Artist Sarah Maple’s new exhibition places feminism firmly at the centre of its work, using comedy to explore 21st century gender issues. Heather McRobie asks whether feminism is finally coming back to the fore in the art world
In the days ahead a struggle looms over women's human rights and gender justice in Egypt. Will the Muslim Sisters rise to the occasion?
Les femmes au Burundi ont pu obtenir des modifications radicales du Code pénal, faisant du viol une infraction sanctionnée par la prison à perpétuité. Le tabou interdisant de dénoncer la violence sexuelle a été brisé et la vie de tant des femmes – et des hommes – a commencé à changer profondément,
Women in Burundi have won radical changes to the country's Penal Code, making rape punishable by life imprisonment. The taboo of speaking out against sexual violence has been broken and the lives of some women - and men - are beginning to change forever, says Lyduine Ruronona
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
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
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
