CIAO DATE: 01/2015
Volume: 31, Issue: 1
March 2014
Sex & Sexuality (PDF)
The Big Question: How do sex and sexuality affect one's role in society? (PDF)
Andrew Reding, Jina Moore, Shereen El Feki, Kate Kraft, Siddharth Dube, Tam Nguyen, Coral Herrera Gómez, Hans Billimoria
For as long as humankind has organized into coherent communities, sex and sexuality have played central roles in forming the nature of societies and governments. But only recently, within the past century or less, has the competition or selection of man vs. woman determined the nature of government, its citizens, and the way the two interact. We asked our panel of global experts how the interplay of gender and sexuality has affected their respective societies.
Anatomy: The Making of Wadjda (PDF)
Haifaa al-Mansour
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia-Developing Wadjda, the first full-length feature film ever shot entirely inside the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and directed by a woman, posed some wholly unique challenges that come with making a film in a country where cinema is illegal, public displays of art are vilified, women are marginalized, gender segregation is strictly enforced, and tribal and fundamentalist groups stand resolutely against anything they feel threatens their values.
Gender Über Alles (PDF)
Deborah Steinborn, Uwe Jean Heuser
HAMBURG, Germany-The appointments of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, General Motors' CEO Mary Barra, and IMF managing director Christine Lagarde signify a trend toward increasing the number of women in leadership. Less obviously, they also reflect a new global awareness that sex and gender are paramount in the development of politics, economics, and society in the 21st century.
Map Room: Violence Against Women (PDF)
Jill Filipovic
Sisterhood, Robin Morgan wrote, is powerful. That rallying cry of second-wave American feminism is compelling, but this concept of sisterhood-shared experiences, shared values-doesn't exist on a global scale. There is no universal experience of womanhood. Women around the world live vastly differently lives, our experiences often shaped as much by our location, race, economic standing, nationality, age, and religion, as by our sex. But there is one thread that cuts across all dividing lines-violence.
Trans[ition] in Iran (PDF)
Rochelle Terman
TEHRAN, Iran—When Shadi Amin was growing up in pre-revolutionary Iran, she began experiencing sexual feelings toward other girls. “I thought there was something wrong with me,” she says. “I thought, maybe I should change something.” By “something,” Amin was referring not to her identity or lifestyle, but to her gender. “If I was that young girl living in Iran today, I would have considered having a sex change operation,” even though she has never identified with being male.
Latin Women Take the Helm (PDF)
Silvia Viñas
SANTIAGO, Chile-Feminist sociologist Teresa Valdés was among a crowd of 200,000 men and women who turned Santiago's main avenue, the Alameda, into a party when Michelle Bachelet was elected Chile's first female president on January 15, 2006. "The Alameda was full-full of people, full of women and little girls wearing presidenMICHELLE BACHELET, PRESIDENT OF CHILE tial sashes," she recalls. "It was glorious, like a party." And Bachelet's speech was inspirational-particularly when she asked the crowd, "Who would have thought... 20, 10, or five years ago, that Chile would elect a woman as president?"
Women and the New Global Order: A Conversation with Anne-Marie Slaughter (PDF)
Silvia Viñas
Anne-Marie Slaughter has helped shape global policy at the highest levels of government and academia-as director of policy planning in Hillary Clinton's State Department, as dean of Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and today as president of the New America Foundation. She also has some provocative ideas on the role of men and women in shaping the nature of the contemporary world. World Policy Journal editor David A. Andelman and managing editor Yaffa Fredrick talked with Dr. Slaughter about the nature of global governance and, on a more personal level, whether women, or for that matter men, can have it all.
Mexico: Vigilante Justice (PDF)
Judith Matloff, Katie Orlinsky
TIERRA COLORADA, Mexico—The main road on the mountain ridge had vanished in a landslide, and what was once the tarmac hung off the cliff like a ribbon. Construction workers hired by the government excavated boulders so vehicles could pass. But anyone trying to plough through faced another obstacle—farmers with shotguns manning a roadblock on a curve. A driver exited his car to talk with the men in beige uniforms, who asked for his name and mission. Assured no mischief was intended, the citizen policeman at the barricade waved him on. “If you get stuck in the mud, alert us,” advised the man who appeared to be in charge, a corn farmer who volunteers for regular shifts to maintain order. “We control the path.”
South Africa: A Science Lesson (PDF)
Melanie Smuts
J OHANNESBURG, South Africa— Xoliswa, 11 years old, was given a science assignment in class. The worksheet, written in English and handed to her on Monday, was due that Friday. The task was to build a model solar system using paper maché, newspaper, paint, wire, polystyrene, and balloons. Xoliswa’s mother, who earns a precarious living through child-care and occasional laundry orders, speaks little English and could offer no assistance. Worse yet, Xoliswa had never heard of paper maché or polystyrene. She arrived with a small packet of water balloons at the Learning Center—an afterschool institution in the affordable housing apartment block where she lives—and wondered if the Center could help her complete the task at hand.
Palestine: Children Laboring (PDF)
Matt Surrusco
ZBEIDAT, West Bank—The electricity in the village went out for the third time on a warm July night. But the young men, some in their teens, didn’t want to stop playing cards. A few took out their mobile phones to project some light on the patio’s low table outside Amjad’s house, the regular hangout for a dozen or so of the young men of Zbeidat, a village of 1,870 in the northern West Bank. Three minutes later, the lights flicked back on, illuminating the cards strewn across the table, the young men’s grinning faces, and a few additional patio areas outside other Zbeidat homes, where men were drinking tea or coffee and talking. On Amjad’s patio, Hamza Zbeidat, a Palestinian from the village, and Christopher Whitman, a New Englander from the United States, were sitting with the guys, some teenagers in high school, others in their twenties and working or in universities.
Hunting Witches (PDF)
Gary Foxcroft
LANCASTER, England—More than 400 years ago, King James of Scotland amended Exodus 22.18 to read: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”
Romania: Land for Sale (PDF)
Maurizio Bongioanni
BUCHAREST, Romania-Mauro, 28, and Adrian, 27, are two brothers from the southern Italian region of Puglia, who were sent by their father to cultivate 750 acres of corn in southern Romania, not far from the Bulgarian border. Their plot is small by Romanian standards. The two brothers are considered tiny landowners. Country life is hard, they confess, and they live in an area where they often go without electricity for days. "Here, the goal is quantity, not quality," one of them says. "For months we have had a single young worker-young because the older ones have a concept of working that is light years away from farming as we understand it.
Vietnam's Second Revolution (PDF)
Elizabeth Pond
HANOI, Vietnam-The best way to feel the sheer energy of Vietnam's under-29 population is to ride pillion on Do Duyen's motorbike. Like most Hanoi drivers (except when they drink too much rice wine at Tet or at weddings), Duyen has a sixth sense of how others will react in the flood of motorbikes and intruding cars, trucks, buses, bicycles, and village peddlers balancing bamboo poles across their shoulders. Never mind that motorcyclists routinely make illegal turns at intersections by plunging left against traffic that is hurtling right. Everyone else simply swerves to accommodate this anomaly in his or her own way, and the collective streams of traffic glide on.
Currency Wars (PDF)
David A. Andelman
At noon on August 10, 1978, I arrived at the frontier between Austria and Czechoslovakia in my rickety old Opel sedan that was The New York Times bureau car. I’d driven up from Belgrade, where I was then based, covering an Eastern Europe thoroughly in the grip of communism. Now, when I arrived at the frontier, I steeled myself. I was about to pass through what Winston Churchill had 32 years earlier dubbed the Iron Curtain, separating East from West.