I would have to agree with Fatemeh. I am sick and tired of parents saying that “love” is what motivated them. I respect you for being a parent, and going through those struggles–I just think that sometimes Muslim parents don’t realize how much they put their kids through by raising them in a non-Muslim country. Life is confusing, and if our parents love us, they’d take a step back and let us make our own decisions.

I have absolutely no sympathy for her father. Anything that would motivate someone to take care of things in a physical manner needs to be taken up with a mental institute, not excused.

I think about culture mostly in terms of subject formation, as I too am a sucker for Foucault but also like to think about particular institutions and ‘coagulations of power’ like the State. So in that sense I think everyone ‘has’ culture, including Westerns, but that those cultural formations are heavily influenced by interests and can sometimes contain elements of intentionality and directional power, which is somewhat different from Foucault.

But I’m trying to get better at being less theoretical about shit and think about the ‘everyday’ consequences. And in terms of policy, I think its crucial that we talk about what makes honor killings different than other forms of DV.

For instance, let’s say you’re law enforcement trying to protect a woman from domestic violence. It really depends on the context of the threat what course of action you take. A lot of times social services will suggest that a woman at risk go stay with her family members — a brother, a father, a sister. But if you’re dealing with a case of potential honor killing, then obviously that’s not the right course of action to take because oftentimes there’s a conspiracy component to it.

That’s why I think collapsing honor-based violence into all other forms of DV is unhelpful. And in fact a lot of immigrant women’s groups — Southall Black Sisters in London comes to mind — argue along similar lines. The groups that work with honor violence victims know its not helpful to collapse all vocabulary into DV just to prove a theoretical point that ‘we all have culture.’

That’s not to say that the media uses the term correctly though, and certainly they do not.

I therefore raise the question: what, really, do we mean by ‘culture’? It has become far too much of a catch-all term for its meaning to be clear at all — and here I fully agree with Sara that we need to problematize how we define it. When some people attribute such crimes to, say, brown culture, they seem to be using culture more in the sense of cultural difference, i.e. the things that make Americans different from Indians. On the other hand, if we say, as you do, that “what constitutes the personal is very often constructed via cultural or religious norms,” we’re basically referring to the discursive constitution of the subject, such that every person is in/formed by a ‘culture’. These two notions of ‘culture’ are related insofar as they both refer to something beyond the individual. But for me the problem of ambiguity remains: what exactly do we mean? Of course, this problem is not surprising since I suspect that ontologically, culture is simply non-existent: it just remains for us to identify epistemologically helpful concepts.

The specific legal questions you raise are certainly intriguing. Unfortunately, my analysis is limited to the theoretical. Suffice it to say though that I’m not entirely comfortable with ‘cultural defense’ arguments. BTW, I think I share your critique of the structuralist notion of power, but that maybe just coz I’m a sucker for Foucault…

Jammu & Kashmir ia one state in India and it’s current CM’s sister married a Hindu. This led to huge protests in Kashmir and even current CM’s father had to publicly say that he has no relation with his daughter.

Same CM(man) married a Hindu woman few years back(before his sister’s marriage) there were no protests, nothing.

Here I do not want someone to emphasise on “Hindu” partner, let that be “X” religion. Here we need to look at the reaction when a woman does something. both brother and sister married out of their religion, brother’s marriage led to indifference while as sister’s marriage led to protests.

Though Honour was attached with both siblings, sister damaged honour more, that is what looked from the protests.

This incident makes me feel that “Women uphold honour” whatever that honour means to family.

In this episode there was no physical violence but a lot of emotional and psychological violence against CM’s sister. Is that justified? What would we call that? It was societies reaction, (I do not know how family reacted), if whole society thinks so what should we name it. Honour or violence?

There are many countless examples in India where “Marriage/selecting partner” is seen as requiring honour. It cuts across religions, regions. and I am very sure same mentality is there in gulf, south asia.

Does West not attach “Honour” to marriages? I guess I need to read more about it, personally I feel the rise of “individualism” above the “community” is responsible for the indifference in west to “honour with partner” thing. But is that because parents feel helpless in front of “individualism” or it is their own choice is something we need to research.

Again, if we want to put such kind of violence under blanket”Domestic Violence” I guess as a society it would be hard to fight stereotypes.

Stereotypes like:

Wear Hijab rather than asking daughters to wear it and leaving decision on them.
Choose partner within same religion, region, race etc. yes parents may guide us where to marry and make transition smoothest but do not force.

If we need to fight stereotype we need to understand that there are many people in world who feel dishonoured if their daughter wears “mini skirt” and they can thrash her.

We can never separate power, religion, culture… Religion is a form of culture, power operates through religion and power, religion and culture are used to legitimate power differences, etc.

But questioning how “culture” is used in discourse, in media, is actually really different than using a “culture defense” in a legal context. How they work together, however, is this: if a “culture defense” is permitted, it inappropriately assumes that the individual from a particular culture is somehow incapable of participating in the civic society in which s/he resides. It also actually distracts our attention from the material inequalities at hand – problems around immigration in Western societies, for example, can be deflected to culture in order to obscure economic inequalities and lack of access to jobs and education.

On the other hand, since domestic violence occurs across economic groups, we need to address this particular kind of power dynamic … differently. This is so difficult, I think – how do we talk about domestic violence in a way that fights against it, works against culturalist discourses, moves outside of victim discourses as well…

2) I never said that culture is NOT a part of the problem, I think we actually need to problematize how we define culture–maybe I didn’t make that clear enough. There is this misconception that “white people don’t have culture”, and sometimes it is just used as an overarching excuse. What I meant in this article is that we need to look further than simply saying that someone is doing something because of culture…and that it being a “part of someone’s culture” doesn’t mean that it isn’t applicable to all of us. I mean the way that we discuss this has a lot of power, and I understand what you have to say, but I still think that power is a big part of what “cultural notions” are in place—as someone with domineering Muslim parents, I know that my parents use the excuse of “this is our culture” to enforce a rule or something of that nature. It is, for them, a way to maintain control over me, but this is specifically in my own situation, something I can’t say about anyone else.

But in general, I agree as a former victim of (Protestant?) domestic violence that homogenizing Muslims in this way is incorrect. Moreover, it completely ignores the very real experiences of non-Muslim women with violence as well as the experiences of Muslim women with violence from non-Muslim perpetrators.