Feminist anthropology最新文献

There is growing scholarly and public attention toward the stark racial disparities in birth outcomes in the US. To lower disparate rates of Indigenous and Black infant mortality rates and maternal mortality rates, public and elected officials have proposed extending comprehensive prenatal care and medical resources and addressing racial biases in healthcare delivery. These efforts aim to bring minoritized and marginalized peoples and communities “into the fold.” In this essay, I consider the potential dangers of such contemporary efforts by critically analyzing historical initiatives to address birth outcomes and reproductive health in Indigenous communities. By foregrounding settler colonial social orders and their links to settler capitalism, I show how historical efforts to bring Indigenous peoples “into the fold” jeopardized Indigenous birth and reproductive capacities, while also upholding heteropatriarchal notions of sexuality, family, and racial difference.

This article explores how affect shaped frontline workers’ efforts to address gender inequality in Jaipur, the capital of the Indian state of Rajasthan. Counselors, frontline workers who helped women facing violence seek legal and social support, used the term himmat, courage/daring, to criticize the behavior of men and to celebrate the bravery of women. In counseling interactions, activist writing, and everyday speech, people used the word himmat to describe how affect might be marshaled for social transformation. I argue that himmat animates social movements addressing inequality, simultaneously serving as a felt diagnostic of hierarchy and a prompt to act against that hierarchy. Phenomena such as himmat are what I call affective fulcrums. A fulcrum both generates and limits motion. As an affective fulcrum, himmat channels affect that gains energy from relations shaped by a grid of inequality, including gender inequality. Yet it also creates movement around and within those unequal relations. Using himmat as an example of an affective fulcrum, I argue that attention to the role of affect in women's rights organizations can help us better analyze how inequality grounds efforts for change even as it allows for movement towards transformation.

Based on ethnographic research with transgender Latinas in Chicago, this article answers Susana Narotzky and Niko Besnier's (2014) invitation to think “economy otherwise.” I contend that in order to think “economy otherwise” we must think it queerly, and attend to feminist ways money animates possibilities beyond racist-cisgenderism. I bring together economic anthropology, feminist anthropology, and queer of color critique to queer money, specifically money earned from sexual labor performed by transgender Latinas. An ethnographic examination of trans Latina sex workers’ lives reveals that money accessed through sexual labor is assigned a number of queer and contested meanings. Its use is based in feminist ethics that eschew dominant economic logics in favor of building relations of care. It enables the creation of transgender bodies, and the development of queer networks of care with biological and chosen kin, in the U.S. and beyond. Trans Latinas, then, use money from sex work to support trans Latina ways of being that exceed the racist-cisgenderism. Sometimes, however, their uses of money reinforce racist-cisgenderism. I argue that the women's fraught uses of money reveal the complex intersections that sustain racist-cisgenderism, and how they are experienced and negotiated in people's everyday lives.

This article situates random public encounters in fieldwork as critical ethnographic “shadowboxing” (James 1999) moments shaping Black queer feminisms for anthropology. Based in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, I explore the multiangular effects of an impromptu encounter with a gynecologist within the context of the International Women's Day march in 2013. This article maps how my Black queer feminist lens renders visible the rooted mechanisms of power and subsequent erasures of Black women's agency in silence and social action. I rethink how discovery and evidence emerge as “radical data” to frame how Black female bodies become shadows within institutional spaces. It challenges us to boldly call out the radical data that resides beyond the data itself. I engage the scholarship of Black queer and Black feminist scholars as a call for more Black queer feminist praise songs.

Every year in Haiti and its diaspora, the Lenten and Vodou festivals of Rara occur through Easter Sunday. In this article, I argue that religious performances, such as Rara, are critical sites of Black women's social and economic empowerment. In particular, the women performers of Rara or the queens use Rara to empower themselves. Based on long-term ethnographic research in Haiti, I attend to the way Black women transform play and Black religious expression into labor or what I call spiritual play-labor. This concept builds on the works of Robin D.G. Kelley's (1997) and Oneka LaBennett's (2011) in which they attend to the ways that Black youth turn play and Black cultural expression into labor. I use Spiritual play-labor as an analytic to explore the ways that Haitian women turn spiritual performances and Rara's carnivalesque play into labor that is compensated. The queen's reframing of their performance as labor relies upon their understanding of chalè or heat in which Black women's beauty and bodily work are central. Situating myself within the field of Black feminist anthropology, I explore my role as a feminist ethnographer in advocating with the queens to reframe their spiritual play into labor.

In this introduction to the special issue on Cite Black Women, Christen Smith describes the conditions of invisibility, exclusion, and silencing of Black women scholars in anthropology. Charting genealogical and biographical confluences, she describes the formation of the Cite Black Women collective, and the interventions imagined by the contributors to this special issue.

Anthropologist A. Lynn Bolles shares her experiences of the way in which Leith Mullings shaped her life and the lives of others. Bolles reflects on how Mullings would forcefully and emphatically create pathways and support systems to encourage Bolles and other sister-scholars to grow and lead within professional spaces she was often surprised to find herself in.

In this description of her work in perinatal quality improvement, obstetrician and crunk public health scholar Dr. Karen A. Scott describes the ways in which perinatal quality improvement has typically prioritized the deaths or near deaths of Black women at the exclusion of the lived experiences of Black women and people as patient, community, and content experts. Drawn into the work to apply a Black women-centered and liberatory analytic, Dr. Scott turned to Black feminist anthropology to transform perinatal quality improvement ethics and theories of change. The work of Leith Mullings, particularly her excursus on the Sojourner Syndrome, was at the center of Dr. Scott's approach to abating Black perinatal death and redesigning perinatal quality improvement.

Black women anthropologists are not cited within the discipline at a rate consistent with our scholarly production and visibility in the field. Despite our training, practice, and prolific writing, authors who publish in top-tier anthropology journals rarely cite Black women. This citational absence reveals a paradox: although Black women play key roles in the discipline as leaders and service providers, our intellectual contributions are undervalued. We are symbolically visible yet academically eclipsed. This article examines the epistemological erasure of Black women's contributions to anthropology in the United States. Through a pilot study, we measure Black women's citation rates in some of the highest ranked anthropology journals (according to impact factor). Moving away from a one-dimensional gender analysis toward a two-dimensional, intersectional analysis that analyzes race and gender, we find that Black women are underrepresented in citations in top-tier anthropology journals relative to their absolute representation in the field. This reveals a significant and disturbing trend: Black women anthropologists are rarely cited in top-tier anthropology journals, and in the rare instances they are cited, they are cited by other Black anthropologists. There is a need for an intersectional analysis of the politics of power and inequality in anthropology, one that not only pays attention to gender discrimination but also racial discrimination.