized that as the State begins to police minority communities, cultural rights groups express their autonomy by intensifying restrictive claims over women in their community, thereby driving those women to join South Asian women’s organizations campaigning against gender violence and, in effect, intensifying the salience of these women’s intersecting identities. This study attempts to explain the political behavior of immigrant women in multicultural, liberal democracies that must adjudicate between women’s individual rights and cultural group rights’ claims.
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