Resources

When the Sierra Leone civil war was declared over in January 2002, the concept of women’s empowerment was firmly entrenched in development discourse and practice. The aftermath of the brutalities of rape, gang rape, sexual slavery, forced pregnancy, abduction, among other atrocities that women and children, especially girls, were subjected to during Sierra Leone’s eleven years’ civil war was firmly on the post-war agenda. There was a groundswell of protest from women’s NGOs and activists demanding the protection and promotion of women’s rights as part of peace negotiations, post-conflict reconstruction and peace consolidation processes.  …

Following the round of UN Conferences on Women from the 1970s to the 1990s, many states in the developing world established national machineries to first 'integrate women into development', and later to spearhead the task of gender mainstreaming adopted in the Beijing Platform for Action.  …

Cecilia Sardenberg’s chapter is an essay on the control over the body that a culture of eternal youth imposes on aging white, middle class women in Brazil. Sardenberg draws attention to the ideals of femininity inherent in media representations, the products, services and body technologies geared towards women’s beautification and the fight against aging. …

In Nigeria, within marriage, women are expected to pleasure their husbands, and preparation for marriage focuses on teaching the girl how to do so. In contrast, non-married women were expected to enjoy sex with their boyfriends. Yet, what emerged from research by Aken’Ova’s organisation INCRESE (The International Centre for Reproductive Health and Rights) was women’s deep lack of sexual pleasure in their relationships, married or not. Some men mistakenly believed they were giving great pleasure to their lovers, and had not discovered the truth due to lack of communication. …

This chapter attempts to give an overview of the trends in research, thinking and programmes in Pakistan from 1975 onwards in the area of women’s empowerment and bodily integrity in order to understand what makes change happen. It also identifies drivers of change and enabling factors, and discusses what women in Pakistan have done to establish their rights and the implications of this. Secondly, it seeks to identify areas that need to be explored through further research. The author considers the concept of empowerment, the definition of bodily integrity, and examines the social constructions of the woman’s body in Pakistan. …

This paper deals with two related themes: bodily integrity and women’s empowerment in the Indian context. Delving into both the politics of gendered culture and sexual politics (the politics of the body) it argues that the dichotomy between the woman’s body and the mind is a synthetic one and socially constructed. The identification of women with their physical bodies is the root cause of their oppression in a patriarchal culture and society like India. Most often women are denied the rights to emotional, mental, psychological and physical spaces. …

The Chinese NGO Pink Space organises exchanges to build solidarity between people marginalised because of their sexuality and challenge the sources of their oppression, as He explains. Pink Space brings together HIV positive women, lesbians, bisexual women, female sex workers, transgender men, and women married to gay men. Fun, laughter and discussions of sexual pleasure are always part of the agenda. He describes how a focus on sexual pleasure promoted solidarity between women. …

This chapter uses rhetorical analysis to analyse the Clitoraid campaign, an American initiative started by the believers of the Raelian religion that set out to raise funds to build a ‘pleasure hospital’ in Burkina Faso that would perform operations to ‘restore’ the capacity of excised women for clitoral orgasm. …

In this chapter, Sharma writes about a workshop programme by her organisation, Nirantar, aimed at building perspectives on sexuality in a manner that was both positive and political. The programme constitutes one of the first efforts in the Indian context to do this, with women from rural, poor communities as well as the organisations that work with them, in an intensive manner. …

In this chapter, the authors draw on a project that explored the gendered stereotypes of women in Ghanaian popular music, and sought to contribute to reflection on, and creation of, alternative (empowering) narratives about women through song. The project involved an extensive analysis of the lyrics of music produced by Ghanaian popular artistes since the 1930s, using emerging themes as an entry point for workshops with popular artistes. …

This chapter makes an attempt to probe into the politics of women’s voice in Bangladesh. The chapter argues that there are structural factors within the state and society that act as barriers for women in Bangladesh to vocalise their opinions in the public sphere. Yet parallel forces are at work at national and international levels that enable women to create their spaces and voices despite these structural limitations. …

In this conclusion, we discuss both the advantages and disadvantages of the marginal position that feminists working in international development bureaucracies find themselves in. Using their creativity and agency as 'tempered radicals' they seek to turn the disadvantages of marginality - such as a sense of powerlessness and reduced visibility - into advantages, as they try to take forward the women's rights agenda. …

Contemporary feminist activism in Brazil emerged in a moment of political upheaval, playing an important role in the process of re-democratization of the country and stretching the very concept of democracy in this process. Over the last three decades, feminisms in Brazil have brought important contributions, not only in terms of a change of values regarding women’s place in society, but also towards building a more gender equitable society in formal terms. However, formal power structures, such as those of the legislative, judiciary and executive branches have remained notoriously resistant to the inclusion of women, which has resulted in a major paradox for Brazilian feminists: on the one hand, the presence of a wide and well articulated women’s movement, and on the other, a notorious absence of women in decision making positions. One of the consequences of this state of affairs is that the feminist movement in Brazil still lacks a “critical mass” of women to push forth the implementation of new state institutions and policies, and there is also little support in the legislative and judiciary to guarantee greater advancements insofar as women’s sexual and reproductive rights are concerned. …

This chapter explores how pornography can eroticize safer and less gender normative sex. The authors point out that pornography is a huge industry, and one of the most important sources of information on sexuality for young people in many countries. They discuss the prevalence and importance of porn as a conduit for sex education before describing ways in which the pleasure industry is challenging norms to create pornography that is positive. They advocate a harm-reduction approach where the harm is not ended, but its negative effects are mitigated, and cite examples of porn that erotizes safer sex with actors using female and male condoms. …

The organisation of women domestic workers in Brazil reveals a process of collective empowerment at work in a society where gender, race, and class inequalities intersection, giving rise to complex mosaics. Analysing processes of empowerment in these circumstances calls for abandoning universalising visions of women and recognising differences and inequalities beyond gender in multiracial and multicultural societies. …