Resources

Mwaura-Muiru highlights the need for the women’s movement and donors to work towards and support woman-led (especially poor woman-led) transformation. Collective organizing and social networks is a means of empowerment that allows women to respond to challenges, but grassroots organizing is being threatened by social and macro economic models of development. The women’s movement’s renewed interest in grassroots women’s coping strategies could potentially be a huge step forward for the women’s movement, but, Mwaura-Muiru argues, the views of the less privileged should be seen as the critical voice in the design of appropriate interventions. She critiques Gender and Development as being too focussed on technical and professional training, which continues to marginalize poor women, and argues that there is a need to rethink development and women’s empowerment, and stresses that strategies towards women’s empowerment need to consider grassroots women’s needs and diversity. …

Alan Greig uses his experience as a development practitioner to reflect on the lessons that have been learned with regards to women’s empowerment, what questions remain unaddressed, and what the frictions, hopes and challenges are for women’s empowerment. He discusses the things that need to be considered more attentively in the broader attempts to ‘empower’ economically and politically, and offers his opinion on the determining factors for women’s empowerment. …

Blagojevic reflects on empowerment. She looks at the history of ‘empowerment’ in Serbia, from the debate over its translation to the co-opting of the concept by donors to enforce democratic, neo-liberal policies, with the result that empowerment simply instrumentalized women. She provides a definition of empowerment that links it with rights and introduces the concept of ‘de-development’ to indicate when development does not equal progress, linking this concept to MGDs. In relation to the Balkans, Blagojevic suggests that gender equality instead of empowerment may be a better term to use. …

In this article, Marinova draws upon her experience of being a woman in Bulgaria to reflect upon the importance of personal empowerment of women and girls in development. She provides her own definition of empowerment and stresses the importance of empowering environments over egalitarian policy. …

Kamau draws upon her experience at ActionAid International Kenya to reflect on development interventions and what makes them successful. She views empowerment as both an individual and collective process of understanding and action, and highlights the importance of education and access to information as essential to empowerment. She concludes with an ActionAid Kenya case study that illustrates the success of the rights-based approach in aiding an empowering development process. …

Wendy Harcourt, editor of Development, talks with Khawar Mumtaz and Jacqueline Pitanguy about how they understand empowerment in relation to their national and international work for women’s human rights. …

Stigma and legal sanctions against homosexuality, as well as gender norms among men who have sex with men, lead to an emphasis on aggression, power play and penetration in male-to-male sex in India. This in turn contributes to low levels of condom use among men who have sex with men (MSM) and transgender people, and increases the risk of HIV and ill-health. This article explores the potential for promotion of more sensuous, pleasurable, and communicative sex which could also be safer. The article draws on the author’s research as well as on his personal experience working as a masseur in Kolkata Massage parlours which provide commercial sexual services to male clients. …

Talk of ‘ensonga za Ssenga’ (Ssenga matters) among the Baganda of Uganda signifies an institution that has endured through centuries as a tradition of sexual initiation. At the helm is the paternal aunt (or surrogate versions thereof) whose role is to tutor young women in a range of sexual matters, including pre-menarche practices, pre-marriage preparation, erotics and reproduction. In contemporary Uganda, commercial Ssenga services abound, with Ssenga columns and call-in radio programmes and Ssenga booklets on sale in Kampala’s streets. The institution is being transformed by “modernization” and urbanization, re-drawing the boundaries of Ssenga to suit the times. …

Most of the literature on women in politics and political empowerment in Bangladesh has either focused on the elected women representatives at the union level in rural areas and the constraints they face or on the ineffectiveness of women Members of Parliament (MPs) in reserved seats. In this chapter, we shift the focus from rural areas and women MPs to women councillors in urban government. …

Sexuality and sexual rights have generally been treated as secondary to the ‘really important matters’. This article explores the linkages between sexual rights and other rights which are considered to be priorities in development, such as health, education and labour rights. This article does not argue that sexual rights are of equal importance to these other rights. Instead, it asserts that sexual rights are all these rights, in that sexuality and social norms surrounding it have huge impacts on health, education and work. …

This article identifies changes and continuities in gender relations in a working class neighbourhood in Salvador, Bahia, through the generations. Based on data collected over a period of nearly 20 years, it seeks to identify processes of women's empowerment. It confirms the relevance of women's economic independence to their participation in decision-making and in gaining autonomy; it gave them the power to assert control over their own lives. To this end, female solidarity has also played a special role, propitiating the exercise of power with to bring about the desired changes in one's lives. …

The economic and political empowerment of women continues to be a central focus for development agencies worldwide; access to medical care, education and employment, as well as women's reproductive rights, remain key factors affecting women's autonomy. …

In Latin America, the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing has been a milestone in the history of the feminist and women’s movements. Twenty years have passed and despite important achievements in gender equality, for issues of economic equality the results are still meagre and there remains a long road ahead in the fields of employment, access to resources, and social protection for women. Unsurprisingly, it is in economic matters that the feminist and women’s movements have renewed their themes and strategies. This article identifies a gender economic agenda that is broad in its transformative scope and in its determination to challenge core aspects of the current economic and social organisation. …

Meena Seshu as guest editor of this issue of Contestations suggests that by viewing 'sex work' through the framework of patriarchy and the objectification of women's bodies, feminists foreclose any discussion over whether women can actively choose sex work as a livelihood option. It is this narrow approach linking sex work with violence against women, she argues, that leads many feminists to the assumption that all sex workers are victims who need 'rescuing', which is not always the case. Seshu contends that a far better lens is the rights-based approach which recognises sex workers' rights as human beings and allows them to break out of the victim mode. …

On behalf of Meem, the community of and for Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer (LBTQ) women in Lebanon, Nadine delivered one of the most exciting and talked about speeches at the Opening Plenary of the International AWID Forum: The Power of Movements held in Cape Town November 2008. She looks at sexuality in relation to feminism from the perspective of an activist working to have women's self-defined expression of sexuality accepted openly in mainstream culture. …