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Susie Jolly’s chapter is a nuanced account of how Chinese activists have drawn on the possibilities afforded by international forces, agendas and discourses, to broaden openings available in the flux and ambivalence of processes nearer to home. Jolly highlights the great overlap among donors, government and activists, showing that the boundaries between these institutional spaces are in fact porous, rather than partitioned from one another. …

This IDS Bulletin addresses a theme that mainstream development has persistently neglected: sexuality. Why is sexuality a development concern? Because sexuality matters to people, and is an important part of most people’s lives. Because development policies and practices are already having a significant – and often negative – impact on sexuality, and because sexuality and the societal norms that seek to contain and control it have, in turn, a significant impact on poverty and well-being. Development needs to move beyond the current limited and negative approaches, to embrace the significance of sexuality for development in more affirmative ways. …

Samia Huq discusses the reconfiguration of sexuality at the heart of changing worldviews in urban Bangladesh. Until recently, the modernity of the state had been predicated on the notion of a ‘modern woman’, which Islamists have sought to unravel. …

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. …

This paper, presented Strategic Planning Workshop of the Feminist Network on Gender, Development and Information Society Policies, IT for Change, Bangalore, India, 5-7 October, briefly addresses some of the issues in debates on the rise of the information society and its impact on feminism and women’s movements in a world scale, as well as its importance as a tool for the empowerment of women and significance to contemporary expressions of sexuality and identity. In this paper, Sardenberg focuses more specifically, on those debates relating to expressions of sexuality and identity in the information society, as seen from a critical Latin American feminist perspective. She raises these issues in the hopes that they can be of significant consequence for policy formulation on the uses of the information society with greater gender equity. …

This report in Bangla focuses on research which explored how Bangladeshi women engage with television and the meanings, choices and subjectivities they derive from it. The researchers examined the changing representations of women and female sexuality and explored how women in different sites and classes engaged with television and attached meaning to the images represented on screen. …

Andil Gosine asks whether sex and sexuality have been left unconsidered in international development or not. Sex and sexuality he argues have always been at the heart of development. Three figures have haunted the project of international development: Monster, Womb, MSM (‘Men who have sex with Men’). Anxieties about the sexual proclivities of these figures have driven and shaped the project of international development, both as a teleological metanarrative and in its material application. …

Xiaopei He describes her activities in China working with the lesbian and gay (tongzhi) movement as activists challenge the conventions and traditions of heteronormativity in innovative and fun ways. …

This report focuses on a project which looks at resurgent Islam and its influence on the formation of female identities and sexualities. The researchers explore the ways in which women in their daily lives engage with religious tenets and observance, focusing on new forms of religious organization and the appeal it has for women of various classes. …

Bangladesh has recently been seeing a rise in religiosity which has been treated as problematic, anti-secular and anti-progressive within the public sphere. Various writers describe this trend as having a disempowering effect on women and negating their self-expression. However, underlying these views is the assumption that the assertion of women's agency is not enough if it does not confront existing structures of relations. This article asks whether it is possible that in seeking changes in certain aspects of one's life, existing gender relations are not necessarily transformed, but indirectly challenged and reconfigured? The conclusion suggests that rather than a polarisation of the secular and religious ways of living most people are in fact in between, negotiating between the two camps, and borrowing ideas and ways from both. …

Ogni O Jol is a collection of eleven short stories by young and established writers, and three papers by researchers. Two of the stories are in English and all others in Bangla. This book comes from a project conducted by Shamim Azad who gathered researchers from Nigeria, England, Ghana, Egypt, Pakistan and Bangladesh to conduct a workshop named 'Pathways of Women Empowerment'. Twenty five authors took part in the six month long workshop. …

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. …

The rise in an intense, textually‐based piety, which has become increasingly prevalent in many circles in Bangladesh in the past decade, sees music as taking away from an ideal pious disposition, and therefore considers its removal from everyday life as a requisite to becoming a good Muslim. The removal of music is critically looked upon by secular Bengali Muslims, where singing, especially songs of the Nobel Laureate Tagore, is equated with cultural pride and Bangladeshi nationalism in the secular‐liberal, especially the intellectual imaginary. The shunning of such music is thus tantamount to shunning ‘Bengaliness’ and a source of anxiety for the nationalist. In this article, through a deeper exploration of women's struggles of and sense of achievement in giving up music, I argue that for the women in pursuit of piety, what the act of giving up music speaks to is inner changes that enable them to critically reflect upon roles and relationships that have long been the defining features of a particular kind of middle class, Bengali, feminine self. …

Representations of women in popular music can reinforce or challenge stereotypes. Pathways researchers, Akosua Adomako and Awo Asiedu, researched the changing representations of women in Ghanaian popular culture. They analysed the gender content of the lyrics of 250 Ghanaian popular songs from the 1950s to the present. Their textual analysis showed that the messages contained in these songs were often negative, portraying women as sex objects, or as fickle and jealous. …

Walking down the streets of Dhaka – or anywhere in Bangladesh for that matter – popular expressions of matters of faith, specifically Islam, strike the eye. Painted on public transport vehicles such as trucks, three-wheeled auto taxis or bicycle rickshaws, painted on walls and minarets of mosques, paintings and calligraphy dot the landscape. While Islamic expressions are normally associated with high art forms that reflect deep spirituality and faith, or more recently with the growing politicization which is often seen as extremism or fanaticism, these popular images reflect an every day and comfortable co-existence with the faith. Eschewing the high art forms of the Mughal and Sultanate traditions of the 15th to the 18th centuries, these images reflect a more folk tradition, and an easy accommodation with religion and culture. …