Resources

By focusing on three different national level women's organisations in Bangladesh, this article looks at how the movements have used different strategies to become an effective voice for women's interests and empowerment at civil society and state levels. The importance of framing their issues in a non-contentious way, building alliances with like-minded groups and the strength of personal networks can be clearly seen. Reaching out to these diverse groups has meant the organisations at times making strategic choices, which allowed the groups to create space and legitimacy for their agenda. Relying on personal networks is shown to carry certain risks for sustainability and their ineffective engagement with political parties can reduce their influence, but ultimately their strategies for mobilising support and building constituencies has gained these organisations greater legitimacy and strength as advocates of women's issues. …

This paper examines how concepts of women’s ‘agency’ have been appropriated and transformed by neo-liberal discourses. Within this framework, the exercise of agency is sought in women’s strategies for survival rather than struggles for transformation, and at the level of the individual rather than the collective. Post-modern preoccupations with the subject and the recognition of ‘difference’ have been incorporated alongside liberal definitions of the ‘rational individual exercising free will’ to pursue and legitimise neo-liberal economic policies involving intensified exploitation of poor women’s labour. Meanwhile the emphasis on women’s agency marginalizes analysis of oppressive structures, and shifts the focus away from patriarchal ideologies. …

In pre-colonial Peru the distinctions between male and female were far more flexible than they are today. A traditional ‘travesti’ or transgender/transvestite identity and culture existed and played an important role in Andean religion and society. Colonial and subsequently development influences suppressed these identities and communities, although the Peruvian travesti remained. In contemporary Peru travestis face violence from the public and police, as well as economic exclusion and discrimination by health services. …

Jaya Sharma shares her concerns about assuming that norms govern us entirely and of constructing a binary between the ‘normative’ and the ‘non-normative’. She argues that such a binary can be arrogant and privilege as ‘ideal’ those seen as ‘non-normative’. It is perhaps closer to reality and more empowering to see the play of norms as a process of negotiation rather than placing them in a hegemonic and binary framework. …

The language of rights has been of great value to queer movements, particularly in the context of claim making vis-à-vis the state. There are however significant limitations of the rights language that need to be recognised. This article focuses attention on these, drawing on the experience of PRISM (People for Rights of Indian Sexuality Minorities), a queer activist forum based in Delhi, India. The rights language pushes us into a limiting framework of identity politics. …

This study of the digital storytelling (DST) project at the South Asia Hub of the Pathways of Women's Empowerment Research Programme Consortium examines the capacity of DST practice to articulate women's diverse experiences of empowerment, given the genre's formalities and narrative guidelines. I challenge notions that DST mediation is limited to relationships between the storyteller and the technology, and instead focus on mediation as a co-creative process. There are at least two overlooked dynamics in DST. The first is how the organization adopts narrative guidelines to fit their framework and purpose; and second, the social relationships mediating the way actors related to one another in the workshop. …

In this paper, we address the methodological challenges as well as innovations made possible by a mixed methods analysis of empowerment in a multi-lingual environment. The linguistic challenge of translating empowerment fully reminds us that the concept is both time and place specific. Combining a survey with intergenerational interviews allows us to uncover both whether or not Ghanaian women are empowered and equally importantly the context that makes this possible. Such an approach also allows us to assess the extent to which researchers and the researched share similar understandings of what empowerment means. …

In the context of HIV/AIDS, youth have become central to contemporary South African social thought and educational policy concerns regarding changing behaviour, addressing gender inequalities, safe sex and preventing the spread of the disease. Yet we know very little about how youth in specific social contexts give meaning to gender and sexuality. Greater understanding of these processes would appear vital to successful educational strategies in the protection against HIV/AIDS in South Africa. Deevia Bhana and Rob Pattman argue that the lives and identities of young men and women must be central in any initiative to change behaviour. …

The articles in this collection are based on papers presented by authors and the collective reflections of participants and external resource persons from a workshop on methods organised by Pathways in December 2012. These articles represent the experience of conducting specific research projects on women's empowerment in Bangladesh, Egypt, Ghana, Brazil, and Palestine. During the workshop, the participants collectively reflected on the practical experience of investigating empowerment in a particular country context and through this lens re-examined theorising on feminist methodology. They began with an appreciation of the contradictions and complexities underscored by earlier feminist analysis of women's empowerment and the use of feminist methodology to examine women's experience in the global South. …

Domestic women workers in Salvador, Brazil, were given disposable and digital cameras with which they traced their movements and documented their everyday lives. This participatory photography project re-presented these women’s humanity as well as revealed the conditions in the places where they lived and worked. …

Critical evaluation of the current status of ‘gender’ in development points to the conclusion that its political and analytical bite has been blunted by its domestication by development agencies. Transplanted from domains of feminist discourse and practice onto other, altogether different and in many ways inherently hostile institutional terrains, the term has retained little of the radical promise that was once vested in its promotion. ‘Gender equality’ is used as an umbrella term for as diverse a set of activities as gathering sex-disaggregated statistics, doing ‘gender sensitization’, championing women’s rights and making women more competitive in the labour market. That which once lay at the heart of the ‘gender agenda’ – transforming unequal and unjust power relations – seems to have fallen by the wayside. …

This article provides a critical analysis of the conceptualisation of women’s empowerment through employment (and later decent work) from the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, the Beijing Platform for Action through to the Millennium Development Goals, the Decent Work Agenda and current proposals for the post-2015 Development Agenda. The article focuses on the context of rural women. Through a historical overview of the increasing importance placed on employment and the “world of work” for poverty reduction and women’s empowerment within the development discourse, the article will analyse the implications and gaps of prevailing approaches. The article will also provide recommendations to enhance the potential of rural employment and decent work in promoting women’s empowerment, including with specific reference to the debates around the post-2015 Development Agenda. …

UK-based international development agencies are introducing the concepts of diversity and sexual orientation into their staff employment policies for the first time. Based on interviews with agency staff and a study of diversity policy documents, Carolyn Williams outlines some of the difficulties that have emerged. She proposes that future debates and policymaking need to explore how to interconnect sexual identity, social and cultural diversity, while paying careful attention to the protection of individual's right to privacy. …

HIV prevention messages have an impact on people's sexualities in ways that are unimaginable. In Kenya, consultations with HIV positive people under the Maanisha programme reveal that HIV prevention messages work to regulate and stigmatize sexual expressions among people already infected with HIV. Regrettably, these stereotypical strategies are promoted by health experts and HIV/AIDS service providers. Interventions must break with stereotypes and create spaces for behaviour change strategies that begin with positive peoples lived experiences, acknowledging their complexities and working with them in a more equitable and mutually respectful interaction. …

What can men’s interest be in the social and sexual revolution being proposed by advocates for sexual rights? The first answer to this question is to recognise that some men’s sexual rights have long been violated. Those men who ‘betray’ their gender through their ‘feminine’ representation and/or sexual relations with other men are especially vulnerable to such violation. Violence maintains the gender and sexuality hierarchy by keeping the men ‘who are not men enough’ in their place. But what about the men who appear to be, or strive to be, ‘man enough’? What can be said of their sexual rights? Perhaps the most basic demand of advocates for sexual rights is that people be free to live their sexual lives without coercion. …