1. Objectifs

Intentions :
This article «interrogates the connection between citizenship, familial violence, and polygamy made by state and media discourses, to expose how the state and media reproduce homo/heteronormative kinship, marital, and familial relationships that are grounded in western European notions of the family and a settler-colonial history that bolster the supposed superiority of the Canadian nation and ‘culture’.» (p. 179) It investigates how the «Shafia family was used to buttress imaginings of hetero/homonormative Canadian families as nonviolent and non-patriarchal, while polygamous families (often connected to Eastern family formations) are linked to gender-based violence.» (p. 167)

2. Méthode

Échantillon/Matériau :
Données documentaires diverses

Type de traitement des données :
Réflexion critique

3. Résumé

According to the author, the «notions of supposedly ‘superior’ family formations reproduce a history of colonialism through which the state defines which families contribute to the purported ‘goodness’ of the nation, and facilitate in disciplining bodies into homo/heteronormativity based in supposed gender equality. Discourses on polygamy tend to overwrite how socio-economic conditions can make women more vulnerable to domestic and gender-based violence. The media coverage of the Shafia family drew on Shafia’s foreignness, Muslimness, and his polygamous relationship as the reasons he committed gender-based and domestic violence. State and media discourses reinscribed orientalist narratives of violent Muslim patriarchs and justified anti-immigration discourses without attention to how polygamy itself can be practiced consensually, or how the Canadian immigration system played a role in making Rona and the Shafia sisters more vulnerable to violence. The political discussions around the Zero Tolerance Act drew on the Shafia case to continue to carve out differences between white Canadians and Westernized/assimilated immigrants, and Afghan/Muslim Canadian communities. Afghan/Muslim Canadian communities are represented as violent and patriarchal, and state discourses used the Shafia case to push the argument that polygamous Afghan/Muslim men in Canada are perpetrators of violence against women, and, therefore, should not be permitted into Canada.» (p. 179-180)