Resources

Walking down the streets of Dhaka – or anywhere in Bangladesh for that matter – popular expressions of matters of faith, specifically Islam, strike the eye. Painted on public transport vehicles such as trucks, three-wheeled auto taxis or bicycle rickshaws, painted on walls and minarets of mosques, paintings and calligraphy dot the landscape. While Islamic expressions are normally associated with high art forms that reflect deep spirituality and faith, or more recently with the growing politicization which is often seen as extremism or fanaticism, these popular images reflect an every day and comfortable co-existence with the faith. Eschewing the high art forms of the Mughal and Sultanate traditions of the 15th to the 18th centuries, these images reflect a more folk tradition, and an easy accommodation with religion and culture. …

This article is based on the experiences and reflections of a group of researchers in Bangladesh (of which we were members) studying women's empowerment. We investigate the kinds of epistemological and ethical dilemmas that arose from how they selectively presented their identities to gain access and tried to create ‘positional spaces’ in conducting fieldwork. We also explore how these researchers engaged in co-production of knowledge with research participants and tried to balance our multiple accountabilities in this process. By exploring these issues, we analyse assumptions about ‘feminist’ research practices and our struggles to live up to these. …

The empowerment of women has become an interesting if troubling issue for debate and action in the Arab world. Since September 11 it has been difficult for Arabs to escape the simplistic and stereotypical misconstructions of their worlds, and there has been a growing resistance to ideas such as women’s empowerment. Such a resistance makes for a highly frustrating and antagonistic climate to feminism and women’s empowerment initiatives. Hania Sholkamy offers a personal analysis of why women in the Arab world attract attention as victims of an unfair social order and yet repel the advances of those who would work to over turn this social order to ‘save’ them. …

Wendy Harcourt, records the conversation between Peggy Antrobus and Gita Sen, founders of Development Alternatives for Women in a New Era (DAWN), on how they understand gender and empowerment. …

The pursuit of pleasure is one of the primary reasons people have sex; and sex is the most common way people contract HIV worldwide. Yet information about how to have (or deliver) pleasurable sex and stay healthy are largely missing from health resources and HIV prevention campaigns. Wendy Knerr and Anne Philpott explore how ‘erotophobia’ in the health and development sectors is hindering effective safer sex promotion, and highlight best practices from The Global Mapping of Pleasure, 2nd Edition, a collection of case studies on pleasure and safer sex communication from countries and contexts around the world. …

Hesperian is developing an action resource (book- and web-based tool) that will complement its widely used Where Women Have No Doctor and help community activists work more effectively on all the topics in that book, published originally in 1997. One issue the international team developing the new resource has prioritized is how to help community activists foster sexual empowerment for women. Lucille C. Atkin et al. …

Control of women’s sexuality is the root cause of many women’s human rights violations, such as ‘honour’ crimes, early and forced marriages and female genital mutilation. The Turkish organisation Women for Women’s Human Rights (WWHR) – New Ways, contests this control of women’s sexuality, taking an affirmative approach to sexuality to open up space for women to claim their rights. In 2004, WWHR led a campaign for reform of the Turkish penal code which resulted in over 30 amendments on sexual and bodily rights of women and girls in Turkey, including criminalisation of marital rape and removal of a provision granting sentence reductions for ‘honour’ killings. They have also run human rights trainings for over 4,500 women throughout Turkey which include a module on sexual rights promoting the idea that women have a right to sexual pleasure. …

Of all the buzzwords that have entered the development lexicon in the past thirty years, "empowerment" is probably the most widely used and abused. Like many other important terms that were coined to represent a clearly political concept, it has been "mainstreamed" in a manner that has virtually robbed it of its original meaning and strategic value. In this article Srilatha explains that the word 'empowerment' must be reclaimed. …

Pleasure – and even sex itself – have been noticeably absent from much of dialogue surrounding sexually transmitted infections and the spread of HIV/AIDS. Safer sex and good sex are not mutually exclusive, yet most established educational programmes give the impression that they are, by using only fear of risk and disease to motivate their audience to practise safer sex. Yet evidence suggests that positive incentives provide the most effective way to get people to want to have safer sex. The Pleasure Project works with these incentives – pleasure and desire – to build bridges between the pleasure/sex industry and the safer sex world. …

Egypt has recently passed a new quota law, reserving 64 seats for women in addition to its 454 member parliament. While the executive regulations were not issued at the time of writing, the political messages conveyed about the quota are highly relevant: for example, additional seats were allocated rather than existing ones shared. This article speculates on whether the quota will challenge power hierarchies within and among parties. While the quota will undoubtedly increase women's representation in parliament, the political configurations of the existing context – a highly authoritarian one – raise questions as to which women are most likely to occupy these seats. …

Over the last 20 years, the problem of low levels of representation of women in political office has been mobilising women, and especially feminists, throughout the world. The adoption of quotas has become a much-used tool to address the challenge of increasing women's political representation, and as a route to enhancing women's political empowerment. In Latin America, many countries have adopted quota systems, but with widely varying effects. This article takes stock of Latin American experience and asks to what extent quota systems have served as a pathway of women into politics. …

The promise of democratic equality has not arrived for women. In all societies said to be democratic, women have had an arduous struggle and are still fighting for access to rights common to any male citizen, for example an equal salary for equal work, promotion opportunities, the right to physical integrity, and access to work. Gaining the right to vote and the right to run for office as elected representatives has not in practice meant the right to be elected under the same conditions as men (Petit 2007). In the immense majority of representative democracies, women are far from having won political equality. …

Many names are given to identities and practices that suggest or involve sexual activity between men: queer, gay, homosexual, dandy, batty man, queen, bachelor, fag, etc. In international development, however, ‘men who have sex with men’ (MSM) has fast become the preferred descriptor for the myriad expressions of same sex desire by men. This term was originally proposed as an alternative to ‘gay’ or ‘bisexual’ by grassroots activists and healthcare workers concerned about the impact of sexually transmitted diseases in their communities. This was a radical gesture at the time, a sharp refusal of the dominant narratives about sexual orientation and sexual behaviour that were being relayed by organisations led by white, gay-identified men. …

The gang-rape of Mukhtaran Mai launched a nine-year court battle that concluded with a verdict by the Supreme Court of Pakistan acquitting all but one of the accused. Her case illustrates how both the formal and informal systems of justice share the same hostility to women who defy social norms and demand justice in cases of rape, says Ayesha Khan. …

This article makes an argument for the added value of the use of documentary film in development research communication. It draws broadly on the specific experience of the Real World film scheme developed by the Pathways of Women's Empowerment Research Programme Consortium and Creative England, to create empowering representations of women. It argues that both researchers and film-makers have much to gain by collaborating on the political project of co-crafting a visual argument, to create a nuanced and emotive end product. …