Genre et commerce

This paper looks at the strategy for promoting gender equality endorsed in the Beijing Platform for Action from the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995: gender mainstreaming. This strategy seeks to ensure that, across the entire policy and issue spectrum: the analysis of issues and the formulation of policy options are informed by a consideration of gender differences and inequalities; and opportunities are sought to narrow gender gaps and support greater equality between women and men.

The present report is the result of five working meetings of the Group of specialists on mainstreaming (EG-S-MS), which was set up by the Council of Europe in 1995. The aim of this report is to stimulate the various policy actors of the member States and the different bodies of the Council of Europe to initiate concrete actions in the field of gender mainstreaming, and to facilitate their initiatives. The recommendations contained in the report are meant to be general, and are valid for all levels (national, regional and local), as well as for the Council of Europe.

Virginia Woolf famously wrote 'as a woman I have no country', suggesting that women had little stake in defending countries where they are considered second-class citizens, and should instead be forces for peace. Yet women have been perpetrators as well as victims of violence in nationalist conflicts. This unique book generates insights into the role of gender in nationalist violence by examining feature films from a range of conflict zones. In The Battle of Algiers, female bombers destroy civilians while men dress in women's clothes to prevent the French army from capturing and torturing them. Prisoner of the Mountains shows a Chechen girl falling in love with her Russian captive as his mother tries to rescue him. Providing historical and political context to these and other films, Matthew Evangelista identifies the key role that economic decline plays in threatening masculine identity and provoking the misogynistic violence that often accompanies nationalist wars

Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990; second edition 1999 is a book by the philosopher Judith Butler, in which the author argues that gender is a kind of improvised performance. The work is influential in feminism, women's studies, and lesbian and gay studies, and has also enjoyed widespread popularity outside of traditional academic circles. Butler's ideas about gender came to be seen as foundational to queer theory and the advancing of dissident sexual practices during the 1990s

Social attitudes toward women vary significantly across societies. This chapter reviews recent empirical research on various historical determinants of contemporary differences in gender roles and gender gaps across societies, and how these differences are transmitted from parents to children and therefore persist until today. We review work on the historical origin of differences in female labor-force participation, fertility, education, marriage arrangements, competitive attitudes, domestic violence, and other forms of difference in gender norms. Most of the research illustrates that differences in cultural norms regarding gender roles emerge in response to specific historical situations, but tend to persist even after the historical conditions have changed. We also discuss the conditions under which gender norms either tend to be stable or change more quickly.