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This chapter examines women’s representation in Bulgaria’s national assembly. It is argued that women’s representation can be improved when parties become unified organizations and when women achieve leadership in these parties. However, the volatile party system and the uncertainty of voter support has made parties hesitant to nominate women in competitive list positions.

This chapter examines the variations in women’s representation in Russian regional assemblies. A study of representation levels according to economic regions and distance from the Moscow-St. Petersburg axis show that women have done much better in peripheral regions than in the central regions. Political institutions such as the electoral system, district size, and the level of support for political reform play influence the variation in female representation. Political culture, measured indirectly using dominant religion, also plays a major role in women’s access to regional parliaments.

The shortfall of female representatives in the DUP is often blamed on the reluctance of women to stand for election, as opposed to the existence of any barriers to participating in the political arena. This chapter challenges this assumption and explores how supply (family commitments, self-confidence) and demand factors (party selection procedures, voting system) help explain the constraints on women representing the DUP. These factors, whilst not specific to the DUP, exacerbate the problem of lack of gender balance in the membership. Drawing upon interviews and survey data this chapter examines the role and opinion of women at various levels of the DUP to gain their perspectives on whether there is discrimination against women in public life, the position of women in the party, and how they feel female representation could be improved. The DUP primarily encourages a ‘gender-neutral’ position, which emphasizes the principle of merit as a method of selection, as opposed to the implementation of gender quotas.

The chapter introduces and historicises the key debates about the female action hero, before offering an extended investigation of the representation of the female action hero in contemporary action cinema. Identifying an action heroine who is physically and economically empowered while also sexualized, the chapter argues that this figure is defined by her proximity to postfeminist discourses of female power and sexual agency, while suggesting that the potentially unsettling prospect of a physically violent woman is minimised by traditional containment strategies that locate her in comic or overtly fantastical settings. Using Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle and Kill Bill as illustrative case studies, the chapter shows how, in this dominant representational mode, images of physical stress and damage are suppressed for ideological reasons, but also argues that more ‘untidy’ forms of female physical agency are emerging in the margins of the mainstream.

This chapter discusses the selection process made by the National Candidate Commission in order to provide a final candidate list for the national elections of 2002–2003. This chapter focuses on the 2002–2003 elections which provide a great opportunity to examine closely the Cuban electoral process. Whereas previous studies on Cuban elections lacked gender perspective, this chapter focuses on the gender composition of the various assemblies involved in the Cuban national elections wherein female representation on the local and national level varies considerably due to positive discrimination. The chapter also examines the candidate nomination process and presents a detailed election results for the municipal and national level.

This chapter analyses the typification and standardisation of the voice in Spanish cinema, which is argued as the result of a long history of film dubbing, with its strict codification of vocal types according to gender and role. This practice has resulted in a series of unwritten rules and expectations that continue to shape and restrict the kinds of voices that Spanish audiences hear on screen. Under these norms, while non-standard voices may be permitted and are even cultivated for comic and character parts, leading roles continue to demand what the chapter calls the ‘phonogenic’ expression of unproblematically feminine and masculine identities. With her unmistakable, high-pitched voice, the chapter shows how Gracita Morales was inevitably slotted into supporting roles, her child-like affect and lack of verbal inhibition put to classic comic ends as weapons used to skewer the pretensions of a would-be upwardly mobile and modernizing middle class. Despite being categorised in this manner, Gracita Morales become an example of what Kathleen Rowe calls ‘unruly women’, female comics who by talking back and laughing loudly claim their right to a traditionally male privilege, thereby challenging the notion of comedy as a male-dominated genre.

This concluding chapter considers the status of women's sports in 2012, the various points of change that brought them there, and reasserts the need to cheer with reserve. Even as the number of women athletes seems to rise, their representation in administrative ranks has dwindled from the pre-Title IX era. In addition, sports sociologists Michael Messner and Cheryl Cooky found that there has been a “precipitous decline” in the amount of television coverage devoted to women's sports over the past several years. In 2009 women's sports garnered just 1.6 percent of network sports news and 1.4 percent of ESPN's SportsCenter. For a brief window in July 2012, however, those numbers temporarily increased as the world tuned in to the Women's Games.