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Young women are increasingly experiencing greater visibility and mobility in Bangladeshi society. The new public spaces they occupy together with the more traditional private spaces are greatly mediated by the narratives beamed on television. This article looks at how Bangladeshi women engage with television and the meanings and choices they derive from it. It examines which elements the women choose to adopt and which they discard as being alien to their lifestyles. …

The global HIV/AIDS pandemic has pushed sexuality issues higher up on the development cooperation agenda but the sexual health and rights of lesbian women and other women who have sex with women are often completely missing from sexual and reproductive health and rights policies, materials and documents. Karin Lenke and Mathilda Piehl are concerned that this underlying homophobia and heteronormativity will lead to these women being unable to enjoy their full human rights in any field. …

This project explored the meanings and debates around women’s empowerment within and among sets of actors with a global reach, and how they are shaping values, ideas and policy actions (or absence of actions) on women’s empowerment. …

Contestations is an e-journal whose aim is to elicit lively disagreements and to offer a platform for argumentation. It is inspired by a vision of deliberation that is about people feeling able to air their views, listen to a plurality of positioned responses and take from that what they will - without any pressure to arrive at a consensual conclusion. It is, above all, about the freedom to dissent with any of the orthodoxies that exist in the field of women's empowerment - and there are many - and take the opportunity to provoke others to think again about the things they take for granted. …

This special issue of 'Development' picks up some of the contentions and contestations that have accompanied the uptake of 'women's empowerment' by the development industry. Contributors reflect on their own personal and political engagement with the term and what it has come to represent. …

This ongoing study has been carried out by NEIM since the 1980s, focusing on feminisms and women’s movements in Brazil. It is the study that underpins the Pathways Latin America programme, in that the feminist movement has set the stage for the specific struggles and campaigns examined in the other projects. Pathways Latin America's research has been conducted from a feminist perspective, sustaining a “liberating empowerment” approach and, as such, their primary focus is on collective action as a pathway of women’s empowerment. …

This bulletin is devoted to exploring what empowerment means in the everyday lives of women in different situations and circumstances. …

Articles by Pathways of Women's Empowerment researchers for Open Democracy's 50:50 section which features and analysis and news from women working around the world on issues of women's rights and empowerment. …

This book explores the emergence of an alternative repertoire among women working in the growing informal sectors of the global South: the weapons of organisation and mobilisation. The book offers accounts of how women working on farms, as sex workers, maids and waste pickers, in fisheries and factories, have come together to carve out new identities for themselves, define what matters to them, and develop collective strategies of resistance and struggle. …

This bulletin arises from a conference of the same title that was held at the Institute of Development Studies in July 2007 in collaboration with Birkbeck College. It sets out to provoke reflection on the now ubiquitous notions of 'empowerment' and 'agency' within neoliberal development discourses on gender. It also seeks to raise broader questions about the politics and political economy of Gender and Development. …

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 addresses a theme that mainstream development has persisently neglected: sexuality. Drawing on a workshop held at the Institute of Development Studies in 2005, it seeks to show why sexuality matters. It features papers from the workshop which provide diverse accounts of sexual rights conceptions, mobilisation, and new approaches to implementation. …

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. …

Representations of men as perpetrator and patriarch have profoundly shaped the terms of gender and development’s engagement with masculinities discourse and practice. Many of those working in the field have remained hesitant, tentative, often hostile to the notion that men might be potential allies in the struggle for gender justice. This work explores what role there should be for men in women's empowerment. …

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. …