Narayan, Uma (2002). "Minds of Their Own: Choices, Autonomy, Cultural Practices, and Other Women," in: A Mind of One's Own. Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity. Edited by Louise M. Antony and Charlotte E. Witt. New York and London: Routledge
I believe that two different but con nected "specters of the other woman" often haunt these conversations and require philo sophical exorcism. I call the first of these two specters the "prisoner of patriarchy." The "prisoner of patriarchy" has various forms of patriarchal oppression imposed on her entirely against her will and consent-similar to how a prisoner is subject to constraints on liberty. [418]
However, in making this criticism, they often evoke the second specter, one call the dupe of patriarchy. Although patriarchal violence is coercively imposed on the prisoner of patriarchy, it is virtually self-imposed by the dupe of patriarchy because she is imagined to completely subscribe to the patriarchal norms and practices of her culture. Her attitudes are envisioned as completely shaped by the dominant patriarchal values of her cultural context. [418-419]
Each specter displays one problematic pole of a certain "imperialism of the imagination"-the prisoner imagines the Other's responses as perfectly identical to one's own; the dupe projects a totalizing form of "difference" on one's Others. Both specters share the problem of imagining one's Others as monolithic in their responses, failing to recognize that one's Others have a variety of responses to the practices that shape their lives. They fail to register the real multiplicity of Other women, with dif ferent sorts of shoes and feet, and different takes on the fit between them! Attending to the varied responses of real Other women, responses that are often critical of certain aspects of patriarchal cultural practices, even as they endorse or collude with others, enables us to see that most Other women differ from both the prisoner and the dupe of patriarchy, and to recognize that perhaps the most important form of "sameness" these "Other women" share with "Us" is the wide variation in their responses to "patriarchal practices" in their context. [419]
I will proceed to concretely illustrate these claims by examining women's atti tudes to veiling. In the prisoner of patriarchy model, the veil is entirely imposed on the woman-she veils only because she must. In the dupe of patriarchy model, she veils because she completely endorses all aspects of the practice. I discuss actual veiled women's responses to veiling, responses which show that these women differ both from the prisoner and dupe of patriarchy, and from each other. [419]
The range of criticisms about veiling voiced by many of these women would surprise those inclined to view them as com pletely compliant dupes of patriarchy. Many complain strenuously about the sheer physical discomforts that attend veiling in really hot weather and about how it makes them giddy and faint and about being unable to see properly and tripping into drains. Many even have a wry take on the esthetics of the burqua, commenting with exasper ated amusement that it makes them look like water buffaloes! [420]
They recognize how purdah and veiling have lim ited their access to education and their social mobility in terms of shopping or visit ing relatives. They have even kept them ignorant about much that happens in their immediate social world-self-deprecatingly referring to themselves as "frogs in a well." [...] All these responses collectively show that Pirzada women are not dupes of patriarchy who completely and uncritically endorse the values and practices of their culture. [420]
For many, wearing the burqua is an integral part of their social identity and sense of self, and the social discomfort they would feel without it outweighs its physical incon veniences. Others shrewdly note the practical and strategic advantages of wearing the burqua-under its cover they can go out in a hurry without changing the old clothes they were wearing for housework, or they can sneak off to the cinema with a friend af ter telling their husbands they are going to the bazaar, the husbands being none the wiser even if they pass them in the streets. [...] These reasons, individually and collectively, demonstrate that these women differ from the prisoner of patriarchy, who is forced to veil under lit eral coercion. These women recognize they have real practical and emotional stakes in the approval of their family elders and in maintaining their reputation in the community [420]
1. Patriarchal Contexts, Cultural Practices, and Women's Choices
Many women's decisions to comply with cultural practices such as veiling or wearing makeup can, I believe, be seen as forms of "bargaining with patriarchy" rather than living as prisoners or dupes of patriarchy. There is active agency involved in women's compliance with patriarchal structures, even when the stakes involved in noncompli ance and the pressures that enjoin compliance are very high, and the idea of "bargain ing with patriarchy" enables us to keep this consideration in mind. [421-422]
The negotiating powers some women have to bargain with patriarchy might be considerable; in other cases their negotiating powers are far less strong. But even in the latter sorts of cases, women avail themselves of whatever room they have to maneuver, and unlike the pris oner of patriarchy, they know they have some real stakes in the compliances they do undertake. [422]
The decisions many women make with respect to "cultural practices" ought, I think, to be understood as a choice of a "bundle of elements," some of which they want and some of which they do not, and where they lack the power to "undo the bundle" so as to choose only those elements they want. Much of what individuals in general want in life comes in such "mixed bundles" that require resignation to certain tradeoffs as a means to secure goods one values, and it would be both incorrect and dangerous to ignore that choices were in fact being made by women, even where they lacked the power to negotiate some elements of the "bundle." Regarding women's compliances with "cultural practices" it is important for feminists to maintain a dual awareness-seeing both how the practice imposes constraints on choices and how choices are in fact being made within these constraints. [422]
In the engulfing view, women's agency is represented as if it were completely "pulverized by patriarchy"-so maimed that women have no wit, no capacity for critical reflection or resistance, no real stakes in their way of life. They are capable only of zombielike acquiescence to patriarchal norms, beings whose desires and values are patriarchal excrescence not attributable to women as real free agents. [422]
When the "oppressiveness" of patriarchal practices is blatant and obvious, agents might be more critically aware of it and more realistic about the nature of their choices, than when "oppression" is subtle, and can seem not like oppression at all. [424]
Let me illustrate this by means of an example, which I recognize may be contro versial. Many women I knew in India were subject to pretty strong "cultural pres sures" to enter into arranged marriages, pressures to which some eventually yielded. It is my considered judgment that some women who did yield to these pressures had a pretty clear-eyed and realistic sense of what they were letting themselves in for, and why. [424]
2. Autonomy and "Other Women": State Coercion and "Cultural Practices"
However, I believe that improving the range of options women have with respect to these practices is vastly different, both morally and politically, from using coercive state intervention to outlaw or illegalize such practices on the grounds that the cultural constraints render women's decisions to comply with such practices "not really choices in any meaningful sense." I am going to argue that feminists should not support coercive state intervention against such practices, for a number of reasons. [426]
State sponsored "compulsory deveiling policies" expose women to serious state surveillance and terror, no less than state-sponsored policies that compel women to veil. I find it difficult to support the conclusion that one kind of policy is any less "patriarchal" than the other. Imagine the effects of an allegedly "antipatriarchal" policy here that al lowed the police to chase women wearing makeup, to threaten them with arrest, and to manhandle them while they scrubbed their faces of any offending marks of their patriarchal oppression! [426]
What is perhaps my central reason for opposing state-imposed coercion as a means to eradicate these sorts of "patriarchal practices" has to do with my sense that the wide range of desires and attitudes women have with respect to such practices, and wide range of negotiations and choices they may wish to make with respect to various aspects of such practice, should be respected. Here is where I run into an important problem. Much of liberal feminist discourse treats "respect for women's choices" as an important value. However, it often predicates such "respect" on the grounds that those choices can be judged to have been made "autonomously." I have worries about the ways in which some of these positions cash out the notion of "autonomy" in overly demanding ways that might lend support for the view that many of the desires and the decisions made by "Other women" lack autonomy and therefore do not deserve such respect, since no con siderations beside autonomy are advanced to ground respect for choices. [428]
I believe a "thin" notion of auton omy should suffice for respect in terms of state coercion. A person's choice should be considered autonomous as long as the person was a "normal adult" with no serious cognitive or emotional impairments, and was not subject to literal or outright coercion from others. On this account, a person's choice could be autonomous even if made under considerable social or cultural pressure, and even if it were the only morally palatable option open to her. Choices to engage in a "cultural practice," where the woman's values and identity are in part "invested in and served by the practice," even if she does not care for certain aspects of the practice and lacks the power to ne gotiate modifications, would certainly meet my test for procedural autonomy. [429-430]
If a liberal position is concerned only with protecting individual autonomy, and not with protecting liberty more generally, I believe that it would paradoxically have profoundly illiberal effects. State policies that protect women against coerced compliance with cultural practices, as well as state policies that improve women's op portunities to reflect on, modify, or reject certain cultural practices by promoting their access to education and employment and by safeguarding their rights, promote both their liberty and their autonomy. In contrast, coercive state intervention into cultural practices, such as compulsory deveiling policies, often end up substantially reducing their actual liberty in the name of enhancing their potential autonomy. I am arguing that feminists need to be extremely wary about endorsing such tradeoffs. [430-431]
Because the notion of autonomy is both vague and complex, I do not think that autonomy, other than in the extremely "thin" version I previously suggested, should be the central issue in determining whether coercive state interference with individual choices is justifiable. Not only is the degree of autonomy evinced by particular agents often difficult to gauge, it is often difficult to generalize about the degree of autonomy different women enjoy with respect to particular cultural practices. The degree to which different agents who engage in the "cultural practice" regard it as life and self defining, and the degrees of coercion and constraint that agents experience with re spect to the practice, vary widely. [431]