multiculturalism and patriarchy

[eva_rajzman]

Thobani argues that Canadian multiculturalist policy reinforces gendered hierarchies by framing immigrant women as victims of their culture, in need of being rescued by assimilation into the Canadian culture. While claiming a tolerant and egalitarian policy, multiculturalism creates a hierarchy with non-Western culture being backward and patriarchal. Immigrant women are portrayed as oppressed by patriarchal cultural practices, such as arranged marriages or pieces of clothing. On the one hand, it encourages women to distance themselves from their culture and community without acknowledging their agency. Once they are well assimilated, immigrant women are instrumentalized as symbols of cultural difference, demonstrating the nation’s value of tolerance and multiculturalism. Thus, multiculturalism is a tool to manage immigrants’ assimilation into Canadian values while showcasing an image of a cosmopolitan, inclusive nation to the international community.
On the other hand, this gendered “othering” reduces gender struggles to cultural “deficiencies,” undermining the intersectionality of race, class, and gender and the existence of systemic patriarchy and gender-based violence in the West, too.
Thobani explains how multiculturalism works within a framework of white superiority and patriarchal structures, managing immigrant gender dynamics in a way that preserves the existing power relations rather than challenging them, as they argue to do so.