Suchergebnisse

Women's representation in the Media is gaining great significance in our region day by day. On reflecting on such an issue, many questions come to mind: Are women well pro-May Elian portionally represented in this field? Is their gender an obstacleto a career? Is it just a question of gender or capacity and qualifications?

Gender and Politics in Sudan, by Sondra Hale - Westview Press, 1996

Islam, Gender, and Social ChangeEdited by Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and John L. Esposito- Oxford University Press, 1998

The argument for gender quotas – made by women's rights activists across the globe has come about in response to women's continued collective marginalization from political power. According to data from the Inter-Parliamentary Union (2005), the global average for women's parliamentary representation is 18 percent, with high rates in the Nordic countries, Rwanda, and Argentina, and low rates in the Arab region and Iran.In the vast majority of countries, political power – legislative, juridicial, and executive rests in the hands of men. In recent decades, therefore, the worldwide growth of a population of educated, employed, mobile, and politically aware women, combined with the diffusion of the UN-sponsored global women's rights agenda, has increased calls for women's political participation and representation. One of the mechanisms to realize this objective is the gender quota. Feminist groups around the world favor the implementation of the gender quota – which may come in the form of a constitutional quota, an electoral quota, or a political party quota – but it remains both controversial and elusive, especially in the Middle East.

The Institute for Women's Studies in the Arab World (IWSAW) through its director Dima Dabbous- Sensenig along with two LAU graduate students participated in the workshop titled "Teaching Gender: Curriculum Workshop" that took place at the universities of Sana'a and Aden from June 9-12, 2007.

Any reader of my first published research on the political participation of Lebanese women can easily detect my vehement opposition to the principle of gender quota and its implementation in Lebanon. As a newcomer to research on women's political empowerment, I lacked in-depth knowledge of the intricacies of the obstacles that faced, and continue to face, Lebanese women who have political aspirations.

The Institute for Women's Studies in the Arab World (IWSAW) in collaboration with KAFA ("Enough Violence and Exploitation"), an organization that works on combating violence and exploitation of women and children, organized a consciousness-raising event from November 3-5, 2008. This event was part of the 16-day activism campaign against gender-based violence KAFA launched to mobilize the youth and general public to support efforts to combat domestic violence.

Most human rights movements have rightly focused on the state as a mobilization site for change. The family is an additional site of contestation for human rights and particularly for women's human rights. Without addressing its structure, culture, and dynamics, neither women nor men will be freed of relations of domination.

Women participate so much in the labor force, yet are not visible in political life, why is this so? Which factors have led to the political marginalization of women? Why are Lebanese women not full citizens? What is the difference between the citizenship of a woman and that of a man? Do women bear any responsibility for this difference? Have they surrendered their responsibilities to their husbandsand sons?

Lebanese from all social and economic classes were attracted by the international migration movement of the nineteenth century. Men and women, married and single, middle class and underprivileged all sought their fortune through migration. Rather surprisingly, given the patriarchal norms of Middle Eastern society, Christian as well as Muslim married women sometimes emigrated without their husbands and families, for, as A. Khater notes, they "had their [own] reasons to leave… Some wanted to escape an unhappy marriage, others sought a better financial status, and a few were after adventure, but most went looking for the 'family'."

Gender, Sickness, and Healing in Rural Egypt Soheir A. Morsy. Gender, Sickness and Healing in Rural Egypt: Ethnography in Historical Context. San Francisco: Westview Press. 1993. ISBN 0-8133-8166.

If we accept the distinction between sex and gender, introduced by the Second Wave of Feminism, and if we agree that gender does not have to be limited to two sexes, we will enter the terrain of the queer, the world of labile, liquid sexuality where the borders between men and women get blurred and the space opens for creating various human hybrids. In Poland, the middle of 1990 saw the launch of the women's studies, gay and lesbian studies, gender studies, queer, LGBT, opening new domains and new methods of human studies. We can call them post-feminist and cultural studies because they stem from the feminist distinction between sex and gender and are focused on gender, i.e. on cultural rather than biological determinants of human beings. The new human sciences will have to face such new narratives of human beings, rethink the concept of objectivity (science) and commitment, learn to live in pluralistic world of many theories and more precisely many discourses, and to learn to cooperate with various groups to present their point of view. But first of all, the new human sciences will have to replace the idea of unity by idea of difference. Once we were looking for unity, now we are looking for difference.

Ahmed, Leila. Women and Gender in Islam. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. ISBN 0-300-04942-0