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Charmaine Pereira looks at changing debates on gender and sexuality. She highlights feminist theorizing that in order to understand the complexity of heteronormative social relations, it is important to examine the relations among gender and sexuality in general, and heterosexuality in particular. …

This edition of the People and Power programme from Al Jazeera TV looks at the state of women's equality, rights and the feminist agenda in the light of International Women's Day. …

This is the third in the series of chapters about the group of feminist bureaucrats learning and sharing their political craft. The scene moves to an international meeting that exposes how power shapes legitimate knowledge and how strategies may fail. …

Drawing on direct experience, this book is about feminists working politically to promote their organisations' gender equality goals. The aim is that by sharing this experience, the book's contributors can help others in similar positions to debate and reflect on the challenges of their jobs, and that readers from within the wider international women's movement will gain insights to help them engage more strategically with their allies inside development organisations. …

Neoliberalism – that ‘grab-bag of ideas based on the fundamentalist notion that markets are self-correcting, allocate resources efficiently and serve the public interest well’, as Stiglitz (2008) puts it – has been a focal point for contestation in development. Feminists have highlighted its deleterious effects on women’s lives and on gender relations. They have drawn attention to the extent to which the institutions promoting neoliberal economic and social policies have undermined a more progressive agenda, as they have come to appropriate words such as ‘empowerment’ and ‘agency’ and eviscerate them of any association with a project of progressive social change. This collection of articles brings together reflections from a diversity of locations on prospects for reclaiming these ideas and using them to reframe and revitalise feminist concepts like ‘agency’ and ‘empowerment’, we argue, we need to return to and reaffirm their ‘liberating’ dimensions, reaffirming their association with forms of collective action that involve resisting and transgressing repressive social norms. …

This introductory chapter provides a brief discussion on conceptual debates on voice and the assumptions that the authors interrogate using empirical evidence. The broader contexts within which feminist activism and voice are organised are discussed. It focuses on the various influences on feminist activism: NGOisation/ professionalisation ; increase in transnational networks and links; rise of conservative forces; creation of participatory/democratic spaces; increase in donor’s epistemic power to shape feminist agenda; and how these have influenced feminist voice in the selected countries. …

Report from the first National Seminar on Feminisms in Brazil Theoretical Reflections and Perspectives. …

Islam and feminism have had a troubled relationship. Over the last two decades, scholars and activists have questioned the western credentials of feminism and claimed justice as a purpose and possibility that can be captured via religious routes. Religion provides women with an ethical framework and a moral foundation that recognizes their rights as individuals and as a collective, albeit redefining equality in the process. The mosque movement in Egypt has empowered women to find dignity, companionship and comfort through piety and conformity to a religious ideal and challenge the less-than-perfect world around them. …

In Palestine, a reassertion of the ‘secularist’ identity of the ‘Palestinian national project’ is taking place against a deeply divided political society characterised by a Palestinian authority in conflict with Hamas. This article argues that the instrumentalisation of religion by the state has backfired leaving secular feminist activists in an unenviable position – without a constituency or a socially legitimate framework through which to address gender and social justice issues. At the same time, a reassertion of the ‘secularist’ identity is taking place against a deeply divided political society characterized by a Palestinian authority in conflict with Hamas. This conflict accompanying the ‘secularization process’ resulted in crushing the very structure of the notion of citizenship and the figure of the secular citizen subject itself. …

In December 1995, when Hamas announced the establishment of the Islamic National Salvation Party, a political organization separate from its military wing, it opened the way for involvement of the Islamic movement in the political processes brought about in the West Bank and Gaza with the signing of the Oslo Accords and the arrival of the Palestinian National Authority. In speaking of the rights of different groups, including women, in its founding statement, and in setting up in Gaza a Women's Action Department, the new party opened its doors to the ‘new Islamic woman’ and to a significant evolution in Islamist gender ideology in Gaza, if not in the West Bank – where, due to Hamas' policy there of targeting only males, there exists no parallel to the Salvation Party or organisational support for women like that represented by the Women's Action Department in Gaza. Hamas' gender ideology, like that of the secularist parties, remains contradictory, and doors to women's equality only partly open; nevertheless, Islamist women have managed to build impressive, well‐organised women's constituencies among highly educated and professional women coming from poor and refugee backgrounds; and the Salvation Party shows an increasing tendency to foster gender equality and more egalitarian social ideals, while holding fast to the agenda of national liberation. These advances have been achieved both through alternative interpretations of Islamic legal and religious texts, and through positive engagement with the discourses of other groups, whether secular feminists or nationalists. …

Reflecting her career as a feminist activist and bureaucrat, Patti O'Neill discusses with Rosalind Eyben her strategies at the OECD as the official responsible for supporting the work of the Gender Network of the Development Assistance Committee. …

Postcolonial feminist representations of Muslim women as subjects and agents have successfully cleared a space for unsettling oppressive colonial representations of Muslim women as unchanging victims of patriarchal religion and Muslim men. This space has also brought into view new problems and issues that divide Muslim women into feminist and fundamentalists, secular and religious, diasporic and native. This paper focuses on one of the most contentious issues of Muslim women's representation: secular feminists' attempts to represent women in Islamic religious movements. In this process I examine some of the normative and ethical dimensions of feminist research as they emerged in my research with women in the Jamaat‐e‐Islami, a movement for religious reform and renewal in Pakistan. …

The Regional Scoping Workshop for Latin America, organized by NEIM, took place in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, from 6-9 June 2006. The workshop was organized around five round-tables followed by open debates in plenary: 1) Theoretical Reflections on the Empowerment of Women in Latin America; 2) Power, Institutionality and the Empowerment of Women in Latin America; 3) Policies of Employment and Income as Spaces of Empowerment of Women in Latin America; 4) Public Policies for Preventing and Combating Violence Against Women; and 5) Struggles for Sexual and Reproductive Rights in Latin America. On the last two days there were three different discussion sessions in small groups, organized around the three axes that the RPC will be investigating (voice, work, and bodily integrity): 1) Issues in Measurement of Women’s Empowerment; 2) Identifying Stories of Change; 3) Exploring Policy Experiences. Group discussions had the objective of generating ideas and recommendations for the formulation of RPC projects, the results being presented in the final plenary session, followed by an informal evaluation of the workshop and its accomplishments. …

Report by Ana Alice Costa and Cecilia Sardenberg on the creation of the interdisciplinary studies programme on women, gender and feminism at the Interdisciplinary Women's Studies Nucleus at the Federal University of Bahia in Salvador, Brazil. …

In this article, O’Connell discusses the necessary factors for meaningful, equitable and sustainable ‘development’. Speaking from her experience and from lessons learned from various commitments and approaches to gender equality, O’Connell suggests that to achieve gender equality, approaches to development should encompass feminist and alternative thinking on economics and politics, and that central to making progress towards full human rights for all women and gender equity are vibrant, inclusive, feminist and well-resourced women’s organisations and networks. …