Culture and Dignity by Nader Laura;

Author:Nader, Laura;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated
Published: 2012-08-30T00:00:00+00:00

Conclusion: The Need to Separate Identities

To understand dogmas of female subordination in dynamic patriarchies, we must examine gender ideologies in the larger framework of attempts by nations and societies, as in the US Afghanistan war, to maintain separate identities within the context of increasing interaction. In short, female subordination can be viewed as attempts to maintain moral authority in nations that are increasingly threatened by the dynamics of international power relationships. In this ­context, gender ideologies emerge not only as a product of internal debate over inequalities between males and females in a particular society, but also out of debates between the prevailing ideologies of different societies. Gender arrangements are complex wholes that can be related to macro-level distinctions between “us and them.” Ruth Benedict (1934) was one of the first anthropologists to suggest that distinctions between “our group” and “outsiders” reinforced in-group moral authority. Benedict’s idea gains new significance today in Said’s work, in which he suggests that the Muslim world is constructed by Westerners for their own purposes. Missing from Said’s work is a consideration of the way images of gender relationships fit into Western views of the Muslim world or the ways in which the Arab Muslim world constructs visions of the West. These issues become crucial when we approach constructions of “the other” with a desire to understand changing structures of economic and political dependence and interdependence.

A major challenge to studies of the cultural construction of gender identity is the failure to take into account changes in gender ideologies. Cultural analysis of gender at times produces static images which are no less deterministic than biological explanations of male/female roles in society. Sanday suggests that “the logic of sex role plans is transmitted from one generation to the next almost intact” (1981: 15), unless there is a serious disturbance in the social and economic environment. With the expansion of US and Western European influence on the rest of the world, however, there are few places in which gender roles have not been altered dramatically by economic and political change, and certainly the Middle East has been a partner in change as a result of contact.

In this chapter I suggest that historical and comparative methods are useful in illuminating processes that may otherwise remain invisible, processes that inhibit knowledge as well as action. Strategies of resistance are often not feminist in origin, but are directly related to the shape of the male power structure. When women’s conditions in both the Western and Arab patriarchiess are analyzed as part of a common discussion and when they are examined in juxtaposition to each other and to global economic movements, it becomes clearer the extent to which male forms of domination are associated with patterns of male competition (as between East and West) and the view that by virtue of their custodial positions, women are key to larger indigenous control systems.

In the West both governments and business corporations have created and consolidated a cultural hegemony and disseminated it to their own populations and to the Arab world by means of media, educational, and developmental organizations.

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