Women's Agency Research Articles

Indigenous Australian women promoting health through sport

The authors explore the sporting experiences and community strengths of Indigenous Australian women. The intention is to inform both health promotion and contemporary sport management strategies, and policies and practices, leading to better health outcomes for this cohort. The authors employ an interpretative qualitative methodology, which involves the combination of data from a range of sources, including interviews and focus groups with 22 Indigenous women living in urban and rural areas, narratives from elite Indigenous athletes and coaches, as well as findings from a recent Australian Parliamentary inquiry into Indigenous health and wellbeing. Drawing from an agency/empowerment theoretical framework, the authors posit that, given support and opportunities, Indigenous women can become empowered to improve their mental and physical health through participation in sport. Sport managers can facilitate Indigenous women's agency in the effects of colonisation, which continues to be the basis of health issues for this cohort. Listening to Indigenous women and facilitating opportunities for them to take control of their own participation can help facilitate this process. Indigenous-women's only opportunities, partnerships with health agencies and sports organisations, culturally safe spaces and Indigenous women acting as role models are some factors that may augment Indigenous women's agency, and thus empowerment. Government, sports, community organisations and health agencies which provide these conditions in their program design can help to overcome entrenched social, historical and health inequalities that Indigenous women may experience.

“Your Vagina Is Not Supposed to Be This Scary Monster”: Young Heterosexual Women's Recommendations for Improving Sexual Satisfaction and Implications for Sexuality Education

ABSTRACTSexual satisfaction is an important component of sexuality, yet rarely discussed in sexuality education. In an effort to better understand young adult women's experiences and thoughts about sexual pleasure and satisfaction, we conducted interviews with heterosexual young women (N = 30, ages 18–25) attending college, asking their recommendations on how to improve women's sexual satisfaction. Two coders utilized grounded theory-based thematic analysis, which revealed three dominant themes: communication with sexual partners, sexual self-awareness and acceptance, and sources of information and education. All three themes fit broadly under women's sexual agency and societal acceptance of women's sexuality. Themes are discussed in relation to their applicability to sexuality education.

Climate change, colonialism, and women’s well-being in Canada: what is to be done?

The impacts of accelerating climate change across Canada are unequally distributed between populations and regions. Emerging evidence shows climate change and resultant policies to be worsening gendered social and economic inequities between women and men, with women's participation largely absent in climate change research and decision-making. These dynamics are resulting in negative impacts for women's well-being, with Indigenous and historically marginalized women at increased risk of experiencing health inequities as a result of climate change. To date, public health discourse has largely failed to incorporate gender as a key determinant of health in discussions of climate change impacts on populations. Paralleling this lack of development, the entangled relationship between climate and colonialism tends to be subsumed under the term "Aboriginality" within health determinants discourse. This commentary on gender and climate change in Canada is framed within a radical intersectional approach as an alternative course of public health analysis and action aimed at addressing resulting health and power inequities. Following an overview of evidence regarding the gendered impacts of climate change on women's work, roles, agency, and well-being, several possible public health action areas on climate change and gender are highlighted as necessary components for resilient communities capable of meeting contemporary challenges.

Localizing Global Medicine: Challenges and Opportunities in Cervical Screening in an Indigenous Community in Ecuador.

This participatory research study examines the tensions and opportunities in accessing allopathic medicine, or biomedicine, in the context of a cervical cancer screening program in a rural indigenous community of Northern Ecuador. Focusing on the influence of social networks, the article extends research on "re-appropriation" of biomedicine. It does so by recognizing two competing tensions expressed through social interactions: suspicion of allopathic medicine and the desire to maximize one's health. Semistructured individual interviews and focus groups were conducted with 28 women who had previously participated in a government-sponsored cervical screening program. From inductive thematic analysis, the article traces these women's active agency in navigating coherent paths of health. Despite drawing on social networks to overcome formidable challenges, the participants faced enduring system obstacles-the organizational effects of the networks of allopathic medicine. Such obstacles need to be understood to reconcile competing knowledge systems and improve health care access in underresourced communities.

The complex challenge of providing patient-centred perinatal healthcare in rural Uganda: A qualitative enquiry

RationaleIncreasing research and reflections on quality of healthcare across the perinatal period slowly propels the global community to lobby for improved standards of quality perinatal healthcare, especially in low- and middle-income countries. ObjectiveThe purpose of this qualitative study was to obtain a deeper understanding of how interpersonal dimensions of the quality of care relate to real-life experiences of perinatal care, in a resource-constrained local health system. MethodsIn total, 41 in-depth interviews and five focus group discussions (N = 34) were conducted with perinatal women and local health system health professionals living and working in rural Uganda. Data analysis used an emergent and partially inductive, thematic framework based on the grounded theory approach. ResultsThe results indicated that interpersonal aspects of quality of perinatal care and service delivery are largely lacking in this low-resource setting. Thematic analysis showed three interrelated process aspects of quality of perinatal care: negative reported patient-provider interactions, the perceptions shaping patient-provider interactions, and emergent consequences arising out of these processes of care. Further reflections expose the central, yet often-unheeded, role of perinatal women's agency in their own health seeking behaviours and overall well-being, as well as that of underlying practical norms surrounding health worker attitudes and behaviours. ConclusionThese findings highlight the complexity of patient-centred perinatal healthcare provision in rural Uganda and point to the relevance of linking the interpersonal dimensions of quality of care to the larger systemic and structural dimensions of perinatal healthcare.

Strategizing to Make Pornography Worthwhile: A Qualitative Exploration of Women's Agentic Engagement with Sexual Media.

Women often expect to encounter negative, problematic content when they consume pornography, yet many women use and enjoy pornography anyway. Some research has centered content type (e.g., sexist/violent vs. nonsexist/women-focused) as a key determinant of women's pornography experiences, but this precludes the notion that women are active, engaged consumers of pornography and minimizes women's role in shaping their own experiences. In the present study, we explored how a sample of sexually diverse women in the U.S. (aged 18-64; N=73) worked toward positive experiences with pornography via active negotiation with negative content, using a secondary analysis of focus group data on women's sexual pleasure. We found that, although women often experienced pornography as risky, many women used it anyway and actively employed strategies to increase the likelihood of having a positive experience. Women's strategies were similar across sexual identity and age groups, but the heteronormative, youth-oriented portrayals of sexuality in mainstream pornography presented unique concerns for heterosexual, queer, and older women. Results have implications for how women can be conceptualized as active, rather than passive, consumers of pornography as well as for how women's agency might influence women's arousal responses to sexually explicit stimuli in research.

Invisible Young Women and Public Policy in Ontario

Scholars across research fields have pointed to the exclusion of young women from theories and studies of citizenship, political engagement, and public policy. Limited systematic attention has been paid to whether or how diverse young women's experiences are reflected in public policy. We ask (a) in which provincial policy areas in Ontario do diverse young women warrant unique attention and (b) how are their experiences reflected in these areas? Using intersectionality to guide our analysis, we find that diverse young women's unique experiences are largely invisible in Ontario public policies, despite Ontario's introduction of an Inclusion Lens in policy development and analysis in 2011. We argue for efforts to counter the dominance of neoliberalism, which serves to individualize responsibility, erase difference, and diminish young women's political agency.

Appropriations of Informed Consent: Abortion, Medical Decision Making, and Antiabortion Rhetoric

In this article, I consider how politicians appropriate the informed consent process to disseminate antiabortion ideology in the United States. I expand on research conducted by the Guttmacher Institute to explore critically three rhetorical strategies that align the informed consent process with antiabortion ideology. I situate this cooption within societal practices that demean and dismiss women's moral agency and reproductive autonomy, and I unpack the ethical consequences that follow from the distortion of medical information.

Understanding how Afghan women utilise a gender transformative and economic empowerment intervention: A qualitative study

ABSTRACTThe processes through which women's economic empowerment interventions are envisaged to improve women's health are strongly embedded in notions of building women's agency and autonomy. Yet despite the ubiquity of such interventions, there remains incredibly little qualitative work exploring how women actually utilise interventions to reshape their lives and wellbeing. Drawing on 9 focus groups discussions among 52 women who participated in the Women for Women International intervention in Afghanistan, an economic strengthening and social empowerment intervention, we explore processes of change. Data showed women learnt new skills around numeracy and animal husbandry; they perceived themselves to have become more respected within the household setting; they invested cash they received for intervention attendance in businesses, primarily their husband's or family's, and saved cash. Women did not, however, report their relationships to have been radically restructured. Rather women described incremental changes in their relationships within their household and used what they gained from the intervention to secure and sustain this. This conceptualisation of agency and empowerment reflects approaches to understanding agency, which move away from ‘action-oriented’ understandings, to ones that recognise ‘distributed agency’ as pathways to change through interventions.

Passing the “Torches of Freedom”: Smoking Behaviors of Women in Nepal

ABSTRACTGlobally, men constitute a larger percentage of smokers than women, but the rate of women smokers is growing. Smoking is a feminist issue: there are unique consequences for women's health, well-being, and agency. Recently passed anti-smoking legislation in Nepal, which has the highest rate of women smokers in South Asia, omits gender-conscious recommendations, potentially diminishing the impact of the legislation on women's lives. Relying on the 2001, 2006, and 2011 waves of the Nepal Demographic and Health Survey, this paper expands the dialogue around women's smoking and places it at the forefront of research on women's health issues. The results indicate that for women in Nepal, formal education and visiting a health facility mitigate smoking behaviors, whereas being employed and living in certain regions promotes smoking behaviors. The aim is for this and the ensuing inquiries to change government anti-smoking legislation in order to improve women's health.

Re-thinking the feminist agenda in selected female authored Zimbabwean literature

This article investigates the feminist agenda in female authored Zimbabwean literature, with emphasis on the novel. It focuses largely on Virginia Phiri's Destiny and Highway Queen as well as Violet Masilo's The African Tea Cosy. The paper argues that Zimbabwean female authorship is flavoured with precepts of African feminism(s) in its representations of African women's agency in gender adversities. Framed within African feminism, women's agency derives from and gives meaning to an inescapable African-ness that needs to be accepted in the fight for emancipation. In light of this, the study analyses Zimbabwean women writers’ literary contributions to discourses on gender based violence and it explores how female characters have embraced the concept of agency to recreate their identities and to introduce a new gender ethos in the context of lives that are often shaped by severe restrictions and oppression. Although largely women focused, the African feminist text is concerned about the survival of both men and women.

Romance's Rivals: Familiar Marriage in Victorian Fiction by Talia Schaffer

Reviewed by: Romance's Rivals: Familiar Marriage in Victorian Fiction by Talia Schaffer Christine L. Krueger ROMANCE'S RIVALS: FAMILIAR MARRIAGE IN VICTORIAN FICTION, by Talia Schaffer. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. 352 pp. $69.00 cloth; $67.99 ebook. "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways."1 Unlike traditional love sonneteers, Elizabeth Barrett Browning does not ask "why do I love thee?" so that she can proceed to a list of her beloved's virtues. Instead, she is interested in examining her own diverse and multiple affective states—how she loves. Romance, if it makes her list at all, is merely one among many ways to love. Talia Schaffer's Romance's Rivals: Familiar Marriage in Victorian Fiction reminds us of this point so that we can appreciate the affective variety of marriage plots in nineteenth-century fiction, including works by Jane Austen, the Brontës, Charlotte Yonge, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. In Schaffer's view, several approaches to literary criticism in the past few decades have attempted to narrow the meaning of desire to sexual attraction and thereby limit what constitutes authentic reasons for marriage. This critical strategy undermines narrative advocacy for forms of desire much better suited to women achieving happiness under the legal and economic conditions of the nineteenth century. As relative creatures, women survived by cultivating affective ties with family, friends, and benefactors. Ideally, husbands would be drawn from these networks, both to ensure the men were reliable and to allow women to preserve their support systems. Drawing her evidence from narratives focalized by female characters, Schaffer demonstrates the range of women's marital considerations and desires, as well as agency and constraints. She develops her argument over topical chapters, including "Historicizing Marriage," "Neighbor Marriage," "Cousin Marriage," "Disability Marriage," and "Vocational Marriage." The most important contribution Romance's Rivals makes to current critical discourse may be to represent the wide array of scholarship from the past two decades that resists master narratives in favor of the variation and nuance in Victorian marriage plots. These critics include Mary Jean Corbett, Claudia L. Johnson, Elsie B. Michie, Kelly Hager, Sharon Marcus, Kathy Psomiades, and Martha Stoddard Holmes, among others who have maintained a healthy skepticism regarding the monolithic tendencies of psychoanalytic and Foucauldian-influenced accounts of desire. [End Page 452] Schaffer's study returns to two influential 1987 works of criticism: Joseph Allen Boone's Tradition Counter Tradition: Love and the Form of Fiction and Nancy Armstrong's Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. The former Schaffer describes as "the definitive book on the marriage plot in British history" (p. 43). The latter, Schaffer faults for using "'the history of sexuality' to mean 'the history of marriage,'" a conflation of what she considers to be "profoundly different fields" (p. 22). She complains of literary critics who merged an unnuanced version of companionate marriage from Lawrence Stone's 1977 The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 with a Foucauldian-inflected hermeneutics of suspicion in order to produce a teleological narrative of desire that was reductive and anachronistic. This move exacerbated the erasure of women's agency inherent in Ian Watt's equation of the novel's rise with that of an autonomous liberal subject in The Rise of the Novel (1957). Whereas Boone's interest lay in examining how novels elaborated a new idea of romantic love, Schaffer cautions against any tendency to infer that romantic love is the culmination of a teleological history of the novel. This caveat emerges from more recent historical and anthropological research, feminist scholarship, disability studies, and queer studies. But it is also worth noting that Schaffer is recovering a strain of scholarship that never bought into this reductive thinking, for example, that of Ruth Perry, whose Novel Relations (2004) she often cites. I would suggest that Carole Pateman's The Sexual Contract (1988) be acknowledged as well. Published the year after Boone's and Armstrong's books, The Sexual Contract demonstrates that social contract theory depended upon an unacknowledged sexual contract—the marriage contract—with the result that women's inferior legal status became a constitutive feature of...

Muslim Women in French Cinema: Voices of Maghrebi Migrants in France by Leslie Kealhofer-Kemp

Reviewed by: Muslim Women in French Cinema: Voices of Maghrebi Migrants in France by Leslie Kealhofer-Kemp Greta Bliss Leslie Kealhofer-Kemp. Muslim Women in French Cinema: Voices of Maghrebi Migrants in France. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015. Pp. 226. This book fills a lacuna in previous scholarship on immigration and ethnicity in French cinema. Building on work in feminist and film studies, sociology, and ethnography, Kealhofer-Kemp shifts the historic focus by documenting cinematic depictions of the generation of Algerian, Moroccan, and Tunisian women who migrated to France in the 1960s and 1970s, usually as the spouses of economic migrants or of harkis, and many of whom became parents to the more highly visible "beur" generation. Though first-generation women have often been consigned to a real or imagined status of invisibility due to the intersectional barriers they faced, their influence is perceptible at myriad levels in cinema and contemporary culture. Through careful examination of a broad corpus of over sixty films produced between 1978 and 2014, Kealhofer-Kemp traces the figure of the Maghrebi woman migrant across multiple genres, whether as documentary subject or as recurrent fictional character. Collectively, these depictions form a complex picture of first-generation Maghrebi women migrants' historical agency. The concept of voice, which Kealhofer-Kemp adroitly defines from the outset, structures her inquiry. In close, concise readings of a wide range of films, the author demonstrates how directors, actors, and storylines combine to reflect or challenge mainstream discourse on ethnic identity and cultural assimilation in France. This analysis dovetails with her discussion of recurrent intergenerational themes, such as tensions between first-generation mothers and their "beur" children. Yet even as Kealhofer-Kemp attends to the overarching sociological and historical conditions influencing both filmmakers and the public, her close readings reveal important nuances in how films have variously positioned Maghrebi woman migrant characters in relation to their households, families, and communities. The study's four chapters are organized by genre, each offering a different angle on the question of voice. Chapter one emphasizes the constructedness of documentaries, situating examples according to the degree of narrative autonomy directors accord to their subjects. In Chapter Two, on short films, Kealhofer-Kemp theorizes how some filmmakers deploy objects, rather than melodrama or dialogue, to symbolize women's agency in navigating complex linguistic, cultural, and physical boundaries. Chapter Three draws on spectatorship data and reception theory to highlight the influence of films within the previously less-studied genre of téléfilms (made-for-TV full-length movies), which can reach up to 8–10 million viewers. In Chapter Four, treating a selection of well-known feature films (such as Yamina Benguigui's Inch'Allah dimanche) alongside some less well-known ones, Kealhofer-Kemp considers how verbal and non-verbal forms of communication further enlarge and differentiate the concept of voice. Rounded out with the author's suggestions for future research and a generous appendix classifying the film corpus by archival location and level of access, this study offers a rich compendium of resources and analyses for scholars working on French film and cultural studies across an array of disciplines. [End Page 145] Greta Bliss University of North Carolina Wilmington Copyright © 2018 L'Esprit Créateur

Cultural De-colonization versus Liberal Approaches to Abortion in Africa: The Politics of Representation and Voice.

Political discussions on abortion in Africa take place in the context of most countries having restrictive abortion legislation and high levels of unsafe abortion. In this paper two major political positions regarding abortion in Africa: a de-colonisation approach based on a homogenized view of "culture", and a liberal approach based on "choice" and rights are outlined. Using the Questions and Answers sessions of a United Nations event on maternal health in Africa as an exemplar of these positions, the paper argues that neither approach is emancipatory in the African context. A de-colonisation approach that uses static and homogenized understanding of "culture" risks engaging in a politics of representation that potentially silences the "Other" (in this case women who terminate their pregnancies) and glosses over complexities and multiple power relations that exist on the continent. A liberal approach, premised on choice and reproductive rights, risks foregrounding individual women's agency at the expense of contextual dynamics, including the conditions that create unsupportable pregnancies. The paper argues for a grounded reproductive justice perspective that draws on the insights of the reproductive justice movement, but grounds these notions within the African philosophy of Hunhu/Ubuntu.

Islamist Women's Agency and Relational Autonomy

Mainstream conceptions of autonomy have been surreptitiously gender‐specific and masculinist. Feminist philosophers have reclaimed autonomy as a feminist value, while retaining its core ideal as self‐government, by reconceptualizing it as “relational autonomy.” This article examines whether feminist theories of relational autonomy can adequately illuminate the agency of Islamist women who defend their nonliberal religious values and practices and assiduously attempt to enact them in their daily lives. I focus on two notable feminist theories of relational autonomy advanced by Marina Oshana and Andrea Westlund and apply them to the case of Women's Mosque Movement participants in Egypt. I argue that feminist conceptions of relational autonomy, centered around the ideal of self‐government, cannot elucidate the agency of Women's Mosque Movement participants whose normative ideal involves perfecting their moral capacity.

"The Daughters of Israel": An Analysis of the Term in Late Ancient Jewish Sources

This article recovers history of term the of Israel (b'not yisrael) from its earliest usage in biblical passages and second temple sources to its appearance in late antique Jewish texts, focusing specifically on term's connotations in rabbinic sources and ritual texts. Rather than taking term at face-value as denoting women's subordinate status, we argue that this term may have a buried history, and that uncovering history of term daughters of Israel offers a fascinating entry-point into role of women in establishing and transforming—rather than merely observing—Jewish law and ritual. Extending Mieke Bal's notion of feminist philology to investigation of rabbinic and other late antique Jewish sources, we make case that in rabbinic literature from late antiquity, Hebrew term daughters of Israel appears in sites of contestation, sometimes deployed in discussions about women's innovation in ritual practice in ways that evoke women's ritual agency from narrative biblical sources. In late antique incantations bowls, Aramaic term for daughters of Israel (b'not yisrael) evokes legal language of second temple marriage contracts that explicitly includes women and may have served to highlight their particular agency as well. Thus in both sets of sources, term often signals moments when women act as subjects (rather than objects) of ritual and legal discourse.

Women survivors and their children born of wartime sexual violence in northern Uganda.

Girls and women who bear children owing to wartime sexual violence committed by armed actors face challenges in gaining acceptance on return to their families and societies. This study analyses the lives of women survivors and their children born of wartime sexual violence in Uganda. It draws on a population-based survey of 1,844 households in the Acholi and Lango sub-regions of northern Uganda, as well as on in-depth qualitative interviews conducted in 2014 and 2015 with 67 purposefully selected women survivors of wartime sexual violence. The study finds that: stigma is linked to broader gender discriminatory sociocultural norms and practices and changes under different circumstances; women's economic agency is essential to reducing stigma; households with members who suffered war-related sexual violence experienced significantly higher rates of violence post conflict than did other households; and the passage of time is less of a determining factor in their acceptance and reintegration than previously thought.

Exploring the potential of household methodologies to strengthen gender equality and improve smallholder livelihoods: Research in Malawi in maize-based systems

Household methodologies (HHM) intervene directly in intra-household gender relations to strengthen overall smallholder agency and efficacy as economic agents and development actors. Strengthening women's agency is one mechanism for progressing towards collaborative, systemic farm management. It is expected this will contribute to improved farm resilience in the face of climate change, strengthen food and nutrition security, and improve other development indicators.HHM are built around a vision, gendered analysis of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT), an action plan, and indicators. Some HHM - including Gender Action Learning Systems (GALS), the focus of the research - use drawings making them easy to use for low-literate individuals. There is considerable evaluation report evidence of the efficacy of HHM in strengthening value chains, food security, and gender equality. However, this has yet to be complemented by a robust systematic evaluation of the methodology which includes non-intervention communities as controls. Here we report on the findings of a research study into GALS in Malawi where the National Smallholder Farmers' Association of Malawi (NASFAM) has been implementing GALS since 2013 with 4274 farmers (2821 women and 1453 men to May 2016). We held sex-disaggregated FGDs with 40 GALS households and 40 non-GALS households, all NASFAM members. Community profiles and a matrix activity focusing on task allocation, asset distribution, and expenditures by gender with 125 non-GALS and 135 GALS respondents were also conducted.Our analyses indicate a significant shift towards sharing of on-farm tasks and household tasks, and joint realization of the benefits from agricultural produce in GALS households. They are building up portfolios of assets including livestock, houses, ox-carts, and land, unlike non-GALS households. Respondents in GALS households, particularly de facto women-headed households, report an increase in social standing and participation in community life. In both GALS and non-GALS households, men and women agree that men continue to dominate marketing and are final decision-makers. However, financial transparency and intra-household agreement on expenditures characterize households with GALS participants.

Introduction: Women and the New Nationalism

The past five years mark a turning point in nationalism and its relationship to ethnicity and gender around the world. As the Egyptian diplomat, professor of Middle East Studies, and graduate students who contributed to this Features series reveal, the framework on which all nationalism depends continues to be structured according to a system human society has now bypassed. From Arab countries that recently experienced uprisings and revolution, to a United States that witnessed the largest march in its history in support of ‘women's rights as human rights’, this series reveals that nationalism is crumbling under the weight of faulty scaffolding – its material is made of patriarchal norms that no longer serve to support a new human identity that allows for a more unified, inclusive state. While this series focuses on events in the United States and Egypt, it could as easily have been written about many other countries in which women are transforming national identity. In ‘Protecting the Motherland: Women's Agency in Transforming National Identity’, Amanda Sztein considers why increased female presence in the U.S. military is still subject to debate. Her article reveals that women's agency in the military threatens the very structure of nationalism, which is based on the premise that only men are ‘reasoned’ and bring about structure, while femininity is ‘uncouth’, ‘uncontrolled’, and acting on a force that cannot be articulated in words and therefore is not safe. Worse, these so-called ‘feminine’ characteristics are considered undesirable. If only this unspeakable force could be tapped. Amanda Lawrence further defines this ‘untapped force’ in America by highlighting the need for ethnic and cultural inclusivity in her article on ‘The Power of Intersectionality to Transcend National Identity in the United States’. Lawrence points out that unless nationalism is inclusive of all ethnicities in the United States, the feminism it engenders cannot affect meaningful or positive change. A new conception of American nationalism that is not white-centric is America's only hope for achieving authentic equality. The final two articles examine the connection between national identity and women in Egypt – a case study in the relationship between post-colonial state-building, national identity, and religion. In ‘The Impact of Notions of Nationalism on Women's Rights in Egypt’, Ambassador Magda Shahin and Yasmeen El-Ghazaly contemplate the development of constitutions after the 2011 revolution and demonstrate that, regardless of whether the government is ‘secular’ or ‘Islamist’, women remain disempowered in Egypt. In ‘The Guise of the Secular State’, I deconstruct notions of ‘secularism’ and ‘Islamism’ in Egypt and the region in order to demonstrate the burden women bear as a result of the ambiguity of national identity. In all four cases, an outmoded version of national identity stands between women and the realization of their human rights. It also stands between a state's ability to move forward as a socially and politically viable entity. Each article presents an argument for achieving a more truthful national consciousness – one that transcends both the state and the international order as it pulls the state and government towards higher principles of life.

Protecting the Motherland: Women's Agency in Transforming National Identity

Protecting the <i>Mother</i>land: Women's Agency in Transforming National Identity