Women’s Cricket in India

Raadhika Gupta’s essay steps into cricket deploying a gender lens locating women’s cricket squarely within the larger, ‘masculine’ world of cricket where it essays a disruptive path. Despite occupying an outsider status, several factors have pushed for women’s inclusion within cricket, with implications of such changing gender dynamics within the sport for gender equality in the wider field of sport and society. The possibilities of transcending exclusion is suggested through early training, local support, more match opportunities, common governing and similar compensation structures, and media attention. These and other societal forces can act as a strong equalizer in social relations.

Moscow Doesn’t Believe in Tears: A Matter of Gender and Fate

This paper offers an in-depth review of the Soviet hit film Moscow Doesn’t Believe in Tears (1979). Focusing on its female characters, it analyses the gender dynamics that prevailed in the Soviet Union at that time and the narrative impact it had on the plot. The article is divided into three subsections: a brief historical and political context, a depiction of the state of gender equality in the Soviet Union, as well as the power dynamics that existed both in the professional and domestic sphere, and a summary of the different femininities portrayed by the characters, along with the role morality and fate played in the film.

Women, Violence, and Gender Dynamics during and after the Five Patani-Siam Wars, 1785–1838

This article examines five wars that occurred on the Malay-Thai Peninsula in the period 1785–1838 and the deep impact they had upon women's lives during and after the conflicts. Constituting the majority of surviving refugees, women rebuilt their lives in the wake of war through business and trade in Malaya, as Islamic teachers in Mecca and Southeast Asia, and as servants and slaves in Bangkok. In each of these settings, women encountered new forms of agency and newfound challenges, shifting cultural values that regulated decisions and actions, and evolving perceptions of the qualifications for leadership. Focused upon the political demise of the Patani Sultanate, a state with a long history of female rule, this study is of particular relevance to scholarly debates concerning women in contemporary warfare because of its transnational focus with keen attention to women in a variety of Islamic spaces and contexts, its aim of dispelling the pervasive notion of Muslim women as lacking agency, and as a point of comparison for the present armed conflict still raging in Southern Thailand that has claimed more than five thousand and continues to impact women and gender dynamics in the region.

Women’s Tears or Coffee Blight?

The transformations of the coffee sector have posed major challenges to rural farmers who have lost an important source of income. However, the way in which such shocks are experienced by families hinges on the gender relations governing families’ production and sale of coffee. In this article, it is argued that in Meru, Tanzania, which once had a strong coffee economy, the production of coffee depended on the subjugation of women by men. The collapse of coffee has created new opportunities for women. They do not mourn its demise, as one might expect from a merely financial perspective. At the same time, women’s new opportunities for income earning and business are also contested by men. The changes in this part of Tanzania in response to recent transformations can only be understood through the gender dynamics, and the contests, they fuel.