Descripción
Sumario:The purpose of this paper is to answer the famous question made by Susan Moller Okin in one of her last works at Princeton University: Is multiculturalism bad for women? The theoretical context I will use to rethink about this question and the challenges multiculturalism poses to the law in Latin America is Catherine Mackinnon's extreme feminism, since, as I explain in this paper, I believe this debate (multiculturalism, feminism and criminal law) can only take place from a gender essentialist feminism, like radical feminism, and not from a non-essentialist feminism. I will take a specific case (the Ruiz case, in Salta, Argentina) to reveal the defects of the -perhaps wrongly- so-called "cultural defence". Finally, I will hold that the only way to critically rethink about multiculturalism is by rethinking the right on which the whole theoretical building of multiculturalism is based: the right of exit. Said right shall be critically redefined as a form of the right to speak. I will hold that a multiculturalism that does not defend (but endangers) women's human rights has actually ceased to be what it promises. Women's human rights cannot be thought about or seen as a "limit" to multiculturalism, since without said basic rights there is no (and therefore we must not talk about) multiculturalism.