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There is considerable debate about the extent to which gender equality and womens’ rights are universal values. This debate has been particularly heated in Afghanistan where the violation of women’s rights by the Taliban regime was one justification used by the US and its allies for their invasion of the country. There is, however, very little research on how ordinary Afghan women view their lives and their place within a highly patriarchal society and how their views might fit into these debates. This paper explores these issues using in-depth qualitative interviews with 12 Hazara women and their husbands in Kabul. …

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 as much as women's subordinate status is a product of the patriarchal structures of constraint that prevail in specific contexts, pathways of women's empowerment are likely to be ‘path dependent’. They will be shaped by women's struggles to act on the constraints that prevail in their societies, as much by what they seek to defend as by what they seek to change. The universal value that many feminists claim for individual autonomy may not therefore have the same purchase in all contexts. This article examines processes of empowerment as they play out in the lives of women associated with social mobilisation organisations in the specific context of rural Bangladesh. …

Kate Raphael of KPFA Radio speaks with with Brazilian feminist Professor Cecilia Sardenberg about Dilma Roussef, Brazil's first woman president (35:45). …

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 looks at the challenges of creating spaces for women to engage in politics in Brazil using a longitudinal study approach spanning the period between 1988 to 2011. It shows that despite the implementation of policies intended to enhance women’s broad political representation such as the introduction of affirmative action and a comprehensive decentralisation policy, political parties, the gatekeepers, are stalling women’s entry into politics. …

This chapter aims to critically understand the ‘positionality’ of Elected Women Representatives (EWRs) in India and more specifically in the state of Rajasthan at multiple levels - political, social, economic and personal with the aim of analysing factors enabling and constraining women’s political pathways through the intersections of gender, caste, class and ethnicity. …

Talk of ‘ensonga za Ssenga’ (Ssenga matters) among the Baganda of Uganda signifies an institution that has endured through centuries as a tradition of sexual initiation. At the helm is the paternal aunt (or surrogate versions thereof) whose role is to tutor young women in a range of sexual matters, including pre-menarche practices, pre-marriage preparation, erotics and reproduction. In contemporary Uganda, commercial Ssenga services abound, with Ssenga columns and call-in radio programmes and Ssenga booklets on sale in Kampala’s streets. The institution is being transformed by “modernization” and urbanization, re-drawing the boundaries of Ssenga to suit the times. …

The economic and political empowerment of women continues to be a central focus for development agencies worldwide; access to medical care, education and employment, as well as women's reproductive rights, remain key factors affecting women's autonomy. …

This introduction draws out some of the dimensions and dilemmas around women's empowerment that are highlighted in the chapters in the book: the choices, the negotiations, the narratives and above all, the context of women's lived experience. In doing so, we show that empowerment is a complex process that requires more than the quick and easy solutions often offered by development agencies. …

This paper illustrates the complementarities between women’s work and their private and intimate choices. The engagements of women in Egyptian labour markets are determined to some extent by their personal life trajectories. The fabled low rates of formal employment for women are a function of the gender roles that women choose to or are compelled to play. Work and marriage choices are linked and have mutual bearings on one another. …

The term ‘women’s empowerment’ is viewed with a certain amount of distrust by feminists in Latin America. There has been some ambiguity surrounding the term in the region and in some cases it has been appropriated to legitimize actions that may not actually empower. This paper reflects on feminist conceptualisations of empowerment and how the process is believed to unfold. It outlines two basic approaches to conceptualising empowerment: ‘liberal’ and ‘liberating’ empowerment. …

This paper, presented Strategic Planning Workshop of the Feminist Network on Gender, Development and Information Society Policies, IT for Change, Bangalore, India, 5-7 October, briefly addresses some of the issues in debates on the rise of the information society and its impact on feminism and women’s movements in a world scale, as well as its importance as a tool for the empowerment of women and significance to contemporary expressions of sexuality and identity. In this paper, Sardenberg focuses more specifically, on those debates relating to expressions of sexuality and identity in the information society, as seen from a critical Latin American feminist perspective. She raises these issues in the hopes that they can be of significant consequence for policy formulation on the uses of the information society with greater gender equity. …

Bangladesh has recently been seeing a rise in religiosity which has been treated as problematic, anti-secular and anti-progressive within the public sphere. Various writers describe this trend as having a disempowering effect on women and negating their self-expression. However, underlying these views is the assumption that the assertion of women's agency is not enough if it does not confront existing structures of relations. This article asks whether it is possible that in seeking changes in certain aspects of one's life, existing gender relations are not necessarily transformed, but indirectly challenged and reconfigured? The conclusion suggests that rather than a polarisation of the secular and religious ways of living most people are in fact in between, negotiating between the two camps, and borrowing ideas and ways from both. …

Women play an important part in several fisheries–related activities in Asia but are less well represented in national or regional fishworker organisations than in community and local level organisations. Women’s participation has been seen to broaden the agenda of fishworker organisations by bringing in issues that concern the quality of life such as access to health, sanitation, education and in particular, bringing in a community perspective to the fisheries debate. The experiences of women’s participation in local and community based organisations; the constraints faced; the different perspective they bring in; and ways in which meaningful participation can be strengthened, are explored in this chapter through the experiences of SNEHA (Social Need Education and Human Awareness), an organization that works with women in marine fishing in Tamil Nadu in India. Christy, the founder of SNEHA, is a member of the fishing community. …