Feminist anthropology最新文献

Feminist anthropologists have long emphasized the cultural, social, economic, and political contexts of gender violence rather than only focusing on interpersonal relationships between intimate partners or within the family. This commentary situates the five articles in the Gender Violence, Emotion, and the State Symposium within that context while noting their “evocative ethnographic” approach as a vital contribution to feminist anthropological thought, paying particular attention to power and its exercise within institutions and various forms of structural violence.

Changing social, political, and cultural processes in Vietnam are reshaping people's emotional and social responses to domestic violence on multiple levels. Socioeconomic reforms instituted in the 1980s, the related state revival of Confucian gender ideologies, and the influences in recent decades of international and local nongovernmental organizations’ approaches to domestic violence are significant shifts that have influenced these emergent responses. Using the framework of feminist critical medical anthropology, I explore how different emotional experiences of violence provide insight into patterns of help-seeking and interventions addressing marital violence. I suggest that Vietnamese state discourses and laws shape people's feelings in diverse and sometimes contradictory ways. State actors, for one, are particularly influenced to express and experience emotional responses in support of the nation. On the other hand, abused women, community members, and professionals experience more ambivalent feelings toward state discourses and practices as they engage moral emotions of care, love, and concern, prioritizing abused women's health and safety. Complicating this is some state actors grappling with their own ambivalent and tangled feelings as they assist abused women. Awareness of the diverse cross-cultural range of emotional complexity can aid feminist anthropologists and activists in attempts to understand and prevent domestic violence.

This symposium emerged from a panel presented at the 2022 American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting in which we explored how emotions related to gender violence are expressed, negotiated, and shaped by broader political economic forces and processes. A primary goal was to challenge the tendency to consider emotion as tied solely to interpersonal relationships and instead to examine how emotions are central to, and constitutive of, statecraft-in-action through analyses of gender violence, a longstanding concern of feminist anthropology.

Social scientists studying state formation had traditionally overlooked the role of emotion in statecraft, precisely because the realm of the emotional had been considered antithetical to logic, reason and conventional (i.e., masculinist) politics and action. When the relationship between the state and emotions had been more fully explored, emotions were often treated as derivative after-effects of state policy (Reus-Smit, 2014). Moreover, while many feminist ethnographies have explored the experience of gender violence as part and parcel of patriarchal gender formations in different cultural contexts, only some have focused squarely on gender violence as a phenomenon unto itself, even as it takes different forms through a myriad of state interventions (e.g., Beske, 2016; Bloom, 2023; Davis, 2006, 2019; Friederic, 2023; Gribaldo, 2020; Hautzinger, 2007; McClusky, 2001; Mulla, 2014; Parson, 2013; Plesset, 2006; Zheng, 2022). The contributors to this symposium build upon these ethnographies of gender violence by addressing the entangled politics of emotion at the site of the state and body politic, highlighting the felt, bodily, everyday experiences of people embroiled in gender violence from a variety of positionalities, informed by shifting power relations and cultural meanings (Merry, 2009). We analyze the ways gender violence often provokes viewers, recipients, and perpetrators of the violence to experience an intensity of feeling, shaped by the particular historical-social formation from which the violence derives (Das, 2006b; Scheper-Hughes, 1992). Together, these articles contribute to feminist anthropology by providing richer analyses and insights into the entanglement of gender violence, emotion, and the state to understand, mitigate, and eliminate gender violence.

Feminist anthropologists have always been attentive to the ways that gender violence is multiply constituted by various forms of violence, despite a tendency in archaeology and biological anthropology to place undue emphasis on male-to-male physical violence (Nelson, 2021). As many feminist scholars of gender and violence have shown, diverse types of violence—including psychological, sexual, economic, patrimonial, emot

The emotional experiences of incarceration are directly tied to state-sanctioned gendered violence. Most incarcerated women have a history of trauma, stemming directly from broader socio-political and economic forces, which is further rendered throughout the incarceration and reentry process. The carceral system in the United States disrupts family and social support systems, fails to provide accessible and adequate mental health and substance use services, and denies stabilization resources such as housing, employment, and citizenry for women once released from prison, yet their emotional experiences are largely absent in analyses of this gendered violence. Drawing from a larger intimate ethnography project with a woman, LaTasha, recently released from a 25-year to life prison sentence, this article examines how women negotiate and express emotions within the context of prison reentry contributing to feminist anthropological scholarship on state-sanctioned gender violence. Through an in-depth analysis of the challenges LaTasha faces in rebuilding relationships with family, navigating a system in which she has been outcasted, and asserting herself after being systematically disempowered, we gain insight into the ways in which carceral systems have prevented emotional complexity resulting in a form of incipient and largely invisible violence.

In South Africa, a disparate coalition of law enforcement, human rights workers, health officials, and activists claim that women don't know they have been raped. Claims of misrecognition typically follow from the observation that most women who experience gendered violence in South Africa do not report to the police and are especially leveled at Black women living in rural areas under the judicial authority of customary leaders. This article examines this assertion about not knowing gendered violence and the interventions it inspired. Dwelling on the story of one survivor's search for justice in Thohoyandou, South Africa, I argue that in the years following the transition from apartheid to democracy, a consensus coalesced around Black Indigenous women, who were seen as key political agents in post-colonial nation-building. During this time, knowing rape was touted as a gendered civic duty, one that enacted moral citizenship for the sake of a more orderly, democratic and vigorous multicultural nation. In spite of the consensus around knowing rape, “rape,” I suggest, remains an ambivalent sign for both those who encourage its recognition and for survivors. Amidst these disjunctures, survivors’ demands for justice often go denied.

Changing discourses and laws related to women's rights and intimate partner violence (IPV) in rural Ecuador have profoundly reshaped how local women experience and respond to violence. Women once understood violence as one strand of social suffering embedded in everyday rural life, and they resisted and managed this violence through various collective idioms of distress. Over the last two decades, however, state and non-governmental organization (NGO) campaigns have isolated gender violence as a discrete phenomenon, emphasizing the “wrongness” of IPV, the validity of righteous anger, and the importance of a legal response to secure the separation of “liberated” women. In this article, I draw on 20 years of fieldwork to discuss how emotional responses to gender violence have shifted in tandem with changing state and transnational discourses and policies in the coastal region of Las Colinas. A deep disjuncture between neoliberal discourses of feminist empowerment and the material reality of rural women's life options leaves many women experiencing new forms of shame when they are unable to turn anger into liberation and escape gender violence in their families and communities. Focusing on the emotional states that states create reveals how political-economic and discursive shifts are mediated through emotions and collective idioms.

Obstetric violence is endemic in Cuba, a highly medicalized society where the obstetrics institution is unquestioned and, in the afterlives of Atlantic slavery and US occupation and intervention, emotions of fear and gratitude work to normalize obstetric violence and control birthing bodies for the state. I draw on ethnographic observations, birth stories, and experiences as a patient to examine how birthing people, providers, and the Revolutionary state negotiate care and responsibility for health. I describe three fears: the fear of failure to protect maternal-infant health (and its repercussions for clinicians and the state); the fear of physiological childbirth; and fears of inadequate or violent care. Obstetric violence in Cuba is structural. As birthing people shift between primary and tertiary healthcare infrastructures with distinct epistemologies of care, they exert ambiguous agency to domesticate the hostile space of the hospital, building relations of reciprocity and performing docility and compliance. Finally, I look at the gratitude expected of patients and the consequences of refusing to recognize healthcare as a “gift.” This contemporary account of obstetric violence in Cuba contributes to calls by abolition feminists to study the obstetric institution in order to refuse and dismantle it, building life-affirming futures for maternity care worldwide.

This piece weaves together the voices of four feminist disability studies scholars and anthropologists whose work has been profoundly shaped by Russia's war of aggression. Composed via a dialogic encounter, it is based on a panel presentation on the topic of disability studies in war and care that took place at the University of Massachusetts Amherst just before the 1-year mark of the full-scale invasion. We came together to share insights and consider the best ways to practice horizontal solidarity, our approach inspired by recent work on feminist epistemology and methodology and scholarship on care, and disability studies. The text assumes a dialogic form, presenting our reflections as well as the contexts that shape our knowledge production and sharing the process of scaffolding our “Dis-Fem” conversation. In dialogue with the decolonizing discussions that animate feminist, anthropological, and Slavic Studies, as well as critical disability scholarship, it centers on the work of Ukrainian scholar-activists associated with the organization of people with disabilities (OPD) Fight For Right. In foregrounding their work, it traces the creative ways they've mobilized data and the experimental and collaborative data practices they've harnessed. Finally, it asks questions about trans-local solidarities we can enact and ways we might forge novel, “otherwise” ways to collaborate.