This book chronicles five decades of struggle to introduce family planning into one of the largest, most complex countries in sub-Saharan Africa: the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
...Interweaving details of major political, social, and economic events into the history of family planning in DRC (formerly Zaïre), the book analyses the achievements and setbacks of five decades of programmatic work. President Mobutu's 1972 discourse on Naissances Désirables (desirable births) opened the door to organized family planning programs, which gained considerable momentum in the 1980s despite societal norms favoring large families. Two pillages and armed conflict paralyzed development work during the decade of the 1990s, and family planning was one of multiple public health programs that struggled to regain lost ground in the 2000s. With new donor funding and implementing agencies, the 2010s witnessed rapid programmatic expansion and improved strategies. By 2018, family planning was operating as a well-oiled machine. But progress is fragile. The book ends by tracing the deleterious effects of the colonial period to contemporary programming and individual contraceptive use. It asks hard questions about donor financing. And it details the six conditions needed to accelerate family planning progress in the DRC, in pursuit of providing millions of Congolese women and men with the means of controlling their own fertility.
The book will be of interest to development and public health researchers and practitioners, as well as to historians of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Broken Silence brings together for the first time many of
Japan's leading feminists, women who have been bucking the social
mores of a patriarchal society for years but who remain virtually
unknown ...outside Japan. While Japan is often thought to be without a
significant feminist presence, these interviews and essays reveal a
vital community of women fighting for social change. Sandra
Buckley's dialogues with poets, journalists, teachers, activists,
and businesswomen exemplify the diversity of Japanese feminism: we
meet Kanazumi Fumiko, a lawyer who assists women in a legal system
that has long discriminated against them; Kora Rumiko, a poet who
reclaims and redefines language to convey her experiences as a
woman; Nakanishi Toyoko, founder of the Japanese Women's Bookstore;
and Ueno Chizuko, a professor who has tackled such issues as
pornography and abortion reform both in and out of the academy.
These women speak to a host of issues-the politics of language, the
treatment of women in medicine and law, the deeply entrenched role
of women as mothers and caregivers, the future of feminism in
Japan, and the relationship between Japanese feminists and
"western" feminisms. Broken Silence will do much to dispel
Western stereotypes about Japanese women and challenge North
American attitudes about feminism abroad. With a timeline,
glossary, and comprehensive list of feminist organizations, this is
a long overdue collection sure to inform and excite all those
interested in feminism and Japan.
Interdisciplinary in perspective, this book explores contemporary struggles around ‘identity politics’ in Europe, offering a unique glimpse into contemporary tensions and paradoxes surrounding ...identities, belonging, exclusions and their deep-seated gendered, colonial and racist legacies. With a particular focus on the Nordic region, it provides insights into the ways in which people who find themselves in minoritized positions struggle against multiple injustices. Through a series of case studies documenting counter-struggles against racist, colonialist, sexist forms of discrimination and exclusion, Transforming Identities in Contemporary Europe asks how the paradigm and politics of the welfare state operates to discriminate against the most marginalized, by instating a naturalized hierarchy of human-ness. As such it will appeal to scholars across the social sciences and humanities with interests in race, gender, colonialism and postcolonialism, citizenship and belonging.
"This book focuses on the gendered experiences of environmental change across different geographies and social contexts in South Asia and on diverse strategies of adapting to climate variability. The ...book analyzes how changes in rainfall patterns, floods, droughts, heatwaves and landslides affect those who are directly dependent on the agrarian economy. It examines the socio-economic pressures, including the increase in women’s work burdens both in production and reproduction on gender relations. It also examines coping mechanisms such as male migration and the formation of women’s collectives which create space for agency and change in rigid social relations. The volume looks at perspectives from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal to present the nuances of gender relations across borders along with similarities and differences across geographical,socio-cultural and policy contexts. This book will be of interest to researchers and students of sociology, development, gender, economics, environmental studies and South Asian studies. It will also be useful for policymakers, NGOs and think tanks working in the areas of gender, climate change and development."
The ebook edition of this title is Open Access, thanks to Knowledge Unlatched funding, and freely available to read online. Gender Violence, the Law, and Society analyses and explores the historical ...and cultural roots of issues of gender-based and sexual violence in Japan, India and South Africa. Using a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary methods, this edited collection highlights the intersection of marginalized gender and sexual identities – such as raped women, gay men and women who are victims of commodified violence – and marginalized geographic areas.Taking a structured and holistic approach, the chapters authors break down issues across three levels: violence, state, and society. By exploring case studies from the three selected geographical areas, both the roots and effects and related organization and belief systems are explored in their relations to the issues of sexual and gendered violence. The chapters expose and consider the complexities and nuances in each country in terms of their varying cultural practices, their religious and caste systems, and racial disparities, whilst exploring and expanding the understanding of the concept of violence itself. Gender Violence, the Law, and Society takes an important step towards synthesizing area-specific issues and knowledge into a more comprehensive and global body of knowledge on the apparently universal appearances of forms of sexual and gendered violence.
This volume brings together the most innovative historical work on the conjoined themes of gender and consumption. In thirteen pioneering essays, some of the most important voices in the field ...consider how Western societies think about and use goods, how goods shape female, as well as male, identities, how labor in the family came to be divided between a male breadwinner and a female consumer, and how fashion and cosmetics shape women's notions of themselves and the society in which they live. Together these essays represent the state of the art in research and writing about the development of modern consumption practices, gender roles, and the sexual division of labor in both the United States and Europe.
Covering a period of two centuries, the essays range from Marie Antoinette's Paris to the burgeoning cosmetics culture of mid-century America. They deal with topics such as blue-collar workers' survival strategies in the interwar years, the anxieties of working-class consumers, and the efforts of the state to define women's—especially wives' and mothers'—consumer identity. Generously illustrated, this volume also includes extensive introductions and a comprehensive annotated bibliography. Drawing on social, economic, and art history as well as cultural studies, it provides a rich context for the current discourse around consumption, particularly in relation to feminist discussions of gender.
The increased visibility of transgender people in the past decade has been accompanied by an increase in the level of institutional and general social transphobia in Serbia. The mass media, through ...which the population of Serbia is mostly informed about transgender people and transgender issues in general, have a significant role in spreading and encouraging transphobia. Texts in print and online media are usually the only source of information about transgender people that reaches the citizens of Serbia. Most of these texts contain offensive, outdated and inadequate terminology. The texts report in a sensationalist manner and do not address transphobia as a serious social problem that transgender people face on a daily basis. In this article, I will deal with the representation of transgender people in Serbian print and online media, as well as the impact of media reporting on the spread of transphobia in Serbia. All texts dealing with the transgender issues and transgender people were collected by searching the digital archive of media texts for 2021 with the help of key words and tags. The collected material is analyzed using the media content analysis method and the critical discourse analysis method. The aim of this research is to determine how print and online media represent transgender people in Serbia and to what extent they influence the creation of prejudices, stereotypes and negative attitudes about transgender people.
While the typical Japanese male politician glides through his district in air-conditioned taxis, the typical female voter trundles along the side streets on a simple bicycle. In this first ...ethnographic study of the politics of the average female citizen in Japan, Robin LeBlanc argues that this taxi-bicycle contrast reaches deeply into Japanese society.
To study the relationship between gender and liberal democratic citizenship, LeBlanc conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork in suburban Tokyo among housewives, volunteer groups, consumer cooperative movements, and the members of a committee to reelect a female Diet member who used her own housewife status as the key to victory. LeBlanc argues that contrary to popular perception, Japanese housewives are ultimately not without a political world.
Full of new and stimulating material, engagingly written, and deft in its weaving of theoretical perspectives with field research, this study will not only open up new dialogues between gender theory and broader social science concerns but also provide a superb introduction to politics in Japan as a whole.
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