Following a recent post about the women in Tunisia and the use of topless protest to raise awareness about women’s rights, it got me more interested in the organisation and thinking behind it, which led me to stumble upon the feminist group Femen. Last thursday, the group started a ‘International Topless Jihad Day’ to raise the profile of womens rights throughout the Islamic world.

 ‘topless protests are the battle flags of women’s resistance, a symbol of a woman’s acquisition of rights over own body‘

This does address some concerns I personally had about the importance of talking about burqa’s and niqab’s in terms of gender and development, and the idea that it is a subject heavily focused on, however could be considered relatively trivial compared to other problems that women face in the developing world, especially such serious breaches of human rights as FGM or child marriage. The use of women’s bodies as a symbolic means of communication is so powerful, and therefore how they dress or how they are dressed communicates a message to the rest of the world that is interpreted (especially by the Western world) as how they live their lives. Is what women in the developing world wear important? or is it just what is seen first by the rest of the world and other issues are therefore overlooked?