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.
The solution to this dilemma rests, for Connolly and Patel, in a reworking of the multiculturalist state. The essay is organized into two parts: separately authored analyses through personal narrative, and a collectively authored argument against multiculturalism and fundamentalism as it is sanctioned by the state. Throughout both parts, however, the authors weave in court battles and legal disputes as representative examples of the issues at hand. The essay’s criticism of the state is thus undertaken with the understanding that reform of the state is possible: how, the authors ask, can we transform the British Christian secular state, how can we “reappropriate the term secularism and prevent this fundamental principle of democracy from being transformed into a mere front or guise” through which the dominant group exerts power (392-93)? WAF—and the authors—seek an answer through activism on the political field. Thus they challenge democracy as it is practiced through multiculturalism, and thus they work against inequalities in both minority communities and the state, fighting fundamentalism and racism simultaneously if not unilaterally. Throughout the essay, Connolly and Patel emphasize the diversity of experiences constituting the individuals and interests represented by groups such as WAF and SBS. They eschew the “mournful pleasures of identity politics, which stressed and celebrated difference at the expense of alliance,” but they also note the uneasy politics present in alliance (384). As Patel writes in reference to a case about an Asian woman accused of killing her husband, “We brought attention to the specificity of her experiences as an Asian woman, yet avoided stereotyping the issue as an ‘Asian’ concern only; ultimately our demands were ones that benefit all women” (382). Without claiming that “all women are this woman,” Patel explains instead the way in which SBS works to articulate the case in terms of race that nevertheless has broader implications for women, regardless of their particular community. The essay works, in this way, on the border of minority communities, simultaneously validating and critiquing such categorizations. The formal choice to draw personal narrative and more objective analysis together mirrors this two-pronged approach to the issue. Metaphorically, then, the breakdown between personal narrative and objective analysis—for the two bleed together in each of the two parts—helps to rhetorically prepare the reader for the way the authors will ultimately re-define “community” through “An oppositional version of pluralism” that “would accept the absence of social cohesion as its foundation” (388).
This piece concludes with a rethinking of the multicultural state and a documentation of its failure to address its own internal racism as well as the oppression of those within minority communities; it begins with an address to the dangers of fundamentalism, at the heart of which “is the control of women’s minds and bodies” (375). Because of its status within the fundamentalist context, gender inequality is central to the issues raised by Connolly and Patel—as well as to the WAF and SBS groups they discuss. Rather than reducing all issues to simple female inequality, however, the authors are particularly attuned to the ways gender relates to race and class. Yet, as Patel notes in charting the development of SBS, the group has “moved away from a mechanistic understanding of how race, class, and gender intersect in black women’s lives to one that allows us to unravel the complexities of our positions, one that permits us to act out in terms of those complexities in order to achieve empowerment and autonomy” (380, emphasis mine). Notably, WAF was formed in 1989 in response to the fatwa placed against Salman Rushdie: gender oppression was, from the founding moment of the organization, understood in expansive terms linking it to all forms of dissidence to patriarchy. As Patel explains, “If Rushdie could be silenced by religious fundamentalists, then so too could women” (377). Rushdie, Connolly explains by way of Homi Bhabha, is dangerous in that he questions national identity and suggests “forging alternative social identities and practices” (385). The link between Rushdie and feminism is, then, one that allows the authors to explain their attempts to create “solidarity with dissident movements all over the postcolonial world” (384). Rushdie’s plight resonates with Connolly’s more personal knowledge of outlawed novelists in the Irish Catholic context. Focusing on Rushdie-as-writer, Connolly implicitly connects authors and women through their similar oppression. The essay, then, models as well as describes an alternative community forged through oppositional pluralism.
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