February 7, 2006
Connolly, Clara and Pragna Patel. “Women Who Walk on Water: Working across ‘Race’ in Women Against Fundamentalism.” The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital. Ed. Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1997. 375-95.
Clara Connolly and Pragna Patel’s “Women Who Walk on Water: Working across ‘Race’ in Women Against Fundamentalism” articulates the authors’ dissatisfaction with religious fundamentalism and argues that British multiculturalism—frequently seen as a liberal and progressive project—is ill-equipped to mediate the inequalities facing minority groups both within their cultures and within British society at large. Using the examples of their involvement in the feminist organizations Women Against Fundamentalism (WAF) and Southall Black Sisters (SBS), Connolly and Patel describe their personal participation in the struggle against racism and gender oppression, using these narratives to then analyze and critique multiculturalism. Their focus on gender, racism, fundamentalism, and multiculturalism leads them to frequently note the way these issues yoke together in complex and, at times, seemingly contradictory ways. For instance, Patel becomes involved in SBS in order to join “struggles against forced arranged marriage that many women faced within the family, and the struggles against racism […] where other non-Asian children and teachers reminded us of our marginal positions within British society” (376). While thus beginning the essay with a critique of fundamentalism, Connolly and Patel explain that fundamentalism’s negative effects are exacerbated and even institutionalized in a multiculturalist British society that endorses an ostensible “mutual tolerance of difference” between majority and minority groups, and which is loathe to intercede on the behalf of those oppressed (i.e. women) within those groups (388). In fact, this so-called “celebration of diversity” silences the subjugation of women within fundamentalist-dominated minority groups while simultaneously maintaining an us/them racist mentality: multicultural policies assume the minority group is internally cohesive. The policies are therefore “ultimately based on essentialist constructions of culture/religion that tend to homogenize both minority and majority communities” (392). Both communities are fixed, through multiculturalism, in an unequal relation to one another, so that “far from being tolerant, the modern British state in fact practices a form of secularism that is intolerant of minority communities even where it appears to permit and maintain their cultural autonomy” (392). The state’s offered democracy is as unsatisfactory to women as the fundamentalist communities of which they are subjugated members. (Read the article)