The subject of menstruation is filled with powerful socio-cultural implications involving language, religion and gender relations. Yet, the topic is often relegated to silence, considered taboo, and strongly associated with impurity and shame. This schism between the natural reality of menstruation and its socio-cultural damnation highlights the marginal and oppressed condition of women who are considered inferior and impure in many cultures and religions for the mere fact of menstruating, despite ancient practices that validated and celebrated women’s menarche. The multimedia project 13 lunas 13/13 moons 13 allows for the interactive exploration of these themes while reflecting upon the patriarchal foundations of the taboo of menstruation. This essay examines primarily the video 13 lunas 13, a video of testimonies by thirteen Spanish women form different generations and social backgrounds. Fear, shame, lack of sexual agency, are some of the common experiences expressed by the women interviewed, particularly among older generations. Along with these testimonies on sexuality and menstruation, this project seeks to collect and reveal euphemisms, myths and cultural practices that are being erased by global practices, while pointing to new technologies and attitudes towards menstruation. Other variables of this project include art installations, poetry, and an interface that allows the collection of testimonies via the Internet, reaching out to new generations of men and women wishing to expose an experience intrinsically related to their lives.

This essay examines Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy, a novel that tackles the process of decolonization from old and new forms of colonialism through the language of servitude and family (specifically, mother-daughter relationships). The novel’s protagonist is not only an example of the wave of West Indian migration and the feminization of labor, but her agency also provides Kincaid with the necessary platform to deploy her views on U.S. imperialism. I propose reading Lucy’s evolution toward self-determination as not only an individual but also a collective experience. I interpret the novel as an allegory that can help us better understand the nuances, tensions, and challenges involved in the historical journey of former British colonies in the Caribbean, from colonial rule, through political independence, and into the current challenges posed by neocolonialism. Kincaid’s Lucy suggests the need for Caribbean countries to question, if not reject, the influence of American culture, economics, and politics, in order to achieve absolute independence and freedom to determine their own fate. This allegorical reading also illustrates how race, class, gender, and national origins are intertwined in Kincaid’s rendition of the Caribbean migrant experience. What makes the novel more relevant to discussions of current Caribbean migration patterns is how the author also weaves in the significance of the colonial past in approaches to the new globalization culture. Although Lucy’s story reflects a yearning for a borderless world where cultural differences do not restrict the individual’s choices, Kincaid does not allow her readers to escape the legacy of colonialism, challenging them to consider the complex nature of current U.S.-Caribbean relations. Lucy thus becomes a symbol of the neocolonial condition, experiencing the economic and social challenges that both Caribbean peoples and postcolonial writers face in today’s globalization era.

In the words of renowned criminologist Antony Altbeker, South Africa is suffering from a “crisis of crime.” The outworking of tensions from the perceived inadequacies of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission have seen an explosion of violent crime, which has little improved in the two decades since the end of the Apartheid-state. Contemporary South African literature has spoken to this violent reality in myriad ways, from the violence of South Africa’s most written about novel, J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, to the more recent trends in crime fiction and true-crime genres. The novels considered here, Disgrace and Margie Orford’s Like Clockwork, work together to form an aesthetic of violence. Where Orford’s work is bounded by generic convention to solve crime and seek restitution, Coetzee leaves us in a state of uneasy non-resolution. The growing popularity of the “crime-fiction” genre then, speaks to a desire to make sense of a violent reality. If protagonist Clare Hart can restore order and enforce clear boundaries within the space of 300 pages, can readers feel assured in “a country at war with itself”?

This essay is about the objectification of women in the early novels of Iris Murdoch, particularly A Severed Head (1961), Under the Net (1954) and The Italian Girl (1964), and how this is subverted by complex characterisation. In focusing on novels predominantly with male narrators and a first person male gaze, I will draw on Sartre’s analysis of “the look” in Being and Nothingness (1943) as well as feminist film theory to firstly consider evidence of immobilization and then re-examine criticism of Murdoch’s female characters as “puppets”. I will contend that Murdoch does not objectify her female characters but instead draws attention to their active passivity and resistance to petrification. Throughout I am concerned with the immobilizing gaze and with the comparisons that can be drawn between woman and Medusa, a figure embodying the core themes of the gaze and object-hood. To this end I examine how the gaze can be re-appropriated by female characters and utilized as a tool of female empowerment rather than objectification.

Unlike academic and policy discussions over enduring and pervasive social problems like poverty or ill health, which focus on how they should be tackled, debates concerning individuals in prostitution are divided over how, and to what extent, prostitution even is a problem. This has led to apparently intractable disagreement over the legitimate representation of a subject at the juncture between vulnerable invisibility and liberated agency. Concretely, this raises a paradox whereby feminist researchers, seeking to facilitate emancipation through the illumination of the experiences of a stigmatised and invisible subject, must carefully give voice to the voiceless without speaking on their behalf. Drawing on contemporary feminist scholarship on prostitution, this essay argues that, to begin resolving this paradox, the field must explicitly engage with the underlying epistemological and methodological implications of conducting emancipatory social science research on prostitution. The essay concludes that, in order to contribute meaningfully to the feminist research agenda on prostitution, practitioners must acknowledge the inherently political nature of emancipation, as the expression of choice and power.

This article explores the participation of children in the Syrian uprising against Bashar al-Assad. The involvement of children in democratic social movements and regime transitions has not been addressed in the literature, although some works describe the role children can play in making public policy or in the humanitarian domain. I argue that just as the role of women and of university-aged youth was gradually incorporated in the body of research on the social movements and regime transitions, so should the role of children be studied. I then characterize the role of children in the Syrian uprising as a three-stage cycle, whereby children unwittingly sparked the revolution, then were targeted by the regime in response, and finally, have been, along with adults across the country, spurred to further anti-Assad action, rather than silence and submission, as a result of the regime’s brutality. Providing empirical evidence to illustrate how this cycle plays out in Syria, I suggest that additional research is needed to further examine and theorize about the role of children in social movements and regime transitions.

This paper draws on the narrative of a Samburu woman, whom we call Sasha, from northern Kenya. She has been living with recto- and vesico-vaginal fistula for more than ten years. Her homeland is characterized by abject poverty, patriarchy and traditional practices involving witchcraft, which is intertwined with the teachings of Christian evangelist missionaries that traverse the last two centuries. Sasha’s research interview offered representations of the broader social and political aspects affecting women with vaginal fistula and how this influences their lived experiences. We suggest that this condition is more than a biomedical issue, which we explain through our interpretive feminist analysis of Sasha’s story. An African feminist lens enables attention towards the influences of patriarchy, African ethnicities and underdevelopment of the African continent.

This article explores the role of Somali women in the twentieth-century history of modern Somalia. This includes exploring the role of women in the decolonisation and post-colonial movements and gender changes during the military dictatorship. The article examines women’s social movements that made some significant changes in Somalia over the past seventy years, even though these have not paved the way for fruitful results. In demonstrating that the current attempts to position themselves in political circles by Somali women has its roots during the decolonisation and post-colonial successive Somali governments, the article argues that women failed to benefit from their feminist agenda as the notion of governmentality changed on the way–from democratisation to the dictatorial military regime.

This article sets out to retrieve two accounts of female deviance in colonial Fiji. It will posit rule-breaking behavior as a reaction to colonial and patriarchal efforts to regulate female behavior and sexuality. The article simultaneously aims to undo rigid categorizations of female deviance by relating such acts to historical circumstance. Police records, court proceedings and news items from The National Archives of Fiji are cited to show how indigenous Fijian woman, Davilo, and indentured Indian woman, Sukhrania, transgressed socially constructed paradigms of morality by procuring abortions in 1884 and engaging in prostitution in 1909, respectively. By relabeling these alleged acts of deviance as survival strategies emerging out of women’s experiences of ‘double colonization’, this article will reconstruct two ‘minor’ anecdotal fragments awkwardly wedged within the realm of ‘mainstream history’.

The purpose of this study was to explore the factors that promoted resilience in Haitian women earthquake survivors. The literature on mental health among Haitians is sparse. Furthermore, the concept of resilience is not easily translated across cultures. In the aftermath of the devastating 2010 Haiti earthquake, relocated victims struggled to adjust. This study looks at what factors helped women adjust to their new environment and cope with the traumas and losses suffered from the earthquake. A qualitative design was used to discover and describe resilience. Findings indicate that cultural values and strengths were key factors in the women’s perseverance.