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Social work has long been concerned about women's involvement in the sex industry. This article asks what can be learned from sex workers themselves about how social work might better support those who work in the industry. Based on a qualitative study in Bangladesh, it is argued that although the non-governmental organisations who worked with these women helped to increase their feelings of agency, violence and abuse continued to feature in their daily lives. It is concluded that in order to more holistically meet sex workers' needs, social workers should understand better the ways in which agency and exploitation co-exist.

To be assaulted is to be subjected to an illegal action and confronted with one's own helplessness and powerlessness. It also requires confronting one's own actions, aimed at protection and resistance. This article examines the relationships between male violence and female resistance by focusing on agency, i.e. the relationships between power, responsibility and activity as reflected in the various ways battered women positioned themselves in their narratives of leaving. Three basic positions were identified casting the victimized woman as: Wounded, Self-blaming, or Bridge-building. These positions are associated with relational themes such as vulnerability, isolation and connectedness. The overall message of the article is to urge feminists to return to the roots of feminist theorizing of men's violence towards women, and to include women's strategies of resisting the violence in that theorizing.

This article addresses the question of women's agency in traditionalist religion, through a study of self-narratives by women in the Orthodox Jewish community of Antwerp, Belgium. Women who study or work outside the boundaries of their community were interviewed about their experiences in negotiating gender ideologies by moving in and between the `secular' and `religious' spaces of higher education, work and home. Various subject positions emerged in terms of either rejecting, separating or reconciling dominant community norms regarding women's proper role with personal trajectories of self-realization and individual autonomy. On the one hand, the results confirm the possibility of women's agency within religious-traditionalist settings and in that sense subscribe to some recent feminist theoretical challenges to secularism. However, it is argued that the younger generation faces more restrictions in negotiating religious and secular gender-role expectations in the Antwerp context. Their prospects depend on the dynamic between global fundamentalist tendencies and local liberal state policies of multicultural accommodation.

Through a review of the 2012 documentary film The World before Her directed by Nisha Pahuja, this article provides a critical reflection on how neoliberal governmentality appropriates women's bodies and subjectivities in two women's boot camps in India: the Miss India contest and the Hindu militant Durga Vahini camp. Studies on appropriation of women's bodies in the neoliberal ideology of the market and in varied religious ideologies have generated rich feminist insights into the structures of women's oppression across the world. Feminist academic research has traditionally looked at market- and religion-based oppressions separately. In this critical reflection we articulate how women's bodies get incorporated into the service of varied ideologies, namely neoliberal capitalism and religious fundamentalism, through processes of ritualisation, responsibilisation and subjectivation. Drawing on the shared elements of neoliberal (capitalism) and Hindutwa (Hindu fundamentalism) ideological projects, this article proposes a renewed analysis of the location of women in various ideological projects and the nature of women's negotiation of these power structures or women's agency within these structures.

Through a review of the 2012 documentary film The World before Her directed by Nisha Pahuja, this article provides a critical reflection on how neoliberal governmentality appropriates women's bodies and subjectivities in two women's boot camps in India: the Miss India contest and the Hindu militant Durga Vahini camp. Studies on appropriation of women's bodies in the neoliberal ideology of the market and in varied religious ideologies have generated rich feminist insights into the structures of women's oppression across the world. Feminist academic research has traditionally looked at market- and religion-based oppressions separately. In this critical reflection we articulate how women's bodies get incorporated into the service of varied ideologies, namely neoliberal capitalism and religious fundamentalism, through processes of ritualisation, responsibilisation and subjectivation. Drawing on the shared elements of neoliberal (capitalism) and Hindutwa (Hindu fundamentalism) ideological projects, this article proposes a renewed analysis of the location of women in various ideological projects and the nature of women's negotiation of these power structures or women's agency within these structures.