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Citizenship Studies
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Fictitious universalism and substantive equality: A comment

Kiren Aziz Chaudhry
a a

Associate Professor of Political Science, 210 Barrows Hall, University of California, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA Available online: 16 Nov 2007

To cite this article: Kiren Aziz Chaudhry (1999): Fictitious universalism and substantive equality: A comment, Citizenship Studies, 3:3, 391-395 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13621029908420723

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Citizenship Studies, Vol. 3, No. 3, 1999

Fictitious Universalism and Substantive Equality: A Comment

KIREN AZIZ CHAUDHRY This short comment highlights the political and conceptual substantinist feminist critiques of liberal citizenship.

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The liberal notion of citizenship rests on the fiction of stripped down individuals who enjoy uniform and equal rights defined and enforced by a neutral state. Feminist challenges to this concept of citizenship can be roughly divided into two categories. The first highlights the ways in which the workings of the institutions of the state and the substance of the law in practice do not afford equal treatment to women. The second emphasizes the ways in which the very presumption of uniformity across gender, religious, cultural and national boundaries conceals and misrepresents substantive differences in the lived experiences of citizens Such that the practice of 'equal' law actually results in different degrees of representation and citizenship. Feminists arguing from these two positions disagree not only on the question of whether universal notions of citizenship are feasible and useful, but also on whether the legal realm can (or, for that matter, should) be separated from substantive experiences of power and identity. They differ on what it is, exactly, that should be included in the realm of 'citizenship'; and on whether or not the fiction of the disembodied individual is a useful tool in thinking about rights at all. Judging from the papers in this volume, with the possible exception of Suad Joseph's essay on Lebanon, the second mode of critique has triumphed. My aim here is examine the potential pitfalls of this approach. I want not simply to trace the outlines of political defeat in the substantivist position but also to suggest that citizenship need not necessarily encompass and embody the totality of our human experience. And perhaps, even, that such a condition might be even more oppressive than the fictitious individual in the liberal state. Of course, none of the societies discussed in this volume even aspire to that condition and this, in itself, is something that is not necessarily intellectually uninteresting or politically irrelevant. Grewal's argument that universalist discourses of human rights and citizenship reflect and institutionalize disequilibria in international power that undercut issues of socio-economic justice while enshrining bourgeois preoccupations with
Kiren Aziz Chaudhry, Associate Professor of Political Science, 210 Barrows Hall, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA. 1362-1025/99/030391-05 1999 Taylor & Francis Ltd 391

Kiren Aziz Chaudhry domestic violence and rape is perhaps the strongest statement of the substantivist position. An emphasis on the universal rights of women is politically suspect because '... gendering is done by multiple agents in a society and in widely divergent ways'. Thus, a generalized gender-based reading of a single notion of 'human rights' could potentially support the ideological agendas of majoritarian religious groups (such as the Hindu nationalists) and of the hegemonic process of economic globalization. With India in mind, Grewal argues that the substantive interests of women living in societies with group-based family law systems are therefore not best served through a uniform civil code but by intra-group efforts to reform religious laws to the benefit of women in ways that conform to the culturally divergent ways in which oppression is experienced. One can hardly argue with this prescription except to say that such internal reform has, historically, been exceedingly difficult for it asks the weakest members of a society to singlehandedly reshape the legal machine and the values that oppress them. I return to this point in my discussion of Suad Joseph's paper on Lebanon. Where Gurewal easily locates the pernicious impulse of universalizing agendas in international disequilibria of power, Hale, Ong and Moallem explore the interplay of struggles over political inclusion and exclusion as they occur within majority Muslim societies. The quest to achieve functional modernity while maintaining a distinctive Islamic identity has a long history in the Muslim world. Hale, Moallem and Ong are all concerned with how the construction of rights as attributes of groups or of individuals mediates secular and religious versions of nationalism, yet they have radically different views on the role of political Islam in changing articulations of citizenship. Ong's essay on the 'reasoning sisters' of Malaysia expresses most clearly the tensions between the oppositional and disciplinary aspects of contemporary Islamist discourses. Ong describes the paradoxical interplay between a religious elite seeking to control the social and sexual behavior of women and the deployment of Islamist discourses by Muslim feminists asserting the moral equality of women. The rationality claim of feminist Islamistsas 'reasoning sisters'is thus more deeply radical than a claim to legal equality because it subverts the foundational cultural belief that the control of women is necessary because of their irrational proclivities. Ong's analysis raises the fascinating question of whether citizenship rights need to be built on moral and substantive equality or on legal equality and certainly the one does not guarantee the other. At the same time, however, it is unclear how she weighs the relative success of oppositional Islam and Islam as a set of disciplinary practices. Feminist Islamism coexists with Islamic values (discipline, thrift) deployed by elites to withstand and overcome the challenges of global economic integration through a construction of cultural citizenship in a capitalist state. It is unclear how Ong reconciles the successful strategies of the Islamist feminists with the notion that cultural citizenship as a deeply conservative force; or how she perceives the opposition between clerics and technocratic elites in a regime where the state was deeply implicated in the legal, economic and political means of clerical ascent through its distribution of state-owned assets and other public resources. Whatever the balance between the conservative and liberatory potentials in Malaysian Islamism, Ong fails to ask, let alone 392

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Fictitious Universalism and Substantive Equality answer, the question of why Islam and not some other ideational framework provides the language of legitimate debate on social issues at this particular juncture of history. If Ong's discussion places women in a public sphere where Islam negotiates cultural citizenship and Islamic capitalism in an increasingly interdependent global economy, Sondra Hale's analysis underscores the importance of Islamic citizenship as a potential source of national unity in a society torn by a seemingly interminable civil war. By distinguishing between the identities of 'Arab' and 'Muslim', the Sudanese regime not only constructs a cultural identity that is at once more inclusive (of various non-Arab tribes) and more exclusive (of the Christians), it also articulates an identity for the female citizen that liberates her from oppressive Arab customs, thus equating Islam with modernity. Free and equal in the new Islamic state, Sudanese women are also available for military mobilization and recruitment into the war against the secessionist south. Ong and Hale suggest that cultural nationalism in Sudan and Malaysia is not just a way of bypassing critical perspectives on capitalism and avoiding the identification of class-based divisions in society, for all successful nationalisms do just that. Rather, they point to the ways in which the quite obviously conservative impulses of Islamist cultural nationalism negotiate basic processes of nation-building and capitalism while simultaneously opening up spheres for radical critique and citizenship for women. While both present a subtle and nuanced appreciation of the tensions inherent in this accommodation, it needs to be stated that the seemingly benigneven liberatoryspheres that apparently open to women in Islamistdominated discourses only do so in the context of a prior abandonment of the goal of equal citizenship and, more importantly, do not necessarily constitute permanent avenues for negotiating citizenship. There is, in short, no guarantee that the besieged Sudanese regime will not revoke its 'progressive' version of female citizenship once conditions change, or that the technocratic elite in Malaysia will cease to need the 'reasoning sisters' in their (quite friendly) tussle with the Islamist clerics. The danger in abandoning struggles for legal equality based on the fiction of the decontextualized individual and the gender-neutral law-giving state is precisely that the bargain of cultural rights in post-colonial societies is notorious for its vulnerability to manipulation and obsolescence. A full recognition that legal equality in citizenship is imperfect and lacks substantive remedies for culturally entrenched differences between men and women does not, in other words, conflict with the desirable (but apparently abandoned) aim of achieving legal equality. What expresses itself as a tension in the essays by Ong and Hale takes the full form of advocacy in Moallem's discussion of gendered citizenship in Iran during the brutal secularist period of the Pahlavis and, again, after the consolidation of the Islamic regime in the early 1980s. Moallem begins with the commonplace observation that the creation of a uniform 'individual' in both these episodes of defining citizenship actually requires a subversion of the robust and variegated terrain of individual identity. In promoting modernism as Westemism the secularizing Shah created a 'hegemonic masculinity' that forced men to abandon religious identities while simultaneously creating a homogeneous category of (de-veiled) modern Iranian women. Secular citizenship in its initial rendition was 393

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Kiren Aziz Chaudhry thus constructed on a cultural emasculation of both men and women. During the Revolution these hegemonic identities were disrupted only to be reintroduced through locational dichotomies constructed during the eight-year war with Iraq, and cemented into new homogenized Muslim citizens. Gender differences and more democracy, apparently, go hand in hand. Moallem's essay raises explicitly the question of whether we can (and should) look to the realm of citizenship to express the depth of our individuality in its evolving complexity and constructive specificity. If citizenship always requires the inherently violent subversion of most things that distinguish us from each other, does that mean that we cannot reasonably, profitably and collectively posit uniformity in the limited sphere of legal citizenship rights, reserving the full force of our uniqueness for a different realm? Moreover, is the homogeneity of the Westernized citizen that the Shah sought to impose on Iranian men and women through de-veiling really comparable to the much more explicitly gendered citizenship of post-Revolutionary Iran where women are literally missing from the public realm? In a world where culture is often upheld as the last bulwark of resistance against the homogenizing impulses of global capitalism and Western imperialism, these studies of the gender and citizenship illuminate the everyday negotiations and occasional victories of women living increasingly on the margins of a political debate in which their claims to equality have been all but jettisoned. We can recognize this condition only if we avoid the impulse to paint all modernity with the same brush of violent dehumanization. Indeed, the capacity to think politically rests precisely on being able to differentiate between different renditions of modernity and appreciate the glaring differences in the way the state constructs female citizenship. If each such construction of citizenship is brutal and oppressive, it does not necessarily suggest political equivalence. Moreover, it is crucial to recognize the deep political ambiguities in contemporary cultural nationalisms for the discursive strategies of anti-imperialism in the international arena might well be (and often are) deployed to subjugate, control and discipline any number of social and political groups domestically. I began my comments with the observation that feminism posed two broad categories of challenges to liberal notions of citizenship. In concluding with Suad Joseph's essay of patrilineality as a substructure of patriarchy in Lebanon, I hope to clearly illustrate of the pitfalls of taking the second mode of substantive critique to its logical conclusion. Joseph's essay is an illuminating review of the ways that patrilineality is both foundational to Lebanese religious subcultures and the ways that the state has used patrilineality to systematize ideas of citizenship. Apparently lamenting this systematization as a process of shrinking options for negotiating in different legal and social realms, Joseph shows how a legal system with numerous subdivisions based on religious distinctiveness generates mechanisms for reinforcing religious categories. Clerics in control of fashioning and enforcing family law encourage religious purity and condemn mixed marriages. Feminine experiences of citizenship, then, vary radically depending on the religious lineage of the woman in question. In substantive terms' the law conforms to the cultural and religious norms in which any particular woman lives, shaping each aspect of her rights and 394

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Fictitious Universalism and Substantive Equality responsibilities as a citizen in ways different from women belonging to other religious groups. Joseph's aim is clearly to connect this plethora of citizenships to what she calls the 'substructure' of patriarchy, but her account raises the question of whether there actually is such a thing as 'citizenship' in Lebanon. The family laws that define various kinds of citizenship for Suni, Shi'a, Maronite and Druze women may well be substantively connected to their real lived experiences as members of a particular religious community, but this very fact means, also, that efforts to change the status of women in any of these legal traditions immediately comes up against the iron bedrock of patrilineality in much the same way that Muslim women trying to reshape their legal code in Grewal's India would face the foundational structures that oppress them. It is banal but perhaps necessary to mention that Lebanon is also a society where precisely the institutions and power structures that underpin and uphold this variegated notion of rights and entitlements that were responsible for a civil war that eclipsed any discussion about citizenship for decades, throwing groups into a conflict that was so protracted and bloody that 'Lebanon' achieved the dubious distinction of becoming a metaphor for civil violence. It is easy to couple the observation that liberal citizenship is based on the dual fiction of the homogenous individual and legal equality with unending examples of the substantive vacuity and even the violence of the real lived experiences of that very form of citizenship. Perhaps critical thinking about gender and citizenship in Islamic and Islamist countries can begin by asking why cultural nationalism and cultural citizenship have emerged as the dominant discursive strategy in so many societies today and by examining the novel barriers cultural citizenship poses for seeking legal equality. Only with that achievement in hand can we, cautiously, work to define and fight for substantive equality as women.

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