Women's Movements in the Global Era: The Power of Local Feminisms - Tapa blanda

"In this fine collection, Basu and her contributors provide sweeping analyses of diverse feminist and women's movements and organizations in major world regions. Highly recommended." -Choice "In the fifteen years since the first edition of this book commemorated the Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing in 1995, the panorama of gender politics and women's movements across the globe has been dramatically reconfigured. Bringing together a broad array of richly detailed, analytically exacting, and often provocative case studies, this new edition offers fresh insights into how changing global and local forces have impacted women's lives and feminist activism. Written by scholars from all major world regions deeply immersed in the processes they analyze, this volume exhaustively documents how the global gender policy agenda consolidated since Beijing has been translated and transformed by activists and policy makers on the ground. It will surely be a vital resource for feminist rights advocates and scholars alike." -Sonia E. Alvarez, University of Massachusetts, Amherst "Amrita Basu has done it again. She has created, with her fine contributors, a book that is accessible, worldly, nuanced and analytically smart. Every country study here and all of them read together reminds me why we have to be grittily specific when we talk about women's activism and why we always need to watch how feminist thinking and activist strategizing constantly inform each other. This book should be assigned to students at all levels." -Cynthia Enloe, author of Nimo's War, Emma's War: Making Feminist Sense of the Iraq War "In our increasingly interconnected world, women's movements, which for many years have played a key role in the struggle for gender justice, are evolving--retaining their local roots, but also joining transnational networks and responding dynamically to new alliances. This outstanding set of thirteen nation-based studies provides a rich resource for anyone trying to understand this evolution. Amrita Basu, one of the foremost scholars in this area, provides a superb Introduction: analytically sophisticated, lucid, and bold." -Martha Nussbaum, the University of Chicago "Spanning the decade and a half since the Beijing conference, Women's Movements in the Global Era astutely captures a world in which global flows of ideas, people and resources, the exigencies of nation states, and the workings of geopolitics increasingly complicate the circumstances within which feminist movements must exist. The book, which covers women's movements in thirteen countries, makes clear that given that women's movements continue to operate within national boundaries with the ultimate goal of seeking concessions from their own nation states, they are vulnerable to both national and global economies and politics. The chapters in the book insightfully illustrate the pitfalls of such a double-edgedness as well as the creativity of movements which are able to successfully work within and across national/global lines. It is a wonderful and much needed assessment of the state of global feminism today which provides readers with the tools with which to grasp the possibilities of these movements in the future." -Raka Ray, University of California, Berkeley

Women's Movements in the Global Era provides a path-breaking study of the genesis, growth, gains, and dilemmas of women's movements in countries throughout the world. Its focus is on the global South, where women's movements have engaged in complex negotiations with national and international forces. It challenges widely held assumptions about the Western origins and character of local feminisms. The authors locate women's movements within the terrain from which they emerged by exploring their relationships with the state, civil society, and other social movements. This is essential reading for anyone interested in the global scope and implications of feminism.