Resources

Human rights, including women’s rights are dropping off the donor agenda. Recent years have seen a marked shift in official development discourse, with less emphasis on a rights-based approach and more on an efficiency approach to gender equality, exemplified by Nike Foundation’s ‘Girl Effect’ theme of stopping poverty by investing in girls – an initiative that ignores the social, historical and structural factors which contribute to inequality while simultaneously ignoring the voices of the people it seeks to help. Removing the realization of rights, including women’s rights, from the donor agenda is part of a wider tendency to define development in terms of measurable outcomes or instruments – immunizations, bednets, numbers of children going to school, quotas for women in parliament. As a result of the shift to the political right in many OECD governments, these demands for reporting against quantifiable achievements as a measure of impact is having an effect on all the organisations that they are funding. …

This paper examines the model of ethnographic framing of the self/other relationship, and how this framing contributes to de-essentialising the theorising of women's agency and subjectivity. The paper reflects on my own PhD field research experience conducted during 2007–2008 in the Gaza Strip. In a situation where the researcher and the research subject share the spatial history, as well as the multiple positionalities in their life cycle, the researcher's self inevitably becomes a subject of the ethnography. The analysis in this paper transcends the simplicity of the interactive relations between ‘researchers’ and ‘researched’. …

This article argues that the slip between policy intension and outcome in policies addressing women and money lies in three neo-liberal assumptions: that individuals have clear title to their earnings, that markets are not socially constructed and that viewing individuals and families as isolated units of subsistence is a valid analytical method. It argues that critiques of development policy that are rooted in individualised conceptualisations and measurement of female autonomy and empowerment do not adequately challenge these assumptions, instead they tend to rely on them themselves. It also suggests that feminist critiques are based on the double standard that women should have clear title to their earnings and assets, while men should be supporting the family. Using research undertaken in South India, this article demonstrates that the social construction of credit, labour, housing and marriage markets determine the extent to which women can benefit from improved livelihoods. …

In June 2007 - five years after it was first promised during the 2002 electoral campaign - political reform finally made it onto the Brazilian National Congress agenda. After years of waiting, women were anticipating deep changes in the patriarchal rules and elitist power structures that had characterized the Brazilian state for decades. But the majority of women's demands did not even come close to the negotiation tables. Costa describes this as “. …

In south Asia as elsewhere in the world, religion has come to play an increasing role in shaping and reshaping women’s lives. This process is a particular challenge to people like Firdous Azim, a feminist who “grew up” intellectually and politically via involvement in the women’s movement of the 1980s in Bangladesh. The activism of that period was explicitly secular; its main priorities were the issues of rights, inequalities and violence prevalent in a young state which had achieved independence only in 1971. Firdous Azim is professor in the department of English and the humanities at BRAC University, Dhaka, Bangladesh. …

This article looks at women's representation in local government in Pakistan, focusing particularly on the introduction of a quota setting 33 per cent of the seats for women brought in under General Musharraf's Devolution of Power Plan in 2000. The article suggests that establishing a direct correlation between a woman's quota and regime type is problematic. It demonstrates a complex pattern of interaction on the issue by both the military and civilian regimes in Pakistan. Policies which have been brought in, informed both by political pragmatism and ideological continuity, have been wide ranging and almost contradictory in nature. …

Women have always been central to the process of national identity formation in South Asia, and in the contests and contradictions with which such monolithic identity making is, of necessity, faced. It is hoped that the new scholarship will open up new ways of negotiating contested terrains, and will shed new light on the historical and cultural positioning of women in this process. In this article, Azim reviews two books that look at Islam and the politics of being Muslim in Bangladesh. The books concentrate on the construction of Islam or a Muslim polity as well as on the position of women within emerging structures. …

A photo-essay co-authored by Professor Firdous Azim and Samia Rahim from the Pathways South Asia Hub, published by the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Journal. The essay is based on a travelling photography exhibition that was organised by the Hub in December 2007 which depicted the "Changing Images of Women in Bangladesh". …

Andrea Cornwall and Nana Akua Anyidoho critically examine empowerment in an introduction to how to go beyond mainstream interpretations of empowerment to discover what is happening in women’s lives that is bringing about positive change. …

Cecilia M. B. Sardenberg reflects upon the experience of NEIM – the Nucleus of Interdisciplinary Women’s Studies of the Federal University of Bahia – in engaging with ‘empowerment’. NEIM has been involved in 27 years of activism in order to bring about changes, both structural as well as in women’s individual lives, towards insuring greater autonomy for women and our increasing participation in decision-making. …

Representations of men as perpetrator and patriarch have profoundly shaped the terms of gender and development’s engagement with masculinities discourse and practice. Many of those working in the field have remained hesitant, tentative, and often hostile to the notion that men might be potential allies in the struggle for gender justice. Even feminists broadly sympathetic to the principle of working with men tend to set out from the notion that all men everywhere are inherently part of the problem. And so efforts have focused on involving men, engaging men, inviting men in – usually on our terms. …

Dzodzi Tsikata focuses on the progress of women’s organizing in Ghana over the last ten years. It argues that although hampered by challenges of state society relations and organizational weaknesses arising from NGOization, women’s organisations have experienced growth and enjoyed some successes. These can be attributed to the establishment of three women’s rights networks to consolidate their work. …

This article focuses on the historical trajectories of women's empowerment in Sierra Leone, taking three entry-points as a means of exploring the dynamics of change over the pre-conflict, conflict and post-conflict periods: voice and political participation; work and economic participation; and bodily integrity. Looking at pathways of empowerment in pre-conflict Sierra Leone, at experiences of women during the time of conflict over the course of a long and brutal civil war from 1991–2002, and at post-conflict possibilities, the article highlights some of the changes that have taken place in women's lives and the avenues that are opening up in Sierra Leone in a time of peace. It suggests that understanding women's pathways of empowerment in Sierra Leone calls for closer attention to be paid to the dynamics of conflict and post-conflict reconstruction, and to the significance of context in shaping constraints and opportunities. …

Short article which illuminates one woman's demand for more empowered representations of women on Bangladeshi TV. …

Young women are increasingly experiencing greater visibility and mobility in Bangladeshi society. The new public spaces they occupy together with the more traditional private spaces are greatly mediated by the narratives beamed on television. This article looks at how Bangladeshi women engage with television and the meanings and choices they derive from it. It examines which elements the women choose to adopt and which they discard as being alien to their lifestyles. …