2005/3

Margaret Gallagher

‘Today we are dealing with the big thing - communication: your right to reason and be yourself’ (Introduction to the Beijing Plus 10 Cyber Dialogue on Media and Communications, 9 March 2005).1 To some of those gathered in New York for the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women Beijing +10 Review in March 2005, it seemed no exaggeration to describe media and communication as ‘the big thing’. But theirs was a minority position. As the review and appraisal drew to an end, gender and media activists were asking why media issues had been so consistently sidelined throughout the proceedings.2

Sunila Abeysekera

The concept of making gender sensitivity and gender analysis an integral part of our frameworks of theory and practice is an old one, perhaps as old as the concept of gender itself. Feminists wanting to move in from the margins to the centre of the discourse demanded it as a right. Statisticians argued for data-gathering formats to be restructured so as to allow for sex-based disaggregation of information. Female politicians argued for the imposition of quotas and reserved seats for women in order to facilitate the entry of more women into mainstream political arenas. And throughout the 1970s and 1980s, activists fighting for equality for women countered formal, systemic and legal discrimination by calling for ‘inclusion’ of women and their interests in all arenas, social, political and economic.

Jennifer L. Pozner

In April 2004, at the height of the American presidential horserace, more than one million protesters attended the ‘March for Women’s Lives’ in Washington, D.C. to support a feminist agenda on reproductive rights, health care, violence against women, poverty, global affairs and more.

Ammu Joseph

Can there possibly be a gender angle to the tsunami story? Certainly, says Ammu Joseph, pointing out that women from economically and socially deprived communities usually bear the brunt of disasters, thanks to the gender dimension of social inequality and inequity.

Gabrielle Le Roux

In 2001 Gabrielle Le Roux had the privilege to meet and draw ten women over the age of a hundred in the Caribbean island of Dominica. They included Elizabeth Israel, known as Ma Pampo (see portrait) and recognised at the time as the world’s oldest woman at the age of 126.

Annabelle Sreberny

The World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) process, which culminates in a second summit in Tunis in November 2005, is a global performance of political talk, of the staging of different forms and different modes of articulation around the contested notion of ‘information society’. Unusually for such processes, there are two summits (an interim one was held in Geneva in November 2003) and civil society and other stakeholders have been part of the process, not simply curious outsiders.

Bu Wei

China has undergone rapid transformations in the decade since 1995. To what extent have these changes affected perceptions of women in society? How have the mass media reflected calls for more sensitivity to gender issues? What are the challenges that remain?

To mark International Women’s Day on 8 March 2005, UNESCO’s Audiovisual E-Platform proposed 20 films about women’s issues, such as women’s rights, development, employment, social role models, which could be used for broadcasting by TV channels and other cultural activities.

Florence Rochefort

Avant l’apparition du concept de genre, on parlait de « rapports sociaux de sexe » en sociologie, d’« histoire des femmes » en histoire. Ce concept a été introduit aux Etats Unis dans les années 1980. Pour ce qui concerne la discipline historique, le nom de Joan Scott a été très important. Cette historienne américaine, spécialiste de la France, a écrit en 1988 un livre sur genre et histoire. Elle expliquait pourquoi cela pouvait être un concept central permettant non seulement de ne plus s’enfermer dans la catégorie « femmes », mais de poser vraiment la question de la relation hommes-femmes et surtout celle de la construction sociale du masculin et du féminin et de son usage politique.

Kate Azuka Omenugha

Poverty is a multi-faceted condition. It has many dimensions, among them poor access to public services and infrastructure, unsanitary environmental surroundings, illiteracy and ignorance, poor health, insecurity, voicelessness and social exclusion, as well as low levels of household income and food insecurity. These features, which are part of the social reality of the poor in Nigeria, tend to be mutually reinforcing, trapping the poor in a vicious cycle.1