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The purpose of this case study is to examine and explore the consequences of reintegration among female ex-combatants in Sri Lanka and Nepal. DDR-programs have often been critiqued by scholars for their lack of gender perspective, consequently this research aims to understand the unique challenges and outcomes faced by women with different intersectional identities. This study uses structured, focused comparison, to systematically compare social, economic and political aspects of reintegration based on several comparing factors such as psychological health, stigmatisation, employment opportunities, education, financial support, political participation and representation. Through this methodology, and the creation of the theoretical framework based on critical feminism and the analytical tool intersectionality, the study aims to answer what differences and similarities can be found in the two countries. The findings shows that social identities such as gender, class, caste, ethnicity, age and ideology have a significant impact on female ex-combatants’ access to reintegration. Furthermore, that prior education levels of female ex-combatant have a decisive influence on the possibility of a meaningful reintegration in society.

This empirical study analyses whether and how the Imbusa initiation rite is used to construct ‘subordinate femininities’ among married Bemba women of Zambia. Imbusa initiation rite is very significant for Bemba and Zambian women despite the many changes that have significantly altered their religio-cultural practices. It is something that makes every parent proud of their daughter because it is more or less a public declaration that they have raised their daughter with good morals as understood by Bemba people. This study has used two frameworks, first, African women theologies because African women theologies draw their sources from rites, rituals, songs, proverbs, riddles and so on. Secondly, I used status construction within social psychological theory because those with authority in groups define the outcomes and expectations of their group. For instance, banacimbusa among the Bemba people determine what should comprise the teachings in Imbusa and how an initiated woman has to behave in marriage. Utilizing mixed methods, the aim was to understand women’s views about ways in which the Imbusa rite contribute to the identity of Bemba and other Zambian women in marriage. I have proposed a framework for a life-giving marriage; first the need for banacimbusa who are gender sensitive in their teachings; second, African feminist Imbusa pedagogy, teachings that equip women for dialogue in marriage. And third, a holistic approach to sexuality in marriage. / Thesis (M.Th.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2013.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-12-17T15:39:01Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 LaisBB_DISSERT.pdf: 4153066 bytes, checksum: b629cf83014e7a5061ed66d61adbd8b6 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013-04-12 / Coordena??o de Aperfei?oamento de Pessoal de N?vel Superior / The present study aims to meet the attention given to women with mental health needs in specialized services for the fight against violence against women, as well as psychosocial care network in the municipality of NatalRN. It is a qualitative research characterized as research-intervention that took place in the year 2011. The study started in the Centre of Reference in which individual semi-structured interviews were carried out directed to the coaching staff and manager, in order to know the care offered in relation to the aforementioned clientele. From the Reference Centre were identified through analysis of registration records, the routes traversed by users through the network of psychosocial care and hospital network. After the identification of the same were visited two day-care Centers, two psychiatric hospitals, a basic health Unit and the local shelter. In these organizations was investigated the reception and procedures offered to users in situations of violence, the knowledge of policies for women and the coordination with the attention to women, through interviews with semi-structured individual scripts directed to professionals. The interviews were analyzed taking as starting point the theoretical framework of French Institutional Analysis, which includes the assumption of events analysers for the critical reading of dimensions introduced in the practices of care of the teams that took part in the study. The survey results revealed difficulties on the part of the same host of users with this profile, both in the face of violence as services in mental health services. This fact led to the lack of support under the guarantee of their rights, ceasing the possibilities of confronting the situations of violence, as well as in the context of mental health care / O presente estudo tem como finalidade conhecer o acolhimento e aten??o dispensados ?s mulheres com demandas em sa?de mental nos servi?os especializados para o enfrentamento da viol?ncia, bem como pela rede de aten??o psicossocial no munic?pio de Natal/RN. Trata-se de uma pesquisa qualitativa caracterizada como pesquisainterven??o realizada no ano de 2011. O estudo se iniciou no Centro de Refer?ncia no qual foram realizadas entrevistas semiestruturadas individuais direcionadas ? equipe t?cnica e gestora, objetivando-se conhecer os cuidados ofertados em rela??o ? clientela supracitada. A partir do Centro de Refer?ncia foram identificados, por meio da an?lise de fichas de cadastro, os itiner?rios percorridos pelas usu?rias atrav?s da rede de aten??o psicossocial e rede hospitalar. Ap?s a identifica??o dos mesmos foram visitados dois Centros de Aten??o Psicossocial, dois Hospitais Psiqui?tricos, uma Unidade B?sica de Sa?de e a Casa Abrigo local. Nestes equipamentos investigou-se o acolhimento e procedimentos oferecidos ?s usu?rias em situa??o de viol?ncia, o conhecimento das pol?ticas para mulheres e a articula??o com a rede de aten??o ?s mulheres, por meio de entrevistas com roteiros semi-estruturados individuais direcionadas aos profissionais de refer?ncia. As entrevistas foram analisadas tendo como ponto de partida o referencial te?rico da An?lise Institucional francesa, o qual prev? a elei??o de analisadores para a leitura cr?tica das dimens?es institu?das nas pr?ticas de cuidados das equipes que fizeram parte do estudo. Os resultados da pesquisa revelaram dificuldades por parte das mesmas no acolhimento das usu?rias com este perfil, tanto nos servi?os de enfrentamento ? viol?ncia quanto nos servi?os de sa?de mental. Tal fato ocasionava a desassist?ncia no ?mbito da garantia dos seus direitos, cessando as possibilidades de enfrentamento das situa??es de viol?ncia, bem como de cuidados no ?mbito da sa?de mental

The centrepoint of this thesis is an action research project, the Maternal Alienation Project (MAP), implemented during 2002 and 2003 in Adelaide, South Australia. Resourced by two government-funded community health services, it was established to improve organisations’ (health, welfare and legal) and systems’ responses to the newly termed ‘maternal alienation’. MAP was situated within a tradition of feminist participatory and action research. It was designed to work on three levels: practice, systems and policy-making, and research. The outcomes, processes and events of MAP at the different levels of its operation are examined in the thesis through the employment of a gendered analysis drawn mainly from materialist feminism and standpoint theories. Post-project interviews and focus groups provided further data to the fieldnotes written throughout MAP, and the project’s formal and informal documents. A recent example of a contested gendered concept, “maternal alienation” was first identified and named in 1999 as a component of gender violence (Morris 1999). It forms part of a spectrum of violence perpetrated in households, and had been identified within domestic violence and child sexual abuse. It is a term for the range of tactics used by mainly male perpetrators, predominantly the mothers’ intimate partners and the children’s fathers or step-fathers, to deliberately undermine the relationship between mothers and their children. The mother-blaming discourses and degrading constructions of mothers conveyed to children and those in the family’s orbit are strongly related to wider socio-cultural constructions of women and mothers. The thesis examines theories of gender, gendered organisations and gender violence. It develops the concept of an abusive household gender regime, characterised by perpetrators’ imposition of a coercive and abusive regime on household members, and particular patternings of gendered relations. Comparisons are made between household and organisational gender regimes, which are also viewed in relation to the local gender order at the time of MAP. It was found that services that lack an analysis of gender are likely to re-inscribe the dynamics of maternal alienation in their responses to families. Language was found to play a significant part in addressing maternal alienation, particularly in developing congruence between language and women’s and children’s “lived” experiences. The principles that were developed were founded on supporting mothers and rebuilding their relationships with children, and making visible the tactics employed by perpetrators, thereby reducing their power to coerce and increasing their accountability. The concept of maternal alienation and MAP itself were attacked by a coalition of men’s rights and Christian Right lobbyists. This compromised the operations of MAP, and of its key supporters, managers of feminist and gender-aware organisations. In many ways these attacks, played out at a macro level, reflected the techniques and dynamics of maternal alienation at a micro level. This thesis raises questions about the strategies that feminist organisations need to develop to more effectively pursue feminist agendas, and to re-invigorate a women’s movement. / Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Social Sciences, 2008

The aim of this work is to analyze quranic feminist interpretation focusing on controversial verse 4:34. We attempt to demonstrate the way islamic feminist exegets deal with the key concepts of this verse mostly notion of male authority (qiwwama and faddala), female obedience (qanitat) and disobedience (nushuz) and wife beating (idribuhunna) through the islamic feminist hermeneutical principles mainly contextual, holistic and through reexamination of terminology. Particular arguments, approaches and interpretative manoeuvres of feminist Qurʼanic exegesis aiming to legitimize gender egalitarian reading of the Qurʼan and challenging centuries of andocentric exegetical tradition will be examined.

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This dissertation fundamentally explores the nature of change, and the development interventions that aim to bring this change into a particular society. What emerges is the notion of a ‘spiral’: imagining the dynamic relationship between paradigms and discourses, the institutions and programmes operating in a place, and the way individual identities are constructed in intricate and contradictory ways. Within this spiral, discourse has power – ‘words matter’ – but equally significant is how these words interact dialogically with concrete social structures and institutions – ‘it takes more than changing words to change the world’. Furthermore, these changes are reacted to, and expressed in, the physical, sexed body. In essence, change is ideational, institutional, and embodied. To investigate the politics of change, this dissertation analyses the spiral relationships between gender discourses, institutions, and identities in contemporary Indonesia, focusing on their transmission across Java. It does so by exploring the Indonesian state’s gender policies in the context of globalisation, democratisation, and decentralisation. In this way, the lens of gender allows us to analyse the dynamic interactions between state and society, between ideas and institutions, which impact on everything from cultural structures to physical bodies. Research focuses on the gender policies of the Indonesian Ministry of Women’s Empowerment, substantiated with case study material from United Nations Population Fund reproductive health programmes in West Java. Employing a multi-level, multi-vocal theoretical framework, the thesis analyses gender discourses and relational structures (how discourses circulate to construct the Indonesian woman), gender institutions and social structures (how discourses are translated into programmes), and gender identities and embodied structures (how discourses enter the home and the body). Critically, studying gender requires analysing the human body as the site of both structural and symbolic power. This dissertation thus argues for renewed emphasis on a ‘politics of the body’, recognising that bodies are the material foundations from which gender discourses derive their naturalising power and hence ability to structure social relations. The danger of forgetting this politics of the body is that it allows for slippage between ‘gender’ and ‘women’; policy objectives cannot be disentangled from the reality of physical bodies and their social construction. This thesis therefore argues that there are distinct and even inverse impacts of gender policies in Indonesia. As the ‘liberal’ and ‘modern’ assumptions of gender equality are overlaid onto the patriarchal culture of a society undergoing transformation, women’s bodies and women’s sexuality are always and ever the focus of the social gaze. The gender policies and interventions affecting change on discursive and institutional levels may thus provoke reaction at the level of individual identities that are contrary to explicit intentions. In effect, projects that purport to work on ‘gender’ are often so deeply rooted in underlying gender normativity that their net effect is to reinscribe these gender hierarchies. By exposing the contradictions in these underlying paradigms we gain insight into the politics of a transforming society. Furthermore, engaging with the politics of the body allows us to analyse the spiral processes between discourse and practice, the question of power, and the way men and women embody social structures and experience social transformation.

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