From Episodic Novel to Serial TV: The Handmaid’s Tale, Adaptation and Politics

This article analyzes the changes in The Handmaid’s Tale’s moral and political outlook as it tracks different forms of complexity in the novel, the film, and the TV series. While the sense of female empowerment increases with each adaptation of this tale of forced sexual servitude in fictional theocratic state of Gilead, the essay argues that Hulu’s TV series (created by Bruce Miller, 2017–) develops an intriguing interaction between the interiority of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel and the exteriority emphasized in Volker Schlöndorff’s 1990 film. In so doing, the TV series Escher-twists across related binaries between activity/passivity and personal/political actions as well. By expanding, displacing, and creatively intersecting storylines which the novel cut short, the series weaves an intricate perspectival web that invites the viewer to participate in its mind games.

Women and their rights: From totalitarianism to feminist empowerment in the context of the 20th anniversary of UN1325 on women, peace, and security between victims, leaders, and perpetrators

While analysing the heritage, input, and various implementation contexts of UNSCR 1325 on women, peace, and security, the authors investigate not only various approaches to women’s position and female empowerment in international engagement settings and cooperation models (UN, OSCE NATO, UNCDF), but also look at female empowerment in a global scope from women’s perspectives as victims, leaders, and perpetrators. By considering the need for complex engagement of international actors in stability, development, and crisis initiatives, the authors analyse NATO policy against sexual abuse and exploitation, on women’s financial inclusion, and the MenEngage initiative. While analysing the societal impact of radicalisation, they seek answers for effective reintegration and anti-radicalisation of female terrorists and foreign fighters. Authors examine the evolving gender equity and female empowerment policies of the EU in their foreign and domestic affairs, with particular interest in internal and external security standards for women’s safety.

The Christianizing the Home Movement

The ecumenical National Christian Council of China (ncc) was the institutional home to an important religious and social campaign: the Christianizing the Home Movement. This article traces the development of this movement from the ncc’s founding in 1922 until the Second World War disrupted its activity. This home- and family-centered movement was a site of female empowerment, and the expansive topics it addressed show women’s desires to serve and lead in a broad set of arenas. This article shows how the Chinese women who led the Christianizing the Home Movement built and shaped a movement and describes the nationwide network of leaders that carried it out, promoting an ideal of Christian family that was culturally informed and progressive.

Female Authority Figures in Dorothea Tanning’s Chasm: A Weekend

Little girls and young women are Dorothea Tanning’s recurrent archetypes, defining and structuring her conceptual archive concerning gender and the feminine. A celebrated painter and sculptor who shaped her artistic vision in the proximity of the historical avant-gardes, Tanning was also a writer who revealed the mystery and estrangement of family ties in Chasm: A weekend, a novel she started writing in 1943 and published six decades later, in 2004. This singular book offers a privileged dialogue between literature and art, as several episodes revisit and translate the high tension of some of her most representative paintings. From within a feminist framework, the article will discuss aspects of female authority and control in Tanning’s novel as dominant forms of female empowerment, present throughout her visual Surrealist oeuvre. I argue that examining these allegories reveals their role as connectors between the literary and the visual arts, between Dorothea Tanning’s fiction and her painting.

The outsiders’ society: from prosperity gender pedagogies to post-feminist heterotopias

This article focuses on a possible permeability between feminist experience and evangelical Neo-Pentecostal experience. Through a focus group approach, we problematize the intersection between the pulsating gender pedagogy in prosperity theology and the lines of force of two feminist premises, which was resignified by a neoliberal rationality: gender equality and female empowerment. Therefore, we defend that the sayings of young evangelicals allow us to suggest the existence of a post-feminist heterotopia: spaces, certainly not full of neoliberal gender discourse ruptures, despite of that, still give rise to small cracks that from the very heart of normativity allow these evangelical young women to create other subjective possibilities for themselves.

regulating motherhood through markets: Filipino women’s engagement with microcredit

The Philippines is a global leader in deploying microcredit to address poverty. These programmes are usually directed at women. Research on these programmes focuses on traditional economic indicators such as loan repayment rates but neglects impacts on women’s agency and well-being, or their position in the household and relationships with their partners and children. It is taken for granted that access to microcredit leads to enhanced gender freedoms. In line with the growing body of work in feminist scholarship that critiques the instrumentalist logic of microfinance institutions (MFIs) in relation to women, this research foregrounds stories from interviews with female borrowers in Zamboanga City in Southern Philippines to provide grounded illustrations of how microcredit is reshaping relationships between women and their families, women and poverty and women and the state. Borrowers used loans to meet their family’s needs even at the cost of harassment from creditors, indebtedness, increased workloads and conflict with partners. These narratives challenge the dominant neoliberal discourse of female empowerment through access to credit by exposing how microcredit is part of a complex set of regulations around ‘good motherhood’ and consumption, where women’s moral worth is based on their willingness and ability to lift their families out of poverty.

Informal entrepreneurship and women's empowerment – the case of street vendors in urban Colombia

PurposeInternational development organizations promote access to resources through self-employment as one of the main strategies to achieve women's empowerment. However, many self-employees are more similar to informal workers than to successful entrepreneurs affecting women's control over resources and their empowerment process. This article analyzes the relationship between informal entrepreneurship and female empowerment in the context of an emerging economy.Design/methodology/approachThe authors surveyed a sample of 295 female street vendors in Bogotá – Colombia. Contingency and correlational analysis is performed.FindingsEvidence is found about the expansion of women's capacity to make decisions about resource allocation and time managing because of informal entrepreneurship. Nevertheless, these decisions are not strategic nor given in a context with several options. Several structural constraints to the exercise of agency limit empowerment to an individual process dependent on circumstances instead of a collective process resulting in changes in women's social conditions.Research limitations/implicationsThis research allows for a better understanding of the potentialities and opportunities these entrepreneurships offer to women and what strategies could be implemented to take advantage of them.Practical implicationsDespite their characteristics, informal entrepreneurship has potentialities to improve female empowerment especially when factors beyond economic rationality, such as personal, familial and sociocultural, are considered.Originality/valueThe authors discuss the category of informal entrepreneurship in emerging economies and evaluate the success of this type of entrepreneurship with a gender point of view by incorporating empowerment as measure.