Women: Opportunities and Challenges

Women: Opportunities and Challenges first compares the state of women's representation in the political leadership positions of South Africa and Cameroon after more than two decades of democracy, as well as its impact on women and society at large. Based on actor perspectives from female Members of Parliament and the national women's organizations in Ghana, the authors analyse insider/outsider dynamics between women inside the state and women outside the state. Following this, the role of the media in the acceptance of Eurocentric Black hair transformations amongst Black South African women is examined. For decades, the debate has raged on the Eurocentric definition of beauty as promoted by various media channels and its possible effect on how Black women define their identity, self-worth, and acceptance into various social classes. The short-lived nature women's post-disaster empowerment is addressed, and the factors that enable and soon challenge that empowerment are theoretically and empirically explored. Barriers to sexual assault intervention related to victim race as well as bystanders' own intergroup contact experiences are studied in an effort to determine whether bystanders may be more likely to help potential victims who are perceived to be similar to themselves. The authors theorize the influence of women's conditioned minds and bodies on their gendered subjugation, pinpointing embodied inferiority and learned helplessness as invisible prime enablers of the perpetuation of domestic violence against women. This compilation also explores how U.S. singer, performer and activist Janelle Monae challenges and complicates the stereotypical myths surrounding African American girls and young women by deconstructing heterosexual normativity and gender conformity in her music, performances and music videos. The closing study focuses on the Spanish Civil War, which displaced half a million people outside of Spain and exiled more than two hundred thousand across the world, concentrating them into refugee communities in France, Mexico, Argentina and the Soviet Union, among others.