All Papers

Anne Marie Goetz, Rina Sen Gupta

Michael Koenig, Saifuddin Ahmed, Mian Bazle Hossain, A. B. M. Khorshed Alam Mozumder

We explore the determinants of domestic violence in two rural areas of Bangladesh. We found increased education, higher socioeconomic status, non-Muslim religion, and extended family residence to be associated with lower risks of violence. The effects of women's status on violence was found to be highly context-specific. In the more culturally conservative area, higher individual-level women's autonomy and short-term membership in savings and credit groups were both associated with significantly elevated risks of violence, and community-level variables were unrelated to violence. In the less culturally conservative area, in contrast, individual-level women's status indicators were unrelated to the risk of violence, and community-level measures of women's status were associated with significantly lower risks of violence, presumably by reinforcing nascent normative changes in gender relations.

* Foreword Susan V. Berresford. * Introduction Amrita Basu. Asia * Discovering the Positive Within the Negative: The Womens Movement in a Changing China Naihua Zhang with Wu Xu. * From Chipko to Sati: The Contemporary Indian Womens Movement Radha Kumar. * Men in Seclusion, Women in Public: Rokeyas Dream and Womens Struggles in Bangladesh Roushan Jahan. * Rebirthing Babaye: The Womens Movement in the Philippines Lilia Quindoza Santiago. Africa And The Middle East * The Dawn of a New Day: Redefining South African Feminism Amanda Kemp, Nozizwe Madlala, Asha Moodley, and Elaine Salo. * The Many Faces of Feminism in Namibia Dianne Hubbard and Colette Solomon. * The Mother of Warriors and Her Daughters: The Womens Movement in Kenya Wilhelmina Oduol and Wanjiku Mukabi Kabira. * Wifeism and Activism: The Nigerian Womens Movement Hussaina Abdullah. * Claiming Feminism, Claiming Nationalism: Womens Activism in the Occupied Territories Islah Jad. Latin America * Out of the Kitchens and onto the Streets: Womens Activism in Peru Cecilia Blondet. * Democracy in the Country and in the Home: The Womens Movement in Chile Alicia Frohmann and Teresa Valds. * Brazilian Feminism and Womens Movements: A Two-Way Street Vera Soares, Ana Alice Alcantara Costa, Cristina Maria Buarque, Denise Dourado Dora, and Wania SantAnna. * Building Bridges: The Growth of Popular Feminism in Mexico Marta Lamas, Alicia Martnez, Mara Luisa Tarrs, and Esperanza Tun (translated by Ellen Calmus). Russia, Europe, And The United States * Democracy Without Women Is No Democracy: Womens Struggles in Postcommunist Russia Elizabeth Waters and Anastasia Posadskaya. * Finding a Voice: Women in Postcommunist Central Europe Elzbieta Matynia. * Extending the Boundaries of Citizenship: Womens Movements of Western Europe Jane Jenson. * Feminism Lives: Building a Multicultural Womens Movement in the United States Leslie R. Wolfe and Jennifer Tucker.

V. Spike Peterson

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgments I am grateful to Georgina Waylen for her generosity in sharing prepublication work with me; and to Drucilla Barker, Jen Cohen, Deb Figart, Ellen Mutari, Julie Nelson, Paulette Olsen and Ara Wilson for conference discussions regarding feminist economics. Notes 1. Torry D. Dickinson & Robert K. Schaeffer, Fast Forward: Work, Gender, and Protest in a Changing World (Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), p. 23. 2. Joanne Cook & Jennifer Roberts, 'Towards a gendered political economy', in: Joanne Cook, Jennifer Roberts & Georgina Waylen (eds), Towards a Gendered Political Economy (Macmillan, 2000), p. 3. 3. Pertinent clarifications: I view 'feminist political economy' as a blend of feminist work primarily but not exclusively in economics, development studies, political economy, international relations and international political economy. My treatment here of political economy and 'new political economy' is very much shaped by my specialisation in international relations (IR) theory, my research on globalisation, and my belief that today's political economy is significantly global political economy. References in this article focus on feminist publications since 1995; for earlier work, see 'gender' articles in New Political Economy, especially Georgina Waylen, 'Gender, Feminism and Political Economy', New Political Economy, Vol. 2, No. 2 (1997), pp. 205–20, and note 8. I prefer 'global political economy' (GPE) to international political economy (IPE) in so far as it emphasises transnational dynamics and transdisciplinary analysis. In this study I characterise scholarship on gender as 'feminist' and do not engage recent claims that gender can or should be studied apolitically. I recognise that phenomena characterised as 'economic' are favoured here at the expense of more 'politically' oriented analyses; a substantial and expanding literature – especially in feminist IR – addresses the latter. For accessibility, I deploy conventional (though problematic) references to 'advanced industrialised countries', 'developing countries', 'Third World' and so on. Finally, slashes between words indicate similarity rather than contrast. 4. Review of Radical Political Economics has had seven such issues; see especially 'Feminist Political Economy', Vol. 33, No. 4 (2001). 5. V. Spike Peterson, 'On the Cut(ting) Edge', in: Frank P. Harvey & Michael Brecher (eds), Critical Perspectives in International Studies: Millennial Reflections on International Studies (University of Michigan Press, 2002), pp. 148–63; Marianne A. Ferber & Julie A. Nelson (eds), Beyond Economic Man: Feminist Theory and Economics (University of Chicago Press, 1993); and, especially, Gabrielle Meagher & Julie A. Nelson, 'Survey Article: Feminism in the Dismal Science', The Journal of Political Philosophy, Vol. 12, No. 1 (2004), pp. 102–26, and Georgina Waylen, 'You Still Don't Understand: Why Troubled Engagements Continue Between Feminists and (Critical) IPE', Review of International Studies (forthcoming). 6. Feminist interventions raise not only political/public, but personal/private issues that are 'disturbing' (from religious beliefs and sexual relations to who cleans the toilet and how value and power are masculinised). To the considerable extent that the implications are experienced as personally threatening, they generate defensiveness and resistance that shape receptivity to feminist critiques. 7. Important overviews and coverage of early critiques include: Diane Elson (ed.), Male Bias in the Development Process (Manchester University Press, 1991); Antonella Picchio, Social Reproduction (Cambridge University Press, 1992); Michèle A. Pujol, Feminism and Anti-feminism in Early Economic Thought (Edward Elgar, 1992); Ferber & Nelson, Beyond Economic Man; Isabella Bakker (ed.), The Strategic Silence: Gender and Economic Policy (Zed, 1994); Nancy Folbre, Who Pays for the Kids? (Routledge, 1994); Edith Kuiper & Jolande Sap (eds), Out of the Margin: Feminist Perspectives on Economics (Routledge, 1995); Julie A. Nelson, Feminism, Objectivity and Economics (Routledge, 1996); Ellen Mutari, Heather Boushey & William Fraher IV (eds), Gender and Political Economy: Incorporating Diversity into Theory and Policy (M. E. Sharpe, 1997); Jean Gardiner, Gender, Care and Economics (Macmillan, 1997); Cook, Roberts & Waylen, Towards a Gendered Political Economy; and Lourdes Benería, Maria Floro, Caren Grown & Martha MacDonald (eds), special issue on 'Globalization', Feminist Economics, Vol. 6, No. 3 (2000). 8. Post-1995 histories of the women/gender and development literatures include Joya Misra, 'Gender and the world-system: engaging the feminist literature on development', in: Thomas Hall (ed.), A World-systems Reader: New Perspectives on Gender, Urbanism, Cultures, Indigenous Peoples, and Ecology (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), pp. 105–27; Shirin M. Rai, Gender and the Political Economy of Development (Polity, 2002); and Lourdes Benería, Gender, Development and Globalization: Economics as if People Mattered (Routledge 2003). 9. Esther Boserup, Women's Role in Economic Development (St. Martin's Press, 1970); Nilufer Çağatay, Diane Elson & Caren Grown (eds), special issue on 'Gender, Adjustment and Macroeconomics', World Development, Vol. 23, No. 11 (1995); Kathleen Cloud & Nancy Garrett, 'A Modest Proposal for Inclusion of Women's Household Human Capital Production in Analysis of Structural Transformation', Feminist Economics, Vol. 3, No. 1 (1997), pp. 151–77; Saskia Sassen, Globalization and its Discontents (New Press, 1998) and 'Women's Burden: Counter-geographies of Globalization and the Feminization of Survival', Journal of International Affairs, Vol. 53, No. 2 (2000), pp. 503–24; Elisabeth Prügl, The Global Construction of Gender: Home-Based Work in the Political Economy of the 20th Century (Columbia University Press, 1999); Marilyn Waring, Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women are Worth, second edition (University of Toronto Press, 1999); Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration and Domestic Work (Stanford University Press, 2001); Deborah M. Figart, Ellen Mutari & Marilyn Power, Living Wages, Equal Wages: Gender and Labour Market Policies in the United States (Routledge, 2002); Caren Grown, Diane Elson & Nilufer Çağatay (eds), special issue on 'Growth, Trade, Finance, and Gender Inequality', World Development, Vol. 28, No. 7 (2000); Rita Mae Kelly, Jane H. Bayes, Mary E. Hawkesworth & Brigitte Young (eds), Gender, Globalization, & Democratization (Rowman & Littlefield, 2001); Susan Himmelweit, 'Making Visible the Hidden Economy: The Case for Gender-impact Analysis of Economic Policy', Feminist Economics, Vol. 8, No.1 (2002), pp. 49–70; and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Duke University Press, 2003). 10. For example, in a comprehensive study, Hewitson persuasively argues that 'neoclassical economics produces femininity as that which must be excluded for it to operate'. Gillian J. Hewitson, Feminist Economics: Interrogating the Masculinity of Rational Economic Man (Edward Elgar, 1999), p. 22. 11. For recent examples, see Cecile Jackson (ed.), Men at Work: Labour, Masculinities, Development (Frank Cass, 2001); Frances Cleaver (ed.), Masculinities Matter! Men, Gender and Development (Zed, 2002); Rai, Gender and the Political Economy of Development; Benería, Gender, Development and Globalization; and Suzanne Bergeron, Fragments of Development: Nation, Gender and the Space of Modernity (University of Michigan Press, 2004). 12. Jacqui M. Alexander & Chandra T. Mohanty (eds), Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures (Routledge, 1997); Uma Narayan & Sandra Harding (eds), Decentering the Center: Philosophy for a Multicultural, Postcolonial, and Feminist World (Indiana University Press, 2000); Rose Brewer, Cecilia Conrad & Mary C. King, 'The Complexities and Potential of Theorizing Gender, Caste, Race, and Class', Feminist Economics, Vol. 8, No. 2 (2002), pp. 3–17; Geeta Chowdhry & Sheila Nair (eds), Power, Postcolonialism and International Relations: Reading Race, Gender and Class (Routledge, 2002); and Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders. 13. Çağatay et al., 'Gender, Adjustment and Macroeconomics'; J. K. Gibson-Graham, The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy (Blackwell, 1996); Zillah R. Eisenstein, Global Obscenities: Patriarchy, Capitalism, and the Lure of Cyberfantasy (New York Press, 1998) and Against Empire: Feminisms, Racisms, and the West (Zed, 2004); Grown et al., 'Growth, Trade, Finance, and Gender Inequality'; Marianne H. Marchand & Anne Sisson Runyan (eds), Gender and Global Restructuring: Sightings, Sites and Resistances (Routledge, 2000); Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen, Nicholas G. Faraclas & Claudia von Werlholf (eds), There is an Alternative: Subsistence and Worldwide Resistance to Corporate Globalization (Zed, 2001); Dickinson & Schaeffer, Fast Forward; Suzanne Bergeron, 'Political Economy Discourses of Globalization and Feminist Politics', Signs, Vol. 26, No. 4 (2001), pp. 983–1006; Kelly et al., Gender, Globalization, & Democratization; Sheila Rowbotham & Stephanie Linkogle (eds), Women Resist Globalization: Mobilizing for Livelihood and Rights (Zed, 2001); Nancy Naples & Manisha Desai (eds), Women's Activism and Globalization: Linking Local Struggles and Transnational Politics (Routledge, 2002); Martha Gutierrez (ed.), Macro-Economics: Making Gender Matter – Concepts, Policies and Institutional Change in Developing Countries (Zed, 2003); and Valentine M. Moghadam, Globalizing Women: Transnational Feminist Networks (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). 14. Drucilla K. Barker & Edith Kuiper (eds), Toward a Feminist Philosophy of Economics (Routledge, 2003). 15. As it is typically deployed, however, constructivists (on my reading) fail to address adequately the relationship between language, power and knowledge. In particular, they resist poststructuralist claims that the meaning of all words, 'things' and subjectivities is produced through/by discursive practices that are embedded in relations of power; that language produces power by constituting the codes of meaning that govern how we think, communicate and generate knowledge claims – indeed, how we understand 'reality'. Operations of power are not extricable from the power coded into our meaning systems and their social, 'material' effects. Hence, knowledge projects that presume analytical adequacy and political relevance must address the power that inheres in governing codes, which requires, I believe, the adoption of poststructuralist/postmodernist insights. For elaboration, see V. Spike Peterson, 'Transgressing Boundaries: Theories of Knowledge, Gender, and International Relations', Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 21, No. 2 (1992), pp. 183–206, and A Critical Rewriting of Global Political Economy: Integrating Reproductive, Productive, and Virtual Economies (Routledge, 2003); for a succinct defence of poststructuralism against its most frequent criticisms, see Hewitson, Feminist Economics; and for discussion of poststructuralism/postmodernism in economics, see Gibson-Graham, The End of Capitalism; Carole Biewener, 'A Postmodern Encounter', Socialist Review, Vol. 27, Nos. 1 & 2 (1999), pp. 71–96; Stephen Cullenberg, Jack Amariglio & David F. Ruccio (eds), Postmodernism, Economics and Knowledge (Routledge, 2001); Nitasha Kaul, 'The anxious identities we inhabit', in: D. Barker & E. Kuiper (eds), Toward a Feminist Philosophy of Economics (Routledge, 2003), pp. 194–210; and Eiman O. Zein-Elabdin & S. Charusheela (eds), Postcolonialism Meets Economics (Routledge, 2004). 16. Ferber & Nelson, Beyond Economic Man; Marilyn Power, 'Social Provisioning as a Starting Point for Feminist Economics', Feminist Economics, Vol. 10, No. 3 (2004), pp. 3–20; and Drucilla K. Barker & Susan F. Feiner, Liberating Economics: Feminist Perspectives on Families, Work, and Globalization (University of Michigan Press, 2004). 17. On sexualities, see M. V. Lee Badgett, 'Gender, Sexuality, and Sexual Orientation: All in the Feminist Family?', Feminist Economics, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1995), pp. 121–40; and Rosemary Hennessey, Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism (Routledge, 2000). 18. Poststructuralism is particularly associated with cultural studies, where cultural and literary phenomena are, appropriately, the central focus. Early poststructuralist theory necessarily highlighted discourse and culture to criticise and counteract orthodox understandings of 'reality' as pre-discursive, or independent of intersubjective meaning systems. But poststructuralism/postmodernism explicitly rejects conventional dichotomies and categorical separations in favour of relational/contextual analysis that exposes how cultural codes produce, and are produced by, material 'reality'. Moreover (see note 15), it affords critiques of how power operates that would advance the project of 'not just understanding the world but changing it.' 19. On Sen and economic rights respectively, see Bina Agarwal, Jane Humphries & Ingrid Robeyns (eds), special issue on 'Amartya Sen's Work and Ideas: A Gender Perspective', Feminist Economics, Vol. 9, No. 2/3 (2003); and Laura Parisi, Gendered Disjunctures: Globalization and Women's Rights, dissertation, University of Arizona, 2004. Microcredit loan programmes get mixed feminist reviews; see, for example, Anne Marie Goetz & Rina Sen Gupta, 'Who Takes the Credit? Gender, Power, and Control over Loan Use in Rural Credit Programs in Bangladesh', World Development, Vol. 24, No. 1 (1996), pp. 45–64; S. Charusheela, 'On History, Love, and Politics', Rethinking Marxism, Vol. 12, No. 4 (2000), pp. 45–61; Winifred Poster & Zakia Salime, 'The limits of microcredit', in: Nancy A. Naples & Manisha Desai (eds), Women's Activism and Globalization (Routledge, 2002), pp. 189–219; and Suzanne Bergeron, 'Challenging the World Bank's narrative of inclusion', in: Amitava Kumar (ed.), World Bank Literature (University of Minnesota Press, 2003), pp. 157–71. 20. For reasons of space, in this section I cite only key references not already identified herein; for elaboration of argumentation and extensive citations, see Peterson, A Critical Rewriting of Global Political Economy; and 'Getting real: the necessity of critical poststructuralism in Global Political Economy', in: Marieke de Goede (ed.), International Political Economy and Poststructural Politics (Palgrave, forthcoming). 21. Peter Drucker, 'Trading Places', The National Interest (Spring 2005), p. 103. 22. Guy Standing, Global Labour Flexibility: Seeking Distributive Justice (Macmillan, 1999); and Christa Wichterich, The Globalized Woman: Reports from a Future of Inequality (Zed, 2000). 23. Manuel Castells, The Information Age, Volume 1, The Rise of the Network Society, second edition (Blackwell, 2000). 24. Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contested Identities (Routledge, 1996); Manuel Castells, The Information Age, Volume 2, The Power of Identity (Blackwell, 1997); and Sassen, Globalization and its Discontents and 'Women's Burden'. 25. See, respectively, S. Charusheela, 'Empowering work? Bargaining models reconsidered', in: Drucilla K. Barker & Edith Kuiper (eds), Toward a Feminist Philosophy of Economics (Routledge, 2003), pp. 287–303; and Naila Kabeer, 'Globalization, Labor Standards, and Women's Rights: Dilemmas of Collective (In)action in an Independent World', Feminist Economics, Vol. 10, No. 1 (2004), pp. 3–36, for problematising 'Western' claims that 'work is empowering' or that enforcing global labour standards serves the interests of export workers in poor countries. 26. Wichterich, The Globalized Woman. 27. On erosion of women's wellbeing and social capital through 'overworking' women, see David H. Ciscel & Julia A. Heath, 'To Market, To Market: Imperial Capitalism's Destruction of Social Capital and the Family, Review of Radical Political Economics, Vol. 33, No. 4 (2001), pp. 401–14; and Martha MacDonald, Shelley Phipps & Lynn Lethbridge, 'Mothers' Milk and Measures of Economic Output', Feminist Economics, Vol. 11, No. 1 (2005), pp. 63–94. For the most comprehensive analysis of the crisis of social reproduction, see Isabella Bakker & Stephen Gill (eds), Power, Production and Social Reproduction: Human In/security in the Global Political Economy (Palgrave, 2003). 28. Debates on how to theorise, define, measure and evaluate informalisation are addressed in Peterson, A Critical Rewriting of Global Political Economy, ch. 4. The underground economy has been estimated to be worth US$9 trillion (The Economist, 28 August 1999, p. 59); the value of 'housework' to be US$10–15 trillion (Mary Ann Tetreault & Ronnie D. Lipschutz, Global Politics as if People Mattered (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), p. 25). 29. The World's Women 2000: Trends and Statistics (United Nations, 2000), pp. 120–7. 30. Jean, Pyle, 'Critical globalization studies and gender', in: Richard P. Appelbaum & William I. Robinson (eds), Critical Globalization Studies (Routledge, 2005), pp. 249–58. 31. A variety of sources provide the following estimates (in US dollars, per year) – of 'white collar crime' in the US: $200 billion; of profits from trafficking migrants: $3.5 billion; of money laundering: as much as $2.8 trillion; of tax revenue lost to the US by hiding assets offshore: $70 billion; of tax evasion costs to the US government: $195 billion. See Peterson, A Critical Rewriting of Global Political Economy, pp. 196, 201. 32. Peter Drucker, 'The Global Economy and the Nation-State', Foreign Affairs, Vol. 76, No. 5 (1997), p. 162. 33. Lourdes Benería, 'Globalization, Gender and the Davos Man', Feminist Economics, Vol. 5, No. 3 (1999), pp. 61–83; Charlotte Hooper, Manly States: Masculinities, International Relations, and Gender Politics (Columbia University Press, 2001); and Stacey Mayhall, Riding the Bull/Wrestling the Bear, dissertation, York University, 2002. 34. These claims are variously documented in Nahid Aslanbeigui & Gale Summerfield, 'The Asian Crisis, Gender, and the International Financial Architecture', Feminist Economics, Vol. 6, No. 3 (2000), pp. 81–104; Nahid Aslanbeigui & Gale Summerfield, 'Risk, Gender and the International Financial Architecture', International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, Vol. 15, No. 1 (2001), pp. 7–26; Grown et al., 'Growth, Trade, Finance, and Gender Inequality'; Thanh-Dam Truong, 'The Underbelly of the Tiger: Gender and the Demystification of the Asian Miracle', Review of International Political Economy, Vol. 6, No. 2 (1999), pp. 133–65; Robert O'Brien, Anne Marie Goetz, Jan Aart Scholte & Marc Williams, Contesting Global Governance: Multilateral Economic Institutions and Global Social Movements (Cambridge University Press, 2000); Ajit Singh & Ann Zammit, 'International Capital Flows: Identifying the Gender Dimension', World Development, Vol. 28, No. 7 (2000), pp. 1249–68; Mario Floro & Gary Dymski, 'Financial Crisis, Gender, and Power: An Analytical Framework', World Development, Vol. 28, No. 7 (2000), pp. 1269–83; and Irene Van Staveren, 'Global Finance and Gender', in: Jan Aart Scholte & Albrecht Schnabel (eds), Civil Society and Global Finance (Routledge, 2002), pp. 228–46. 35. Women are the primary consumers of goods and services designed to 'improve' individual appearance: from cosmetics, hairstyles and clothes to dieting programmes and surgical procedures. This reflects the tremendous pressure on girls and women to appear aesthetically and sexually attractive as a measure of their social/economic value, and subjects them disproportionately to the disciplining effects of marketisation and resource depletion on 'unnecessary' expenditures. 36. For example, consumerism's commodification of culture has effects worldwide on how people think (due to the global, though always locally-mediated, exposure to advertising and marketing messages), what resources they have (due to naturalising the ideology of elite consumption), and what work they do (due to production processes driven by Northern consumption).

Raewyn Connell

518 Feminist Studies 40, no. 3. © 2014 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Raewyn Connell Rethinking Gender from the South Dilemmas of Feminism Going Global From the time of the first UN World Conference on Women, in Mexico City in 1975, the hegemony of the global North in feminism was contested. That historical moment, as Chilla Bulbeck explained in One World Women’s Movement, posed the questions of global solidarity and global inequality at the same time, launching a debate in which ambiguities in the global project of feminism quickly became evident.1 The debate has continued, though on changing terms. It’s now a familiar story. Within the North, Black feminists challenged the universal­ ized models of women’s oppression put forward by White radical and liberal feminist thinkers in the 1970s. The challenge was reinforced by the reception of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera in the United States, by the rise of deconstructionist feminism and queer theory in the following years, and by the growing popularity of Kimberlé Crenshaw ’s concept of “intersectionality.” Even the numerical expansion of women’s and gender studies programs played a part, creating a more socially diverse audience for feminist scholarship. Perhaps the most important change in the North, in terms of global feminism, was the work of a generation of expatriate scholars, from Gayatri Spivak to Deniz Kandiyoti, who created a new conceptual space 1. Chilla Bulbeck, One World Women’s Movement (London: Pluto Press, 1988). Raewyn Connell 519 in the metropole’s universities. This new space was epitomized by Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s famous essay “Under Western Eyes” and the collection Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism in which it finally appeared. Mohanty and her colleagues identified the colonial gaze in Northern gender scholarship and sharply challenged the stereotypes of “third-world women” in Northern feminist thought.2 Their critique has been heard. In the last twenty years it has become normal for feminist scholarship in the United States and Europe to acknowledge global context and global difference. This is plainly seen in textbooks. To take one example, the valuable US reader Gender through the Prism of Difference includes items from Bangladesh, Mexico, Spain, Guatemala, indigenous North America, and a good deal about migrat­ ion and migrants.3 Thanks to scholars such as Mohanty, Kandiyoti and Spivak, and the rise of Black and Latina feminism, postcolonial feminism has become a fixture in North American curricula and, more recently, in Europe.4 Courses on gender now emphasize, rather than elide, diversity. A shift has occurred in feminist research as well as teaching. Northern journals (including Feminist Studies) make a point of including contributions from around the world and publish special issues on feminism in the Arab world, India, Africa, or Latin America. Global surveys of knowledge have become a definite genre of gender studies. Witness Women’s Activism and Globalization, Handbook of Studies on Men and Masculinities, and Global Gender Research: Transnational Perspectives, all published in the North, and all making efforts to think at a global or regional level and include material from the global South.5 Increasingly, 2. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarhip and Colonial Discourses,” in Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, ed. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). 3. Maxine Baca Zinn, Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, and Michael A. Messner, eds., Gender through the Prism of Difference, 2nd ed. (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2000). 4. See, for example, Julia Reuter and Paula-Irene Villa, eds., Postkoloniale Soziologie : Empirische Befunde, theoretische Anschlüsse, Politische Intervention [Postcolonial sociology: empirical findings, theoretical integrations, political intervention] (Bielefeld: transcript, 2009). 5. Nancy A. Naples and Manisha Desai, eds., Women’s Activism and Globalization : Linking Local Struggles and Transnational Politics (New York: Routledge, 2002); Michael S. Kimmel, Jeff Hearn, and Raewyn Connell, eds., Handbook of Studies on Men and Masculinities (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005); Christine 520 Raewyn Connell globalization has become an object of knowledge within gender studies. In the journals, the number of papers recorded in the Web of Knowledge database whose titles or abstracts combined the term “globalization” with a gender term rose tenfold between the early 1990s...

Geraldine Healy, Harriet Bradley, Cynthia Forson

Using Acker's conceptual framework of inequality regimes, this article explores the experiences of Bangladeshi, Caribbean and Pakistani women working in three parts of the public sector: health, local government and higher education. Our concern is to investigate how inequality regimes are sustained, despite the existence in the public sector of more sophisticated policy development and stronger legal duties than in the private sector. Drawing on interviews with managers and with women employees, the study demonstrates the complexity and unevenness in the way inequality regimes are produced, reproduced and rationalized. Utilising what Crenshaw calls an ‘intersectional sensibility’ helps reveal the persistence of intersectional inequalities in organizations explicitly committed to challenging inequality regimes.

Pranab Kumar Panday

This article explores the state of women's participation in the political process in Bangladesh. Available data substantiates that women's organizations, donors, and nongovernmental organizations have influenced the government of Bangladesh to introduce quotas for women. Although quotas have increased the total number of women in political arenas, their representation in the decision-making process has not yet been ensured. They still face several social, cultural, and religious challenges which hinder their participation and they are still neglected by their male counterparts. Once they ask for their rights, they are very often victimized, assaulted, and harassed.

Cecilie Thun

This article explores Norwegian female academics' experiences with academic motherhood in an organizational perspective. A main finding is that academia as an organization is greedy, uncertain, and has ‘blind spots' that reveal gender bias related to gender and parental status, especially mothers. By analysing the link between gendered organization of work and the legitimatizing of gender inequality, the article reveals ‘gender blindness' in the academic organization concerning gender and parental status. The article concludes that changes in academia — in line with academic capitalism — may indicate that the Norwegian model of work–life balance is under pressure. This article suggests that the organizational conditions for academic motherhood are important factors in order to understand the persistence of gender inequality.

Shireen Huq

Summaries This article explores the values and limitations of a rights?based approach to development focusing in particular on its potential for extending notions of citizenship to include women. It discusses the function of international conventions as a mechanism through which citizens can hold their governments accountable. The article then examines the work of a women' s activist organisation in Bangladesh, Naripokkho, and explores how it has mobilised around the conventions ratified by the government to advance the rights and citizenship of women.

Naila Kabeer

Struggles for gender justice by women's movements have sought to give legal recognition to gender equality at both national and international levels. However, such society-wide goals may have little resonance in the lives of individual men and women in contexts where a culture of individual rights is weak or missing and the stress is on the moral economy of kinship and community. While empowerment captures the myriad ways in which intended and unintended changes can enhance the ability of individual women to exercise greater control over their own lives, it does not necessarily lead to their engagement in collective struggles for gender justice. This paper argues that ideas about citizenship, as both legal status and potential for action, can help bridge this gulf between institutional and individual change. It draws on empirical research from Afghanistan and Bangladesh to explore the extent to which efforts to empower women by development organisations have also encompassed discourses of citizenship which allow them to articulate, and act on, their vision for a just society.

Mark R. Thompson

t is striking how often, over the last decade-and-a-half, women have led successful popular uprisings against dictatorships in Asia. Corazon C. Aquino in the Philippines (1986), Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan (1988), Khaleda Zia and Sheikh Hasina Wajed in Bangladesh (1990) and Megawati Sukarnoputri in Indonesia (1998) inspired and organized mass protests against non-democratic regimes. They then guided precarious transitions to democracy. Aquino was the Philippines' first president after the Marcos dictatorship. Bhutto served twice as prime minister in the post-Zia era in Pakistan. Khaleda Zia and Sheikh Hasina have alternated as prime minister since the end of military rule in Bangladesh. Megawati, who was initially elected vice president, succeeded to the Indonesian presidency after accusations of corruption and mismanagement led the upper house to dismiss Abdurrahman Wahid from office in July 2001. Moreover, women currently lead two democratic movements involved in ongoing struggles against authoritarianism. In Burma (which the military dictatorship has renamed Myanmar), Aung San Suu Kyi remains the country's most important oppositionist despite the 1998 massacre of protesters, the junta's refusal to recognize her party's overwhelming victory in the May 1990 elections, and her long house arrest. In Malaysia, Wan Azizah Wan Ismail leads a new opposition party and was a major figure in the opposition 199899 reformasi movement that attempted to unseat the long-reigning prime minister Mahathir Mohamad.

Shelley Feldman

Through an analysis of how Bangladeshi NGOs have become institutionalised, the author examines patterns of bureaucratisation and professionalisation to argue that NGOs are part of a process of incorporation that mediates opposition to gender and other structural inequalities. Two important tendencies--the growing partnership between NGOs, the state, and donor agencies, and the discursive shift from social welfare and redistribution to individualism, entrepreneurship, and self-reliance--exemplify these processes. The paper shows how institutionalisation, accompanied by the conflation of civil society and NGOs, masks the loss of member-citizens' voices, channelling opposition through NGOs in ways that often compromise their interests.

Abdullahel Hadi

Sexual violence against women has never been new in history. What is new in the developmental literature is the discovery that this kind of act is wrong and has direct impact on women's health. Using data from a nationally representative sample, this article attempts to improve our understanding about the prevalence and determinants of sexual violence within marriage in Bangladesh. Findings reveal that the probability of a woman to be sexually abused increases if she is young and illiterate and hails from a landless, poor family. The risk of sexual abuse is less among women who participate in credit programs and financially contribute to their families. The article concludes that the context of sexual violence can be changed by involving vulnerable women in productive activities.

Harald Kinateder, Tonmoy Choudhury, Rashid Zaman, Simone Domenico Scagnelli et al.

Patricia Jeffery, Amrita Basu

Appropriating Gender explores the paradoxical relationship of women to religious politics in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh. Contrary to the hopes of feminists, many women have responded to religious nationalist appeals; contrary to the hopes of religious nationalists, they have also asserted their gender, class, caste, and religious identities; contrary to the hopes of nation states, they have often challenged state policies and practices. Through a comparative South Asia perspective, Appropriating Gender explores the varied meanings and expressions of gender identity through time, by location, and according to political context. The first work to focus on women's agency and activism within the South Asian context, Appropriating Gender is an outstanding contribution to the field of gender studies.

Mari Teigen, Lena Wängnerud

Cultural explanations are frequent in social science research. In gender studies, they are especially common in cross-country comparative research that attempts to explain variations in everyday life situations for women and men. A noticeable example is found in the book Rising Tide: Gender Equality and Cultural Change Around the World , by Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris (2003). Inglehart and Norris construct a gender-equality scale from measurements on attitudes among citizens regarding women as political leaders, women's professional and educational rights, and women's traditional role as mother. The results show that Finland, Sweden, West Germany, Canada, and Norway are the countries most influenced by egalitarian values. At the other end of the spectrum countries like Nigeria, Morocco, Egypt, Bangladesh, and Jordan are found (p. 33). The authors demonstrate that egalitarian values are systematically related to the actual conditions of women's and men's lives. They conclude that modernization underpins cultural change, that is, attitudinal change from traditional to gender-equal values, and that these cultural changes have major impact on gender-equality processes.

Mai P., D. Lawrence Kincaid

Shabuj Chaya is a weekly television drama broadcast during a 13-week period in Bangladesh in 2000. It used an entertainment-education format to increase health knowledge and to promote visits to health clinic and modern contraceptive use. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate how a relatively new statistical technique, propensity score matching in conjunction with structural equation modeling, can be used to obtain an unbiased estimate of changes in health outcomes that can be attributed to exposure to the drama. The analysis is conducted with data from an after-only, cross-sectional survey of 4,492 men and women from the intended audience. The results from propensity score matching approximate what would be expected from a randomized control group design.

Sidney Ruth Schuler, Rachel Lenzi, Shamsul Huda Badal, Sohela Nazneen

Intimate partner violence (IPV) may increase as women in patriarchal societies become empowered, implicitly or explicitly challenging prevailing gender norms. Prior evidence suggests an inverse U-shaped relationship between women's empowerment and IPV, in which violence against women first increases and then decreases as more egalitarian gender norms gradually gain acceptance. By means of focus-group discussions and in-depth interviews with men in 10 Bangladeshi villages, this study explored men's evolving views of women, gender norms and the legitimacy of men's perpetration of IPV in the context of a gender transition. It examines men's often-contradictory narratives about women's empowerment and concomitant changes in norms of masculinity, and identifies aspects of women's empowerment that are most likely to provoke a male backlash. Findings suggest that men's growing acceptance of egalitarian gender norms and their self-reported decreased engagement in IPV are driven largely by pragmatic self-interest: their desire to improve their economic status and fear of negative consequences of IPV.

Haradhan Kumar Mohajan

This paper tries to analyze the origin and progress of global feminism. Feminism is a mass movement commenced by women of all groups to eradicate all forms of feminist oppressions by men that are prevailing in a patriarchal society. It always fights against all types of oppressions on women. It is a procedure that takes attempts to understand and conceptualize gender roles and advocates for the annexation of women’s interests in social organization. It tries to explain the phenomenon of gender inequality. It is considered as a politics to achieve gender equality in all spheres of the society. Feminists support of ensuring equal individual rights and liberties for women and men. This study takes attempts to discuss a comprehensive understanding of feminism, and the different variants of feminism. This paper also tries to highlight the major challenges that the feminists are facing and the future goals of the feminist movement should be.