Pathways
Changing Narratives of Sexuality
This theme questions how can existing norms around sexuality that constrain women’s empowerment, including marriage normativity, be unsettled in ways that enable women to empower themselves - including engagement with the media, religion and with the representations and influences that shape people’s experience of sexuality, particularly amongst youth? And what potential exists for using this to build alliances for change?
What does it take to turn private harms into matters for public concern, to make taken-for-granted violation and harassment of women something that is unacceptable? And how can norms that proscribe certain kinds of relationships and behaviour as unacceptable be transformed to permit greater recognition of sexual and reproductive rights?
How can a more positive approach to sexuality help promote well-being and safer sex as well as empower women and marginalised groups?
Featured Research Projects
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Changing Representations of Women in Popular Culture
This project sought to explore and understand the ways in which women are represented in different music genres, and by different artistes over the period 1970 to date. The researchers examined the main themes about women in the song lyrics, both explicit and implicit, focusing on narratives of women's bodies and their roles as workers, providers and caregivers. …
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Women and Religion in Bangladesh
This research looked at resurgent Islam and its influence on the formation of female identities and sexualities in Bangladesh. The aim was to see whether the new forms of Islam in fact open up new spaces thereby ‘permitting’ women greater sexual rights than has been popularly perceived, and what might be learnt by the secular women’s movement from women’s organising in these new spaces. …
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Unmarried in Palestine: Dynamics and Discourses of Choice, Embodiment, Responsibility, Power and Survival in the Lives of Single Palestinian Women
Using topical life stories, focus groups, data and discourse analysis, this project explored the experiential diversity and thematic commonalities in the lives of Palestinian unmarried women, in the context of a society experiencing prolonged warlike conditions, political crisis, and social disruption. In particular, the researchers examined the dynamics of choice, embodiment, responsibility, and survival, as well as attempted to identify structural, social, political and economic factors shaping Palestine’s rather unique pattern of early, but not universal marriage, with a relatively high proportion of never-married women (but not men) over time. …
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Women and Media in Bangladesh
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. …
