Guatemalan Femicide: The Legacy of Repression and Injustice
One generally overlooked feature of the Guatemalan government and military’s 36-year (1960-96) genocidal counterinsurgency campaign against the country’s Mayan population is the strategy of targeting women with violence. Rape, mutilation, sexual slavery, forced abortion, and sterilizations were just some of the sadistic tools used in a systematic practice of state-sponsored terror to crush the surviving [...]
Kalpana and the Jumma women’s movement today
Feminist researcher Bina D’Costa and I were recently discussing a range of obstacles faced by the Jumma [1] women’s movement as well as all indigenous women’s movement today. D’Costa observed that one of the challenges that confront women’s political activism and rights based movements is to forge meaningful alliances and re-build linkages with indigenous human [...]
South Africa: ‘State of the Nation Address 2012 thin on implementation’
The authors of the annual review of the president’s State of the Nation Address on ‘Women and Government Priorities’ express their disappointment with the speech’s lack of details on government departments’ implementation of policies and programmes. Joy Watson, feminist researcher, says: ‘The State of the Nation Address contained far too few details on the progress [...]
Indians grapples with the idea of Slut Walks
Do women entice men and invite trouble with their attire, is something debatable. But many iconoclasts have come on the streets to tell men that a woman’s racy attire cannot be an excuse to sexually harass her. No touching only seeing was the message of Slut walks being organized in different cities of the world. [...]
