Resources

Sohela Nazneen and Maheen Sultan analyse the impact of the NGO-ization process on the structure, autonomy and accountability relations of different types of women’s organisations in Bangladesh. They argue that the impact of NGO-ization varies depending on the resources, level of operation and the organizational motives behind adopting the NGO model. The impacts on smaller women’s organisations operating at the local level are an expansion of structure, loss of autonomy and a prioritization of accountability towards donors. However, some national-level women’s organisations have been able to manage the process through strategically mobilizing resources and prioritizing own agendas, thus retaining their feminist character. …

Is it possible to secure the desired policy action ‘infusing’ gender into existing ways of doing and organising things – and by so doing to incrementally secure real gains for women? Or will transformative policies for women's empowerment only be achieved through discursive and organisational transformation? But can the two be separated so neatly? Are there possibly unpredictable effects when feminist policy actors are on the one hand committed to changing discourse and power relations while on the other hand acting pragmatically to secure small instrumental changes? Taking international development organisations as the field of analysis, this article examines assumptions about policy change as a pathway of women's empowerment and goes on to explore a shift from a focus on institutional capability to one on actors and agency, and on strategies, tactics and manoeuvres. …

Western-led discussions of sexual health have foregrounded warnings of the dangers of sex. Yet, pleasure is one important reason why people have sex. Sexual health work must open up discussion of how pleasure can be experienced with less risk. There are challenges in addressing pleasure in work on safer sex. …

How can digital spaces make possible a feminist future for the queer African woman? Writing as the editors of a South African queer online space, HOLAA, this article aims to draw attention to and discuss queer digital communities and how they afford the queer African woman the space to express her lived experiences. The article further examines how digital spaces create these possibilities for public and political expression. Lastly, the authors put forth what they consider a feminist future for the queer African woman to be, and that it is within this future that the rights of queer women can be protected nationally and internationally as the conversations that fight erasure, exclusion and the denial of rights occur. …

In this article, Koggel reflects on the various influences on her thinking on gender and development, including a research project in Indonesia to explore the possible gaps between the World Bank’s understanding of empowerment and social science theory and NGO practice prior to mainstreaming the concept; capabilities theory and the difference between empowerment and agency; and the rhetoric of empowerment. She discusses the importance of contextual analyses and of the limitations of generalized policies or principles designed to promote ‘development’ or empower women. An important lesson for development ethicists is the need to pay attention to and analyse relations of power – including the overarching factor of economic globalization in the form of neo-liberal and capitalist assumptions and structures. Another important lesson is the one she learned from Sen's complex analysis of poverty: that ethical issues of development are as relevant to ‘developed’ countries as they are to poor ‘developing’ countries. …

A key strategy in the fight against HIV/AIDS is to safeguard the rights of those who are infected and at risk of infection. However, because of the association with sexuality, the rights of young children are not often addressed. Instead, children are represented as innocent and ignorant of sexuality and HIV/AIDS. This article challenges that representation, based on a study of 7 and 8-year-olds in a black township in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. …

In this article, I examine the case of Brazil which, unlike many other Latin American countries, is an example of where quotas are not working. Drawing on over ten years of research and exploring the dynamics of a varied group of political parties, I contest that male resistance is not the only reason behind this failure. Vagueness around the quota law and a lack of sanctions, together with the elitist nature of politics in Brazil are all contributing factors. My research has also revealed a few anomalies, showing that contrary to much of the literature, women would seem to fare better in elections within less developed and smaller states in Brazil. …

Hussainatu J. Abdullah and Aisha Fofana-Ibrahim address the meaning and practice of women’s empowerment in Sierra Leone’s post-conflict reconstruction and peace consolidation processes from the perspectives of the Government of Sierra Leone and the UN system in Sierra Leone. These two institutions illustrate how women’s empowerment has been pursued in two institutions with key roles and positions in Sierra Leone’s post-war renewal processes. …

A short article explaining BRAC Development Institute’s research into what ‘empowerment’ means when applied to women’s position, rights and development in Bangladesh, and how BRAC is mapping out the processes that have contributed to women’s empowerment. Firdous Azim demonstrates how the research is pushing us to reexamine the word empowerment in new and challenging ways, to take it out of its more formal meanings and to look at the ways that women themselves understand the process. …

Tessa Lewin introduces Pathways of Women’s Empowerment RPC, explaining its purpose in bringing together academics and activists from five hubs to understand the factors influencing women’s empowerment. The article elaborates on the four themes of Pathways, namely ‘Conceptions of Women’s Empowerment’, ‘Building Constituencies for Equality and Justice’, ‘Empowering Work’ and ‘Changing Narratives of Sexuality’, before identifying some of the common factors which hamper women’s empowerment and highlighting some of the research being done by Pathways researchers. …

Naila Kabeer reflects on the power of association and collective action, and its ability to transform the lives and livelihoods of marginalized groups, especially women. Inclusive gatherings of women, she says, are important reminders that seemingly isolated struggles against apparently insurmountable odds are really part of a worldwide movement for change. She gives examples of different kinds of collective action and the different kinds of change each movement affected. Her research experience suggests that collective action does not linearly lead from powerlessness to empowerment; instead, myriad transformative processes occur over time through collective action which solidify into a coherent movement for change. …

This article examines the significance of social relationships in women's lives and their relevance to processes of women's empowerment. In Bangladesh, traditional structures limit women's social interaction to their immediate family and maintain male responsibility over them. However, here we look at the example of Saptagram – a social mobilisation organisation particularly focused against gender injustice towards rural landless Bangladeshi women – and how by providing relationships beyond the private sphere it engendered bonds of friendship and loyalty amongst its beneficiaries. Difficulties with systems and its inability to recruit a new line of leadership led to its apparent failure at one point. …

Cecilia Sardenberg discusses the challenges facing Brazilian feminists and their supporters in the campaign to legalize abortion in the country beyond the current strict limits. She reports on the recent decision at the Brasilia gathering of the second Conference for Public Policies for Women (II CNPM) in support of legislation to sanctioning abortion on demand – a significant step beyond the current situation where it was legal only if the pregnancy results from rape or when it put the mother’s life at risk. Cecilia Sardenberg is the director and a founding member of the Nucleus of Interdisciplinary Women’s Studies (NEIM) at the Federal University of Bahia, Brazil. …

This article explores the pathways of political action pursued by the Sudanese women's movement leading up to the introduction of a women's quota in 2008 and its implementation in the most recent 2010 national parliamentary elections, the country's first in 24 years. The article argues that the main achievement of the quota was the extent to which it mobilized women to engage in politics, rather than the increased representation of women in parliament. The form the quota took however, has not significantly challenged political parties to put forth women candidates in core geographic constituencies, restricting them instead to separate women's lists. The need for revisiting the quota, healing divisions within the women's movement and negotiating a robust common programme in the next phase are all critical for translating numbers into positive changes in Sudanese women's lives. …

Based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in West Bengal, India, Akshay Khanna examines the conditions under which epidemiological knowledge about ‘men who have sex with men’ is produced and brought to circulate. He looks at conditions under which particular idioms of gender and sexuality are transformed into epidemiologically over-determined identity categories. The Sexual Subject that circulates in development praxis as an embodiment-in-the-world, it is argued, would be better understood in terms of the political economy that makes its intelligibility and circulation possible. …