[dreadgeek]

I think that the core issue is whether or not a woman has a *choice* in the matter. If any given woman wants to wear a burqa and it is her choice--and it is freely made, not coerced in any way--then I see no problem. It's what she wants to do. If, however, she is being coerced then I see that as highly problematic. I think that it is problematic even if her culture says 'all women must do this'.

I have to say, I'm far *less* sanguine about the idea that cultures trump individuals because if I had been born 10 or 20 years earlier, I would have been born into a culture that said that I, as a black child, could not go to school with white children. That was the culture of the South--that was the argument that white segregationists made was that 'Northerners are comin' down here and trying to change our culture'. The fact that black people were the targets of that culture disappeared. In the same way, I think that we Western feminists betray the core principles of feminism--that women are human beings--when we say "well, I would not want to live in that culture but if that woman's culture says it's okay then who am I to say..."

Either human beings are entitled to be treated with dignity because of some inherent humanness or we aren't. If we aren't, if our right to self-determination is based upon the culture we are born into then NO group has a leg to stand on when arguing that they are oppressed. After all, isn't it their *culture* that says that they should be oppressed?

So whether a woman wears a veil has to, for me, be about whether she has any choice to NOT wear the veil. If she can and do so without harm then that's no problem. If, however, not wearing the veil would resort in her being subject to social sanction then I have to stand with her as an *individual* and not a representative type of a certain culture.

Put another way, how far are people willing to take the 'you can't criticize another culture' meme? To think about this in a visceral sense I ask you to think of two scenarios:

Scenario 1: It is 1963. You are from England. You observe the treatment of blacks in the American South. Should you criticize it? It's not *your* culture. If you should, on what basis do you do so? If you should not, why not?

Scenario 2: A non-Western culture says that boys should be educated but to educate girls is a waste of time at best and an abomination at worst. Is it wrong to criticize that culture? If not, why not? If it is wrong to criticize that culture, why is it wrong?

One last question: what if we were to take a giant step backward in this country and homosexuality were made illegal. Would you want human rights groups in, say, Europe to speak out on our behalf or would you want them to mind their own business since American culture and European culture aren't precisely the same thing?