The Week’s Best Posts on GAB: January 30 – February 3, 2012

Today, we’re launching a new weekly column that highlights our best posts on Gender Across Borders. Maybe you missed reading them that week, or want to read them again because they’re that good. So! Here goes…

GAB’s best posts from the week that was . . .

————————-

The Haredi have long held on to their rigid beliefs surrounding women and modesty, and are comfortable challenging anyone who defies these beliefs. Advertisers will no longer put up ads that include women in Haredi neighborhoods after vandals continued to black out women’s faces on posters. Women are routinely segregated to the back of public buses in Haredi neighborhoods, and recently, a female soldier was attacked for refusing to move to the women’s section of a bus.

-From “Haradat Nashim” – How The Exclusion of Women Is Tearing Israel Apart by Avital Nathman

————————-

The advancement of LGBT equality in Tunisia is moving slowly; as in every revolution, change does not occur overnight, or even within a time frame as short as a year. However, the fact that LGBT equality is being talked about as a serious issue is a step in the right direction.

-From LGBT Rights in Tunisia, A Year After the Revolution by Carrie Nelson

————————-

Click on image for credit

To me, it seems clear: we should consider thinking about homophobia as a fear of people not conforming to traditional gender roles, and the direct correlation between that fear and the same fear that fuels sexism, and transphobia. By addressing homophobia in this way i.e. through the lens of gender justice, Africa could not only avoid repeating the mistakes of the west re: inclusion of transgender people, but achieve what the west has not been able to (at least, until very recently) — achieve unity across its many disparate social movements.

-From Challenging Gender Binaries in the Motherland: Three African Transgender and Intersex Organizations Form Tri-Partnership by Spectra Speaks

Like Gender Across Borders on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter and Tumblr. Subscribe to our monthly newsletter. UPDATE: to take part in our survey regarding international feminism, click here.