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Although this chapter situates all violence against women as a human rights issue, it emphasises ‘culturalised’ forms of this violence, such as honour-based violence/abuse, forced marriage and female genital mutilation. The authors draw upon their respective research to highlight how these forms of gendered violence have been subjected to a process of culturalisation. The chapter shows that while this process has raised awareness of previously under-researched forms of abuse and highlighted some of the contextual differences between women’s experiences of violence more broadly, its overemphasis on culture and cultural pathology has resulted in policy and legislative responses that do not always benefit victims. Ultimately, this chapter aims to problematise ‘culturalised’ understandings of violence in diverse communities and to show how current policy, legislative and support responses fail to adequately address the intersectional needs of black and minority ethnic victims/survivors.¹

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Authors’ note: To capture the collaborative feminist process in writing this article, we list authors’ name alphabetically rather than the traditional presentation of lead author first.

We use Third World, Materialist, and Poststructuralist feminist perspectives with an intersectional transnational lens to analyze our self-reflections about feminist pedagogy and the messy business of conducting our research. We draw on student participant interviews and responses to follow-up questions to support key arguments.

Much feminist pedagogy discourse constructs consciousness-raising and empowerment as positive. However, our research indicates our students’ experiences of these processes as well as our own as teachers and researchers is contradictory; outcomes are often unintended and not always positive, despite our best intentions.

Our work seeks to destabilize problematic notions of empowerment and consciousness-raising by contributing accounts of how feminist pedagogy impacts students in sometimes negative, unintended ways. These contributions should be utilized to better understand power relations between students and teachers, as well as refine pedagogical approaches to best address and reevaluate their impacts on students.

Rather than perpetuate decontextualized and overly optimistic notions of feminist pedagogy, consciousness-raising, and empowerment that fail to capture the complexities and contradictions of women’s lives and the gendered relations in which they participate, this chapter stands as a call to feminists to problematize their key concepts and practices and lay them open to critique.

Academic and popular commentators of Asia find it almost impossible not to reach for metaphors of breathtaking economic and social change, fanned by the winds of globalization. This chapter explores the extent to which young Asian values concerning gender relations in the household, pornography and prostitution are similar to or different from those of young westerners. While some respondents themselves talk of the impact of globalization on attitudes in their countries, clear differences in attitudes as well as vocabularies or justifications for those attitudes are found, the Asian samples, usually but not always, expressing a different set of responses from the Anglophone or Western samples.