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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Dignity And Empowerment: An Exploration Of The Microcredit Experiences Of Women In Rural Bangladesh, Rahima K. Lipi
Dignity And Empowerment: An Exploration Of The Microcredit Experiences Of Women In Rural Bangladesh, Rahima K. Lipi
Journal of International Women's Studies
Modern microcredit, as a tool for economic and social development, emerged with the assumption that it would promote women’s empowerment. Some researchers have found that microcredit has had a significant amount of success. However, some of these supportive studies have also ignored the subjective history of the participants. A second critical view of microcredit presents the practice as a Western World notion which exploits women as a tool of the market economy in order to gain profit, arguing that it has failed to provide an alternative to women’s vulnerability and survival. This article focuses on the drawbacks of both approaches. …
Resisting The Male Gaze: Feminist Responses To The "Normatization" Of The Female Body In Western Culture, Diane Ponterotto
Resisting The Male Gaze: Feminist Responses To The "Normatization" Of The Female Body In Western Culture, Diane Ponterotto
Journal of International Women's Studies
This paper attempts to present a feminist critique of the social and political promotion in Western culture of a univocal model of female corporeity imposed on women, and consequently detrimental to female subjectivity and agency. Starting from the Foucauldian position concerning social oppression determined by the disciplinary gaze of power structures, the paper discusses perspectives of resistance to the patriarchally-motivated scrutiny of the female body, and to the mass-media induced coercion of conformity to the normatized model for the female body in contemporary society.