Feminism and the politics of identity

The recent Eurozine carries an interesting article by Rita Chin titled "Turkish women, west German feminists, and the gendered discourse on Muslim cultural difference". Well, the central thesis is not really all that new. The author shows systematically - albeit rather simply - how the recent proliferation of discourses regarding the alleged Muslim threat to the modern, supposedly Judeo-Christian, European identity embroils the earlier feminist and progressive anxieties about the fate of the immigrant woman. In other words, how European identity politics implicates feminism and its assumptions. This bears resonance with one of the central debates within Indian feminism.

The repeal of the Personal Laws, or communal civil codes for different religious communities that were initially framed in the colonial times and the establishment of a modern Uniform Civil Code (UCC) had been a central demand of the Indian feminists right from the seventies. This tenet is also enshrined as a guiding principle in the Indian Constitution, and thus seemed to be above the political fray. The feminist demand therefore had a liberal but somewhat harmless character that matched its primarily urban and upper caste milieu. But all that changed in the 1980s as the demand for the UCC became one of the favorite slogans of the Hindu nationalists. They raised it strategically to help construct an Islamophobic narrative, where the Sharia-based Muslim Personal Law was depicted as one more evidence of the systematic appeasement of the Muslims by the ruling elite (read the Congress party) in postcolonial India. This cooptation from the Hindu Right of their cherished ideal, which had earlier appeared uncontestable due to its modernist credentials and unrealizable due to the straggling premodernity of the Indian politics, unhinged the feminist movement in India and split it into pro-UCC and anti-UCC factions. Here is an article by Flavia Agnes from the early nineties which presents a critique from the latter position of the left-liberal assumptions of the Indian feminism.