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Learning from the British Suffragettes: How Posters Were Used to Announce (In)Security

Feminist work has always been important, but it seems, with the growing backlash against ‘gender ideology’ and an increasing refusal to identify as feminist, that it is increasingly so. Most important will be to clarify the core message(s) of the feminisms’ varied politics: highlighting gendered power structures and norms.

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Russia’s push for “traditional values” urges us to think about visibility and invisibility in more complex ways

When Chechnya’s president Ramzan Kadyrov, in response to reports in 2017 about a wave of anti-LGBT persecution, publically denied the existence of gay people in the republic – echoing the claims made by Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at Columbia University in 2007 that “in Iran we do not have homosexuals” – such efforts by state leaders to erase queers from the national narrative ironically draw global attention to precisely the category of people whose existence is denied.

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Women are gaining more legislative seats - why are they forming women's caucuses once they take those seats?

Since the end of World War II—and particularly since the early 1990s—the world’s national legislatures have experienced (some gradual, others quite dramatic) rises in levels of women’s descriptive representation.
But - there is no simple link between descriptive representation, on one hand, and women’s leadership, substantive representation, or equality within legislatures, on the other. Women who overcome barriers to election often encounter new obstacles once they take their parliamentary seats.

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When Brazil tried to find a space for solidarity in world politics

Questions such as “what does it take for a state like Brazil to be taken seriously as a ‘strong’ and ‘responsible’ political actor?” and “what are the obstacles to the making of a world in which solidarity can be ranked as a strong quality of those who seek recognition, voice and power?” are intrinsically connected. An exploration of those questions may help us to tackle the limitations in our vocabulary for the recognition of broader feminist agendas in political spaces, especially when we define as feminist any agendas that challenge the alleged neutrality of concepts and/or norms that so often favors the classification of a particular set of qualities as superior and more ‘appropriate’ for the performance of a given role.

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