©Pikala Bikes

Located in Marrakesh the project Pikala Bikes runs a bicycle training center for teens and young adults. There they learn how to restore, repair and maintain a wide variety of bicycles. Moreover this project offers a chance for girls and young women to develop themselves. DW spoke to Cantal Bakker, the director of Pikala Bikes.

(Men stand in heels and wait for the start of the Walk a Mile in her Shoes, event in St. Louis on June 8, 2013.)

This is not about me or Sara Ahmed or Audre Lorde. It is not the story of one woman, or two or three. It is about feminism. And there you go! I just lost a bunch of readers to that word.

Afghanistan’s female fighter pilot Niloofar Rahmani’s request for asylum in the US has caused huge controversy in her country. She has retracted her statement, but DW’s Florian Weigand says the damage has been done.

© Aarthi Parthasarathy

Royal Existentials is a weekly web-comic series that uses Indian vintage art and imagery as a backdrop for contemporary dialogues. Members of the Mughal family contemplate on conflict, problems of patriarchy and feminism. The miniature paintings tell ironic stories of Queens and Handmaidens who talk about smashing Patriarchy.

Her new husband was out of a job. Luckily, she wasn’t. She was mighty pleased with herself to be capable of supporting her very fresh marriage in such times of crisis. After all, it was her first opportunity to prove her utility beyond the household. Although the task of managing her home together with work was exhausting, she was optimistic.

Everything was a failure that day,” says Jyoti’s companion on that fateful ride. From the taxi drivers who ignored the rules to the police “not working properly,” to the hospital facilities, which were “very poor”, to the indifference of the passers-by. In her last blog in the series on the rape incident that occurred last year in December in India, Dr. Kanchana Lanzet tries to capture the plight of the average Indian citizen.

What happened to 23-year-old Jyothi, Nirbhaya or Damini as people know her, was a snowballing of attitudes and hackneyed traditional modes of thinking. In her next blog in the series, Dr. Kanchana Lanzet talks about how Indian society is having a tough time deciding whether to be modern or to be western. Indian women are also partly unwilling to give up the comforts of tradition- of having the security and protection of the Indian family.