Where the female body - through its societal projections in media, art, politics and religion - has always formed the first port of women's oppression, it is necessary to consider whether attempts to reclaim it through topless protests in the public arena are more likely to defy or to reify existi
The concept of wilaya (guardianship over women) is key to discrimination against women. Debates over different interpretations of guardianship under Muslim law ultimately fail to address the key premises underlying hegemonic notions of masculinity and femininity and the institutions that propagate
The lack of institutional concern for epidemic levels of sexual harassment and assault in Egypt is part of the larger neglect of the issue of gender equality by the post-revolutionary powers, says Heather McRobie.
Democracy is more of a culture than a way of governing or a political system. It is a historical process that must go through its evolution. No country can be a quasi democracy. It is in fact democratic people that make a society democratic, says Nobel Peace laureate Shirin Ebadi
دموکراسی قبل از آنکه یک روش حکومتی و یا سیستم سیاسی باشد، یک فرهنگ و پروسه تاریخی است که باید سیر تکاملی خود را طی کند. هیچ کشوری یک شبه دموکرات نمی شود. در حقیقت .انسان های دموکرات هستند که جامعه را دموکرات می
As the renewed threats against politician Cecile Kyenge show, the problem of the abuse of women in Italy's public sphere persists. This cannot be dismissed as just a debate about censorship. Italy’s gender question is a wound left unhealed.
The term “Islamophobia” is everywhere, but its meanings work at cross purposes - to liberals, it refers to discrimination and hate crimes that can be addressed through existing laws, but to fundamentalists, it refers to offenses against religion that must be addressed through censorship or death.
The authors of the re-launched Beyond the Fragments take a feminist approach to healing a divided left. They put women’s exploitation by capital firmly on the agenda. But where is the challenge to patriarchy?
American radical feminist Shulamith Firestone was a leading theorist of 70s feminism who died a lonely death last summer. Responding to Susan Faludi’s psychological profile of Firestone in The New Yorker last month, Kathleen B. Jones examines Firestone’s contribution to women’s liberation
One lesson from the 1979 Iranian revolution and the 2011 Arab revolutions is that activists seeking to promote women’s rights, human rights and the transition to democracy must challenge patriarchy from within the Muslim legal tradition.
The bloggers of Shahbagh are facing a backlash – hunted by fundamentalists, denounced in mosques as atheists, arrested by the government. Those abroad are under threat. Meanwhile activists are still demanding justice and cyber movements are using their mobilising power to deal with disasters.
The failure to translate the momentum of the heady days of the January 2011 protests in Egypt into an effective revolutionary force is closely related to the organisational forms adopted by oppositional movements. This poses broader questions for social movements worldwide, argues Maha Abdelrahman
