A Change of Tongue Antjie Krog

A mix of reportage, memoir, fiction and poetry, A Change of Tongue offers a portrait of South Africa in the decade following the abolishment of apartheid and the country’s first democratic elections.

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? Jeanette Winterson

When Jeanette left home at sixteen because she was in love with a woman, her Pentecostal mother asked her: Why be happy when you could be normal? This is Jeanette's true story of a life's work to find happiness: a search for belonging, love, identity, a home.

The Space Between Us: Negotiating Gender and National Identities in Conflict

Cynthia Cockburn

Cynthia Cockburn studies three women’s organizations working towards peace in Northern Ireland, Israel/Palestine and Bosnia/Herzegovina, and explores how they fill the dangerous space around them with words instead of bullets.

Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference

Cordelia Fine

Continuing inequality is increasingly justified in the media by calling on immutable biological differences between the male and the female brain. Drawing on the latest research in developmental psychology, neuroscience, and education, Delusions of Gender rebuts these claims, showing how old myths, dressed up in new scientific finery, help perpetuate the status quo.

Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center Bell Hooks

Feminist Theory argues that contemporary feminists must acknowledge the full complexity and diversity of women's experience to create a mass movement to end women's oppression. Hooks maintains that mainstream feminism's reliance on white, middle-class, and professional spokeswomen obscures the involvement, leadership, and centrality of women of colour and poor women in the movement for women's liberation.

Rethinking Homonationalism Jasbir Puar

Jasbir Puar discusses homonationalism as a facet of modernity and a historical shift marked by the entrance of (some) homosexual bodies as worthy of protection by nation-states, due to a constitutive and fundamental reorientation of the relationship between the state, capitalism, and sexuality. Read the full article here.

Citizen Action in the Time of the Network Nishant Shah

Through a case study of the ‘Shanzhai Spring Festival Gala’ in China, Nishant Shah illustrates the need for a new conceptual framework and vocabulary to account for the new conditions of citizen action in the age of digital activism and the potentials for political change and intervention therein. Read the full article here.

Measuring Unpaid Care Work with Public Policies In Mind Valeria Esquivel

Time Use Surveys have been carried out in more than 60 countries to measure Unpaid Care Work, but they are rarely used in evidence-based, gender-sensitive policymaking. Valeria Esquivel discusses some of the reasons for the gap between the availability of time-use data and their lack of influence in informing gender-sensitive policymaking, and makes some suggestions for ways to bridge it. Read the full article here.

Have the Millennium Development Goals promoted gender equality and women’s rights?

AWID

AWID looks at some of the achievements of the MDGS vis-à-vis gender equality and women’s rights, while also examining the limitations of the goals. They argue that the MDGs did not integrate a full vision of gender equality and women’s rights as enshrined in key human rights instruments and significant inter-governmental agreements. Still, the MDGs brought some opportunities to advance women’s rights and gender equality. Read the full article here.

Violence Against Women and Girls Cecilia Umul, International Indigenous Women’s Forum

In this article, Cecilia Umul dwells on the issue of violence against indigenous women and girls, who are in a context of colonization and militarization, racism and social exclusion, economic policies and "development" that increases poverty. Moving forward, Umul outlines some key objectives in eradicating structural violence against indigenous women, youth, adolescents and girls. Read the full article here.