With more fundamentalists predicted to win seats in the forthcoming election, the future is likely to see once again the use of religion as an instrument of extreme gender based oppression in Afghanistan. Will President Karzai use his remaining days in office to cement the foundations of women’s r
Attacks on Cecile Kyenge, Italy’s first black minister, reveal interlocked legacies of xenophobia and sexism that continue to manifest in Italian public life.
Whilst LGBTQ rights activists welcomed the recent rulings by the US Supreme Court on "same sex" marriage, Lauren Suchman questions the media's conflation of gender, sex and sexuality in reporting these cases, and argues for "same-sex marriage" to be recognised as "non-heterosexual marriage"
New policies brought in to address violence against women in the UK are being implemented by large generic institutions at the expense of smaller specialist preventative and support organisations. For black and ethnic minority women, paternalistic 'management' appears to be inseparable from disemp
Americans have grown more supportive of same-sex marriages, gun control, immigration reform and even taxes on the wealthiest individuals. Why, then, have the cultural and political wars over abortion accelerated?
Racist and patriarchal ideas underpin the new ‘family planning’ initiatives promoted by DfID, USAID and the Gates Foundation which deny women in the global South real control over their bodies. The appropriation of the notion of ‘women’s right to choose’ for neoliberal population control must be c
With the publication of the updated Beyond the Fragments, Hilary Wainwright spoke to Rahila Gupta about the politics of knowledge and using her experience of the women’s movement to address the question of how to realise the capacities of each for the benefit of all as the basis for alternative, h
Women can only hope for a better future if the next generation of Afghans is taught to unlearn religious, cultural, and gender prejudices that are instrumental in their oppression. Education is pivotal to this vision, and it is the single attainable factor that keeps the hope of our women alive
At a time when global warming requires that we do our most creative thinking, public education and free thought are under attack by both austerity programs and religious fundamentalism. So where are our new creative thinkers supposed to come from?
The way in which gender figures in the picture of anti-immigrant sentiment is rarely discussed, yet anti-immigrant sentiment, wherever it is found, represents a rejection of ‘feminized’ populations and a concern with a national illusion that is distinctly masculine.
Breaking the mould of uncritical US media reporting on Israel-Palestine, a recent broadcast by This American Life draws attention to the routinised disruption of Palestinian lives as central to domination under occupation, but fails to pick up on a gender perspective which sheds critical light on
As men we have to recognize that our gender is more prone to violence and most sorts of crime. But does this mean we are unchangeably so? Personal experience, critical thinking and collective action can present a more optimistic picture, says Richard Johnson.
