"I query what I see as one of the biggest problems with culture: the tendency to represent individuals from minority of non-Western groups as driven by their culture and compelled by cultural dictates to behave in particular ways. Culture is now widely employed in a discourse that denies hman agency, definining individuals through their culture, and treating culture as the explanation for everything they say or do... culture is employed to explain behavior in non-Western societies or among individuals from racialised minority groups, and the implied contrast with rational, autonomous (Western) individuals, whose actions are presumed to reflect moral judgments, and who can be held individually responsible for those actions and beliefs...

The least sympahtetic to [Susan Moller] Okin's work associate her with a hegemonic Western discourse that views non-Western cultures as almost by definition patriarchal and the women in these cultures as victims in need of protection. Okin has been accused of imagining women in traditional societies as duped into a kind of false consciousness that leaves them incapable of noticing just how oppressive the traditions of their society are (as in her comments about older women being 'co-opted into reinforcing gender inequality'); failing to recognise the many ways in which women already contest power hierarchies within their cultural groups; ignoring the value women in a minority of nondominant group actively attach to their culture membership; and generally treating minority women, in Shachar's phrase, as 'victims without agency.'...

Joan Scott has described it as the constitutive paradox of feminism that women organised themselves to eliminate 'sexual difference' in unemployment, education, and politics, but had to make their claims on behalf of women, who were discursively produced through the very sexual differences feminists were trying to eliminate... insofar as [campaigning against discrimination against a group] involves organising as members of that group, you implicitly call the group back into existence...

That people sould be treated as equals has become the default position in discourses around the globe... this is now commonly said as regards the general principle of equality. In my view, the same also applies to the principle of gender equality. Before the irritated reader throws this book across the room...

There is no great value disagreement in contemporary Europe over the acceptability of forced marriage... at what point do the familial and social pressures that make arrange marriage a norm turn into coercion, and how, short of banning all arranged marriages, can public agencies act to protect young people from ones that are forced? Differentiating between choice and coercion is central to solving this problem. This means understanding cultural pressures, but not assuming that culture dictates."

- Ch 1., Multiculturalism without Culture, Anne Phillips