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The Chinese NGO Pink Space organises exchanges to build solidarity between people marginalised because of their sexuality and challenge the sources of their oppression, as He explains. Pink Space brings together HIV positive women, lesbians, bisexual women, female sex workers, transgender men, and women married to gay men. Fun, laughter and discussions of sexual pleasure are always part of the agenda. He describes how a focus on sexual pleasure promoted solidarity between women. …

This report in Bangla focuses on a project which interviewed members of the Chittagong Hill Tracts communities to examine their views on mainstream media and how it was failing in portraying their everyday lives. …

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. …

Samia Rahim recounts the Digital Storytelling workshop held in the Chittagong Hill Tracts in Bangladesh, from the process of making the stories and the major themes that emerged, to the emotional viewing at the end of all the Digital Stories made by the participants. …

Thirty-five years on from the abortion rights victory of Roe vs. Wade, abortion proponents in the USA continue to battle political opposition and the formidable abortion opponents that seek to overturn legal abortion in the long-run, and limit access to services in the short-run. This article outlines the many battles over national and foreign aid policies, legal changes, attacks on and limits to access that have characterized the on-going abortion debate in the USA. Beyond the political, it further illustrates how, despite the legal and human rights discourse the politicians and advocacy bodies pursue, deficient access and funding and stigma are overwhelmingly the critical barriers for the poor and ethnic populations, demonstrating that the ‘choice’ debate is not a realistic one in a context where poor mothers can neither afford to have an abortion, nor mother another child. …

Pathways South Asia used digital storytelling to document the experiences of growth and transformation in women's lives from their own perspectives, in their own words and voices. The workshops the team held in Dhaka and Chittagong enabled participants to make a 3-4 minute multimedia presentation by themselves, providing moving testimonies of individual lives and the contexts in which empowerment/disempowerment is experienced. …

This special issue of 'Development' originates from a workshop held at the Institute of Development Studies in 2008. It seeks to explore the linkages between sexuality and the development industry and to uncover the impacts of development on sexuality and how to move towards a more constructive engagement. …

This bulletin highlights the profound inequities of access both globally and nationally to safe abortion, and the importance of global and national movements for reform to address this. Contributions focus in particular on policy reform and what can be learned from struggles in different parts of the world to obtain or retain safe abortion services. …

This project explored how Bangladeshi women engage with television and the meanings, choices and subjectivities they derive from it. Researchers examined changing representations of women and female sexuality and explored how women in different sites and classes engage with television and attach meaning to the images that are represented on screen. They enquired whether and where there are possibilities of empowerment that open up through women's engagement, pleasure, and learning from the media. …

This book explores the ways in which positive, pleasure-focused approaches to sexuality can empower women. Gender and development has tended to engage with sexuality only in relation to violence and ill-health. Although this has been hugely important in challenging violence against women, over-emphasising these negative aspects has dovetailed with conservative ideologies that associate women’s sexualities with danger and fear. On the other hand, the media, the pharmaceutical industry, and pornography more broadly celebrate the pleasures of sex in ways that can be just as oppressive, often implying that only certain types of people - young, heterosexual, able-bodied, HIV-negative - are eligible for sexual pleasure. …