What Went Wrong with Saman’s Story? Cultural Practice, Individual Rights, Gender, and Political Polarization

Res Publica 29 (4):629-646 (2023)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

In this paper the authors deal with the story of Saman Abbas, an 18-year-old girl of Pakistani origin, who disappeared in Italy and was killed by her family after she refused an arranged marriage. The case raised a public debate between right-wing parties, who accused the left-wing parties of being culpably blind to the danger of Islam and too tolerant towards illiberal cultures, and left-wing politicians who responded equating Saman’s murder with the domestic killing of Italian women. We argue that neither position does justice to Saman’s story. We hold that Saman’s case is an example of intersectional oppression where gender oppression is intertwined with the immigrant’s oppression in a Western democracy. Thus, we counter the dilemma posed by Susan Okin, namely that there is an inherent conflict between the rights of minority cultures and the rights of women. In order to rebut Okin’s position, we rehearse multicultural positions concerning the protection of minority cultures, on the one side, and feminist positions regarding the promotion of autonomous choice, on the other. Our conclusion is that (a) multiculturalism cannot be identified with cultural rights, and (b) that what are autonomous choices and what are, instead, adaptive is difficult to ascertain and, especially, difficult to apply in politics. Structural oppression is instead the key normative notion for addressing equality among genders and among citizens at large. The intersectional oppression suffered by women like Saman cannot be addressed by a restriction of toleration for immigrant cultures or simply by security measures. To prevent more cases like Saman’s in the future, the immigrant oppression should be taken seriously as well. In the context of fairer terms of inclusion, conditions of reciprocal trust between minority and majority may develop and the deconstruction of the patriarchal view of family can start.

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,221

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

An Introduction to Rights.William A. Edmundson - 2006 - Cambridge University Press.
Was it Polarization or Propaganda?C. Thi Nguyen - 2021 - Journal of Philosophical Research 46:173-191.
The Incoherence of Walzer’s Just War Theory.Graham Parsons - 2012 - Social Theory and Practice 38 (4):663-688.
Is There a Right to Have Rights? The Case of the Right of Asylum.Stefan Heuser - 2008 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 11 (1):3-13.
Political management: the scientifi concept and political practice.V. Shcherbak - 2015 - Epistemological studies in Philosophy, Social and Political Sciences 2:18-24.
Whose rights? A critique of individual agency as the basis of rights.E. Glen Weyl - 2009 - Politics, Philosophy and Economics 8 (2):139-171.

Analytics

Added to PP
2023-01-05

Downloads
6 (#1,264,689)

6 months
2 (#658,980)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author Profiles

Anna Galeotti
Universita' degli Studi di Pavia
Roberta Sala
University Vita-Salute San Raffaele

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

No references found.

Add more references