Thursday, March 31, 2011

2) Narayan, Uma. 2006. “Cross-Cultural connections, Border-Crossings and ‘Death by Culture’” Theorizing Feminisms: A Reader, New York: Oxford University Press, Elizabeth hackett and Sally Haslanger, eds. 62-78.

Uma Narayan argues in Cross Cultural Connection, Border-Crossing and “Death by Culture” that cultural explanations are hurting rather than helping Indian women overcome the oppression they are facing. She notes there are two problems, one how issues such as dowry murder are viewed differently within the context of border crossing. Also how culture is used as a tool to excuse violence against third world women as more horrific than the domestic violence being experienced by women in the United States. She argues there is a parallel between domestic violence in the United States and dowry murder in India, but there is a lack of attention paid to what is happening in our own culture, unlike the attention paid to dowry murder that is plastered in the media. Westerners have a fascination with using culture as an excuse to explain how other cultures operate, for instance how clitorodectomy and infibulaton are similar to Muslim women’s politics of the veil since those issues are viewed as icons of African women’s problems. She argues that Indian culture is responsible for producing the effect death by culture, since women are supposedly being burned to death every day.
Lila Abu-Lughod and Uma Narayan are both arguing the same notion that westerners have a fixation with using culture and religious practices as ways to explain women’s oppression which continues to reinforce the binary between the west and the rest. They both assume that Muslim and Indian women are agents that are capable of responding to and challenging power dynamics. Also by the authors explaining how the veiling of women and the dowry murder of women are situated as a primary source of identity for these women.

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