Asia Women's Fund Revisited

The Asian Women's Fund's atonement project for former comfort women set a new vision of Japan in which the people along with the Japanese government proactively participate in performing the moral responsibility for the suffering of former comfort women in cross-boundary and cross-generational ways. This article argues that the Fund's imperfect reconciliation with former comfort women particularly in Taiwan and South Korea was due to the misunderstanding about moral responsibility as an evasion of the Japanese government's legal responsibility and due to the inadequate exercise of political and administrative leadership. Underneath these factors lie the intertwined root causes of the limited availability of facts on the issue of comfort women and the ideologically driven discourse. The article suggests the following measures as a further atonement project: strong political leadership to present the clear meaning of moral responsibility, cooperation with the governments and support groups in the victims' countries, and an international truth investigation.     

Women's industrial employment in Kerala,India

Abstract

This paper examines the dynamics of relations of production in Kerala industry in regard to women's employment opportunities. The changing conditions of women's industrial employment in India, and in Kerala in particular, should be examined at two levels: wage employment, especially in traditional industries; and self-employment, ranging from women's small-scale enterprises to relatively large-scale enterprises run by voluntary organizations of women, charitable institutions, and women's self-help organizations. Income opportunities are provided at both levels, and a common unifying thread is the predominantly casual nature of the work. Casual work is defined as any way of making a living that lacks a moderate degree of security of income and employment, and it is work characterized by informal relations of production.     

The Rise and Fall of the Australian Women's Bureau

Policy textbooks often overlook the importance of international borrowing in their accounts of the policy process. Analysis of feminist policy influence also tends to neglect the international dimension of the opportunity structure and the leverage provided by international agendas. In this article we tell the story of how the Women's Bureau, the first women's unit in Australian government, came into being in the 1960s. This story encompasses the overseas modelling of such bureaux and the promotion of such models through international women's organisations and their national affiliates. The international dimension has been inseparable from the development of women's policy machinery in Australian government; the current disengagement from international standard setting coincides with the dismantling of domestic machinery, including the Women's Bureau.     

"妇女与发展":印尼的妇女非政府组织

本文考察了印尼妇女运动的发展过程,以及在此过程中印尼妇女非政府组织与妇女的社会动员所扮演的角色、起到的作用以及面临的各种问题.通过揭示印尼既定政治环境中妇女非政府组织、妇女的社会动员与妇女运动之间复杂的互动与联系,本文尝试对"妇女与发展"问题在印尼的表现进行初步的勾勒与分析.     

Women's Citizenship and Neopopulism: Peru Under the Fujimori Regime

This article argues that the increased participation of women in Peruvian politics in the 1990s and the advances made in some areas of their citizenship rights are connected to the strategies put in place by some sectors of the women's movement and to the openings provided by the Fujimori regime. Some of the impact of neopopulist rule on political institutions is shown to be positively related to women's increased opportunities during this period; yet the weak rule of law and the political use of the women's agenda by an increasingly questionable regime placed the women's movement in a complex political panorama. A disaggregated analysis of the politics of women's citizenship reveals that women from the popular sectors did not benefit from the same progress in their rights claims as women from the feminist movement or women in party politics.     

Poner el Cuerpo: Women's Embodiment and Political Resistance in Argentina

This article explores the relationship between women's embodiment and political resistance in Argentina during 2002–2003. This was a time of socioeconomic crisis, influenced by neoliberal globalization. In this tumultuous context, women's bodies became embattled sites, shaken by the crisis but also actively engaged in constructing a new society and new forms of womanhood. Bodies are important to understanding political resistance, as reflected by the meanings attached to poner el cuerpo , a common expression in contemporary Argentine social movements. This article analyzes how women construct embodied subjectivities through their activist practices and how they define poner el cuerpo in terms of collective protest and daily activist work, coherence between words and actions, embodied sacrifice, and risk taking and struggle. As life in Argentina deteriorated because of the crisis, women's bodies represented not only suffering but also resistance and renewal.     

Suffrage in San Juan: The Test of Women's Rights in Argentina

The 1927 reform of the Constitution of San Juan province, Argentina, contained a variety of innovative reforms that set a precedent for later national events. Of these, one of the most unusual was the provision for female participation in provincial elections. The authorisation of this right, which preceded the national suffrage law by twenty years, came about as a consequence of local and national circumstances. The fundamental conditions for suffrage had taken root in Argentina prior to 1927, but for suffrage to become a reality, a government had to be in place that could take advantage of an influx of new voters.     

Women's Labour in the Islamic Republic of Iran: Losers and Survivors

This article examines the changes in the female class structure of the urban work force in post-revolutionary Iran by investigating the rate and pattern of the exclusion and the incorporation of women in the market between 1976 and 2006. We examine the gender marginalization thesis and test it empirically by focusing on the class nature of women's exclusion and incorporation into the labour force. We rely on decennial census data and present our empirical finding in the context of the social hierarchy of work. Moreover, we provide a comparative empirical analysis of the economic marginalization process for urban women's and men's class locations historically.     

从女性文学形象看当代越南妇女生存现状

20世纪末越南当代文坛上新晋女作家阮氏秋惠、武氏好、依斑的一系列作品塑造了许多具有典型性的女性形象范式,但驰骋政界、商场的成功女性形象却鲜有出现。文学话语作为对意识形态话语的二度加工,自然会渗入更多的虚构和想象成分,但在越南女作家的文学文本中,虚构和想象成分被排除在外。女作家笔下的女性形象范式呈现的是女性对社会文化意识形态的默许和对自身传统角色的被迫认同,同时也揭露了蛰伏于常态(形象范式)下的不合理现象:越南妇女并未获得真正意义上的性别平等与解放。     

Contested Institutionalisation: Women's Policy Agencies and Challenges to Gender Equality in Germany

Germany has created one of the world's largest women's policy infrastructures. But the scope as well as the effect of institutionalising women's policy agencies is contested. Even committed proponents of gender equality note the agencies’ limited influence in important policy arenas. Critics of institutionalisation have used the fiscal crisis of the past decade to push efforts to downsize or diversify the mission of women's policy agencies. Building on theories of new institutionalism, this article attributes recent challenges to the institutionalisation of gender politics in Germany to three sets of factors: First, to tensions between strong formal gender equality rules and weak informal equality norms; second, to powerful internal and external veto players who use their leverage to prevent gender equality legislation; and, third, to a shifting policy discourse that has reframed gender equality language in gender mainstreaming terms and might lead to significant changes in the institutional gender equality architecture.