Feminist anthropology最新文献

This issue showcases how the global breadth of feminist anthropology is reshaping both the foci and methodological toolkits for anthropology. With articles ethnographically located in Colombia, India, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States, feminist anthropologists in this issue focus on agency and activism, kinship, gender expression, reproductive justice, and the ways we need to rethink the work of Anthropology.

In this article, I blend authoethnography and ethnography to activate a Chicanx feminist theory of the flesh, which is grounded in the sensibilities of vulnerability and rasquachismo. Rasquachismo is a politicized Mexican American visceral modality of being in the world—in art, in politics, in everydayness—that is rooted in purposeful defiance and historical hybridity. I apply this framework in conjunction with Weheliye's theory of enfleshment to write through two seemingly disparate ethnographic scenarios: the almost deadly hemorrhage of my uterus and the health injustice of my treatment and ethnographic work on racialized death in the overdose crisis in Washington, DC. I consider the theoretical and methodological interventions of practicing radical forms of vulnerability in our (auto)ethnographic writing and how this practice affirms connections between my enfleshment and the deep relationality to me as a scholar of necropolitics and unjust death. I demonstrate that this approach challenges current disciplinary norms of reflexivity as a “sufficient enough” form of ethical accountability in anthropology and reorients our theoretical lineages to be rooted in Black and Chicanx theories of the flesh that emphasize connective flesh that has been historically erased.

In this article, we show how the COVID-19 pandemic facilitated experimentation with gender expression via a process that we call cyberspatial agency. During the pandemic in the United States, millions of people were simultaneously physically isolated from one another while also experiencing an unprecedented level of digital hyper-connectedness. In avoiding the public gaze while also having the ability to carefully curate the online communities where they spent most of their days, gender-diverse individuals in our study experienced an enhanced sense of freedom to stretch and bend their gender expression. They collaborated with algorithms and platforms to access new models for linguistic and visual expression, resulting in considerable experimentation and the potential for longer-term changes in gender identity that may last well beyond the pandemic. Our findings from this exploratory study suggest a need to rethink the relationship between visibility and queerness in the post-COVID-19, Trump-era digital age in the United States.

A core principle of reproductive justice (RJ) is the right to have children under one's chosen conditions, emphasizing bodily autonomy. While RJ focuses on equitable access to parenthood, the choice of delivery mode is rarely analyzed through this lens. Some forgo parenthood rather than give birth vaginally; others prioritize vaginal birth despite medical indications for a cesarean. In response, a growing number of obstetricians acknowledge the importance of self-determination in decision-making once parents are adequately informed. However, others refuse to consider rationales beyond strictly evidence-based medicine, sometimes leading to forms of informal coercion. Based on ethnographic research in two Swiss public hospitals and interviews with parents and obstetricians, I examine parents’ trajectories and interactions with healthcare providers. I argue for reframing delivery mode choice within an RJ framework and propose radical compassion as a means to advance RJ in this context.

The continued assault on women's reproductive freedoms has dampened the critique of the liberal feminist logics of autonomy in reproductive rights activism. This article centers on the Pill, a longtime symbol of women's empowerment, to reorient debates about individual choice. While critical work has recognized the stratified nature of birth control, the literature adheres to a dialectic of difference in which the Pill extends the autonomy of privileged women while oppressing structurally marginalized women. Breaking this dualism, this article explores the Pill's uptake among otherwise privileged, middle-class women in contemporary Japan, where the Pill's offer of autonomy introduces new medical, sexual, and social risks that shape women's resistance to making reproduction a matter of individual responsibility and control. By examining the narratives of 48 pill users in Tokyo, I show how, instead of autonomy, women ask for the sharing of reproductive risk and responsibility through contraceptive practices that promote relational forms of care. Situating women's stories against the backdrop of pronatalism and everyday gender inequality in Japan, I show how the multiple layers of structural injustice that middle-class women navigate make it impossible to sustain a fantasy that one can be empowered by a technology that offers individual choice.

The special issue co-editors (Lyndsey Beutin, April Petillo, and Elena Shih) sat down with Kamala Kempadoo and long-time collaborator Amalia Cabezas on July 26, 2024, over Zoom to hear about what sex work research was like before the anti-trafficking framework cannibalized the sex workers’ rights movement.

The exhibition “Weaving reproductive justice: Conflict and peace in Colombia,” which is the result of ethnographic, feminist, and arts-based research, is a collaborative storytelling experience about conflict-related reproductive violence. Through patchwork, embroidery, and written words, the exhibition takes visitors into the lives of Afro-Colombian women who became pregnant as a result of conflict-related sexual violence. The exhibition shows that their experiences of parenthood exceed the grammar of gendered victimhood or reproductive rights. In this article, I examine the conceptual and methodological displacements that enabled us to create stories that talk about their experiences of reproductive violence without centering victimization, but their life-sustaining forces in war contexts. This entailed engaging with storytelling as a site of knowledge production where women's experiences, notions, and practices of sexuality, procreation, and care—not as victims-survivors—met the researcher's situated academic lens.

This article unveils how gender inequality and colonial dichotomy became visible in the practice of polygyny among Muslim-Christian intermarried couples in the southern Philippines. Based on ethnographic research conducted in Iligan, it documents the lived experiences of Christian wives, Maranao Muslim women, and female Muslim converts. While Christian norms have long stigmatized Muslim polygyny, public discussions within Muslim societies in the Philippines have been limited. For women in inter-religious marriages, polygyny provokes painful negotiations that expose intersecting hierarchies of gender, religion, and ethnicity. They described their experiences in their own words, often diverging from the normative discourse, reconstructing the concepts of intimacy and reinterpreting religious teachings in ways that resonate with women in different ethnic and religious positions. Although interpretations and evaluations of polygyny are publicly fragmented by coloniality and normative discourses, these women's experiences reveal underlying alignment. The article argues that their stories constitute an internal critique of the intersecting patriarchies embedded in the Philippine state, Spanish and American forms of ongoing coloniality, and Muslim and Christian societies.

This article is a personal reflection on my 25 years of involvement with sex work organizing and the fight against the anti-trafficking movement, which is where I first encountered Kamala Kempadoo's scholarship, research, and activism. Using autoethnography and self-reflexivity, I focus on my journey into activism in the sex worker movement and the fight against the anti-trafficking movement, which began in Hong Kong and extended to countries around the world, to provide a snapshot of sex work organizing and the anti-trafficking movement in Asia, North America, and globally in the last 25 years.