The feminist critique of religion should not appease the strident voices which label secularism as fundamentalist or militant by promoting a secularism that has had its teeth drawn. Feminists must continue to argue for a robust secularism and the right to stand against religion, argues Rahila Gupt
What are the evolving narratives of the Arab Spring? Hoda Elsadda reports from a conference in Cairo examining the conflicting narratives of and about the Arab revolutions, and the geopolitics of these narratives
Governments are constructing social policy based on misrepresentations and stereotypes about poor people and welfare claimants, rather than by reference to the structural inequalities that affect everyone, argues Kate Donald
While the Iranian government authorities attempted to appropriate the Arab spring, claiming it was a continuation of the Iranian revolution of 1979, the events revived popular longing for democratic change in Iran. Ziba Mir-Hosseini tells Deniz Kandiyoti that no movement for change in Iran can aff
The push to police the way that women dress continues across Africa on the pretext that it causes sexual harassment and violence against women. What really underlies this censorship of women’s expression? asks Bibi Bakare-Yusuf
It’s not an individualist but a collective feminism that we need, one that measures success not by how high a woman can climb, but by the condition in which most women remain, says Shereen Essof
The various social contracts that are emerging between the State and the dominant religious right minority leaderships in the UK trade on nothing less than the human rights of minority women, says Pragna Patel
More than a hundred women's seminaries have been set up by the Iranian state since the 1979 revolution. Yet the number of women candidates standing in next month's parliamentary election is the lowest for twenty years, Mirjam Künkler explores why this may be so
Despite the African Union's commitment to strengthening women's access and control of land by placing land rights in the public domain of human rights, it is silent on the issue of land grabs. This is a gap that the AU's land policy framework needs to plug, says Kathambi Kinoti
The Egyptian elections delivered a parliament that has one of the lowest rates of female representation in the world. Yet this is the parliament that expresses the political will of the people of Egypt. It may also be one that ignores the social realities of gender and of women’s political partici
In breach of the government's pledge to make the asylum system sensitive to the needs of women, officials are asking women to disclose information about sex work and abuse in the earshot of queuing strangers, and in front of their own children. This lack of privacy can have disastrous consequences
"We are constantly aware of our gender and of being watched and judged because of it, so we end up "performing". But in taking to the streets there are no performative acts and there is no audience. Now I feel that there is no going back, After all, there is no text to follow, and no director. It
