Resources

Tessa Lewin draws on the work done by the Pathways of Women’s Empowerment Research and Communications Consortium from 2007 to date. She explores both the broad approach to communicating empowerment and highlights the work of various projects undertaken. …

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. …

Giuseppe Campuzano presents issues of identity considered important by many travestis. He places travesti issues in a ‘development’ framework discussing the difficulties of the contemporary situation of travestis in Peru. …

Women’s paid work has featured in the development literature for two main reasons. The instrumental reason relates to its potential to contribute to make a variety of development goals, from poverty reduction to human development to economic growth. The intrinsic reason is its potential to transform the lives of women and girls by addressing gender inequalities on a wide variety of fronts. …

This paper traces the reshaping of the right to health under neoliberal reforms and considers the new Plan AUGE that has been implemented in the health sector in Chile. The paper highlights how women’s right to health has been challenged by the marketisation of health care services. At the same time the paper demonstrates how a limited notion of women’s health is being promoted, one that notably excludes women’s reproductive rights. The Plan AUGE will improve women’s access to health care services but does little to challenge the underlying gendered assumptions around unpaid work and women’s reproductive rights remain severely restricted. …

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. …

Women activists, politicians and policymakers including international development experts are seeking to harness the power of the divine. The rationale is simple: if people are driven by faith, then let us use faith to drive them towards social and political change. This article problematizes the instrumentalization of religion, arguing that there are many risks in pursuing this route as a way of addressing gendered injustices. It also calls for a different approach to disentangling women's engagement with religion as politics, as morality and as personal piety, using women's hair as a case in point. …

In this article, Petchesky questions the definition of empowerment, asking who is doing the empowerment and based on what agenda. She addresses disempowerment created by structural militarization, self-determined self-empowerment, and stresses the need for a nuanced and contextualized sense of gender to address power and change, as well as the need to go beyond gender and break the divides between people and nature and North and South. …

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 intersect, giving rise to complex mosaics. Analysing processes of empowerment in these circumstances calls for abandoning universalizing visions of women and recognizing differences and inequalities beyond gender in multiracial and multicultural societies. Women domestic workers face class contradictions in establishing harmonious relationships with women bosses, who are also participants as workers in unions and other political spaces. This contradiction creates difficulties in constructing a common agenda for the advancement of domestic workers' labour rights. …

There has been an ideological tug-of-war over women's place in Afghan society from the early years of the twentieth century between the modernising tendencies of its urban-based elite and the forces of conservatism represented by the Islamic ulema (religious leaders). Following the US-led invasion and the international donor community's subsequent efforts to “develop” the country, this struggle has acquired a new lease of life. Current debates reproduce the now familiar divide between cultural values and universal rights that characterises the wider feminist literature. While Afghan voices have been part of this debate, they tend to be drawn from more educated and politicised groups. …

Most international development organisations include women’s empowerment and gender equality as a key objective. But what empowerment means and how best to support it remains a matter of debate. …

Social protection is the right to survive. It is the right to a basic income, shelter, health, food and information, all of which enables people to survive, support their dependents and find a way out of need and destitution. The right to social protection exists for all people, regardless of age, sex or ethnicity. The existence of this right should give people a sense of security even when they are not claiming it. …

In recent years in Latin America, the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people have received greater institutional attention, and legislative gains have been made across the continent. Using a typology of legal frameworks, this article explores trends, challenges and prospects for advancing efforts to address discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in Latin America. It argues that deepening and adequately understanding LGBT rights and how they can be protected and promoted at multiple levels is an indispensable task for legal authorities, professionals and civil society. By proceeding in this direction, a fruitful dialogue can be established between law-making and jurisprudence, public policies, and civil society initiatives. …

Wendy Harcourt highlights the most interesting and contentious issues to emerge during a conversation held among 25 people from key women’s networks, UN agencies, research institutions and think tanks at the 54th Commission of the Status of Women (CSW) in New York March 2010. Using charterhouse rules, the dialogue was an attempt to hold a new kind of conversation in the CSW space. The participants candidly held up to scrutiny the key concepts of gender and empowerment in the context of the new development institutions. …

This article reflects on a digital storytelling project undertaken for research, communication, and advocacy purposes in Bangladesh. The project trained young women from different regions of the country to make digital stories about their everyday struggles and journeys of personal growth. Excerpts from selected digital stories are shared to highlight how these short films can be used to understand struggles against class and gender hierarchies, sexual harassment, and the need to establish full citizenship rights for minority groups. The article makes a case for digital stories as a new methodology for doing and communicating research. …