empowerment of women
NGO participation for women 's empowerment in Bangladesh
AbstractIn this paper, I tell the story of a grass-roots campaign of poor, rural women in the Mehrunnisa district of Chittagong province in Bangladesh. My objective is to examine how feminist activists strategically use and create social spaces to generate collective dialogue and critical reflection on issues of patriarchy and gendered violence. A related aim is to highlight the ways in which activists working at the grass-roots level theorize the interrelationships among their own political actions, their vision(s) of empowerment, and the everyday gendered spaces they seek to transform. In the following analysis, I begin by briefly situating this campaign within recent feminist writings on empowerment and violence in the context of `Third World ' development politics more generally and of Bangladesh more specifically. I argue that a lack of explicit engagement with space in much of the feminist literature on these topics limits our ability to adequately apprehend the nature, content, and meanings of women 's political actions (Staeheli, 1996).
This brief theoretical review is followed by a backdrop of women 's grass-roots organizing in Mehrunnisa, and the socio-economic and political realities that define women 's struggles in this region. But before immersing in the details of what women did on the streets of Mehrunnisa, this struggle must be placed in relation to recent theoretical conversations among feminists, in Bangladesh and elsewhere, on the subject of empowerment and violence in the lives of rural women.
Introduction Despite intimate connections and overlaps among the issues surrounding women 's empowerment and violence against women, feminist theoretical interventions on these topics have often evolved in separate intellectual domains. While empowerment has been a salient theme in feminist discussions of development politics and ecological sustainability in the `Third World ' (Harcourt, 1994;
AbstractIn this paper, I tell the story of a grass-roots campaign of poor, rural women in the Mehrunnisa district of Chittagong province in Bangladesh. My objective is to examine how feminist activists strategically use and create social spaces to generate collective dialogue and critical reflection on issues of patriarchy and gendered violence. A related aim is to highlight the ways in which activists working at the grass-roots level theorize the interrelationships among their own political actions, their vision(s) of empowerment, and the everyday gendered spaces they seek to transform. In the following analysis, I begin by briefly situating this campaign within recent feminist writings on empowerment and violence in the context of `Third World ' development politics more generally and of Bangladesh more specifically. I argue that a lack of explicit engagement with space in much of the feminist literature on these topics limits our ability to adequately apprehend the nature, content, and meanings of women 's political actions (Staeheli, 1996).
This brief theoretical review is followed by a backdrop of women 's grass-roots organizing in Mehrunnisa, and the socio-economic and political realities that define women 's struggles in this region. But before immersing in the details of what women did on the streets of Mehrunnisa, this struggle must be placed in relation to recent theoretical conversations among feminists, in Bangladesh and elsewhere, on the subject of empowerment and violence in the lives of rural women.
Introduction Despite intimate connections and overlaps among the issues surrounding women 's empowerment and violence against women, feminist theoretical interventions on these topics have often evolved in separate intellectual domains. While empowerment has been a salient theme in feminist discussions of development politics and ecological sustainability in the `Third World ' (Harcourt, 1994;
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