· August, 2007

Stories about Women & Gender from August, 2007

Mauritania : Ignorance and Tradition

  30 August 2007

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Generously endowed women are favored in Mauritania. The fatter the woman, the more beautiful she is thought to be. Being big is also a sign of wealth and the search for beauty and signs of exterior wealth leads to some unorthodox methods...

India: On Feminism

  30 August 2007

Ultra Violet, a new blog discussing feminism and India kicks off things with a post discussing feminism in contemporary culture.

South Korea: Inter-racial Love

  28 August 2007

Robert Koehler from the Marmot's Hole summarized a report on inter-racial love relation in one sentence: Korean men want to date foreign women because foreign women don’t view men as simply money-making machines, while Korean women want to date foreign men because it’s a good chance to learn English and...

Arabeyes: Just a Pretty Face

Miss South Carolina's response in the Miss USA Pageant to a question on why a fifth of US students couldn't locate their country on the map was the butt of jokes on Middle Eastern blogs today. Here's a quick review of what some bloggers had to say about her ramblings.

Uganda: Bloggers Respond to Controversial Daily Monitor Articles

  27 August 2007

Uganda’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) community has gotten a lot of press recently in the form of a number of articles written by Katherine Roubos, a 22-year-old Stanford student from the United States. Most recently, Roubos covered the first ever LGBTI press conference, a story that prompted an anti-gay rally in Kampala.

Guyana: A Woman's Role

  24 August 2007

Stella Ramsaroop finds herself assuming the role of submissive woman…but only long enough for her to use it as an example of how women must not “mindlessly fall in line with patriarchal socialisations.”

China: Guidebook On Being A Mistress

  24 August 2007

Wang Xiaofeng is reading a book about “second wife” or mistress (zh). It discusses about the phenomena of “second wife” in China from an economic view point. The writer was once a Taiwanese reporter who collected stories from Taiwan business circle.

South Korea: A Girl's Suicide

  23 August 2007

Matt from Gust of popular feeling looked into the suicide of a 16-year-old girl, Lee Eun-ji. The cause was believed to be cyber bullying by superjunior fans. However, Matt pointed another factor: the T.V program's framing of her image in weight loss.

Russia: Intermarriages

  22 August 2007

Of the more than 60,000 marriages in Moscow in the first half of 2007, a quarter were between native Muscovites – “typically an ethnic Russian woman – and a citizen of a neighboring country – more often than not a man from Azerbaijan or Central Asia.” Window on Eurasia attempts...

Russia: Nashi, BBC, and the Upcoming Elections

  22 August 2007

Mark MacKinnon writes about the recent BBC ban and the Nashi movement's summer camps: “Both the Kremlin's bolstering of “patriotic” youth movements and its crackdown on non-state media outlets are moves directed at heading off any kind of Orange Revolution-inspired uprising in Russia around December's Duma elections and/or next year's...

Nepal: Madhesi Women

  22 August 2007

Kathmandu Speaks on the changing roles of Madhesi women. “Participants of the historic convention, the first of its kind for the Madhesi women, expressed their longing for peace and freedom in the 17-point charter which mainly called for an end to violence…”

Kenya: New Women's Bank

  22 August 2007

Bankelele writes about a new Women's bank in Kenya: “Women’s Bank: They may not have been able to get special seats in Parliament, but women can count on having their own bank when the Kenya Women's finance trust converts to a commercial bank, probably in 2008. Having a women’s only...