“Decolonizing the understanding of "acceptable culture"

There is a certain 'moral authority’ through which the cultural rights and identities of women are dictated in a society. While such an authority is used across the globe it has become increasing visible modern liberal societies in terms of its relation with migrant women. This authority is used in justification of attempts of liberalizing migrant women from their own cultural practices an act of emancipation of women and gender equality. This discourse works on the assumption that migrant women need to be freed from their own culture into the “progressive” social customs of the West. This narrative is directly related to the West's negative perception of other cultures that do not have the same definition of women liberation, equality, and emancipation. A perception that is a direst corollary the nexus between colonialism and the new World order in terms on International Law and organisation s has evolved in the past.

These descriptions of migrant women work on the assumption that migrant cultures treat their women as subordinates as compared to western culture. This understanding has reached a point where migrant women are seen as victims of their own culture, subjected to a ‘death by culture’. This research argues that this negative notion of culture is directly related to the colonial consciousness which sees the practice of minority cultural rights as merely a symbol of domesticity and subjugation. This assumption of oppression of women in migrant cultures is one of the most important legacies of the colonial movement in terms of perceptions of women, which works on the idea that migrant communities are more patriarchal than the liberal west. In his conception of Orientalism, Edward Said explained how western modernity was considered to be the only cure for such traditional consciousness. It is not difficult to find how the civilisation process perceived a need for improvement in the position of women in society. This thought process resonates with a highly western-centric idea of gender equality that denies, any other experiences of culture and identity, a right of survival on its terms supported in the discourse of International Law. This consciousness is consistently reintroduced and regenerated to form a specific perception of non-western cultures. This paper aims to establish that any attempts of “mainstreaming” cultural practices for acceptance of the cultural rights of migrant women have to first undergo a process of decolonising the knowledge of the acceptable culture in Western societies.