Feminist anthropology最新文献

This article examines how colorism is gendered in North India by foregrounding women's narratives of being subjected to ghinn—disgust or repugnance—around their skin tone. I argue that paying attention to the ghinn directed at dark skin shows how colorism here builds on casteism, and how there is a gendered dimension to it: ghinn at women perceived as outside the norms of feminine beauty, and ghinn at marginalized communities, are both, simultaneously, triggered by dark skin. How does the ideal of light-skinned beauty make living with dark skin difficult? In this paper, I analyze how for women perceived as dark, it is not the color of their skin in itself, but how it produces ghinn in those around them that has long-term effects on their sense of self.

In this article, I argue for an ethnographic engagement with trans-exclusionary feminism. Using my fieldwork in a gender-critical collective in the United Kingdom as an example, I show how feminist anthropology can give insights into the motivations and emotional trajectories of gender-critical feminists. By contextualizing the highly affective emic notion of female solidarity, I show how feelings mobilize the trans-exclusionary view that womanhood can only ever exist for cis women. I argue that it is a responsibility of feminist anthropology to contribute to knowledge that can be useful in disputing exclusionary feminisms. Taking this research as a case in point, I believe that this is done most effectively through an intentional ethnographic engagement with proponents of exclusionary feminist politics.

This article addresses the question of whether the Korean sex workers' rights movement has uncritically imported Western pro-sex work theories. This article demonstrates how sex workers challenged stigma and discrimination, government controls, and anti-trafficking campaigns by the Christian women's movement in the early 1900s. Applying a transnational feminist perspective, I analyzed newspaper and magazine articles from the period that write about sex workers, as well as literature written by sex workers themselves. Long before the emergence of academic sex work theory, sex workers in Korea fought and stood in solidarity in defense of their labor and survival rights. Navigating their complex sociopolitical positions in an era characterized by women's liberation and notions of human equality, the advent of capitalism, the influx of socialist ideology, and Japanese colonialism, sex workers have forged their own lives and enacted radical political praxis from the front lines. It is hoped that this century-old history of sex workers' claims and rights movements serve as a basis for understanding that sex workers are the ones who know best what is needed to secure their rights, as they have the deepest understanding of the social and economic dimensions of their profession.

This article situates Indigenous feminisms within anthropology by exploring the ways in which anthropology can benefit from an Indigenous feminist framework. Indigenous feminisms can be employed as a theory and a method. In this article, I argue that employing a wider array of feminisms in our practice is more inclusive and essential to our research.

As noted by Heidi Tinsman, in the 1990s, the scientific literature tended to overlook the structuring impact of the working-class gender regime on paid domestic work in the Americas. This tendency has barely been reversed since then. This article, based on an ethnographic study in Bolivia and Peru, closely examines the sexual division of labor, gendered socialization, and gender-based violence dynamics in the birth families of domestic workers in both countries. It reveals striking similarities in the forms of exploitation and violence these women typically face, not only in their birth family but also in their employers’ households and (for those who marry), in their conjugal family—all mutually sustaining each other. Paying particular attention to sexual and gender-based violence, this article proposes a feminist critique of the family as a space of solidarity and protection. It then places these phenomena in a broader context, shaped not only by patriarchal norms but also by racism and class-based oppression. Viewed through this intersectional lens, paid domestic work can be theorized as a regime of gendered and racialized “appropriated labor.”

The article provides an in-depth analysis of how wartime and peacetime are conceptualized by women against the backdrop of war, in what ways these conceptualizations of time are gendered, and what do “the before,” “the during,” and “the after” war mean in this timely Ukrainian context. It offers the discussion of wartime and peacetime as socially constructed concepts, the distinction between which is further problematized through close reading of women's experiences at war. The canvas of “eight years of war” (2014–2022) before the full-scale invasion used by the participants to navigate the reality of in-betweenness war and peace is closely analyzed along with the participants’ perceptions that the peacetime that comes “after the war” would not be identical to the peacetime “before the war.”

What is it like as an academic to be doing social science research in pandemic times? How do research engagements and interactions transform in the wake of a global crisis? This creative piece ruminates on questions of care and ethics in the context of doing fieldwork during the pandemic. These poems emerged from the need to reimagine anthropological research in terms of care relations and ethics rather than methods or tools. Writing allowed for self-expression and processing of life-shaking events and global crises during uncertain times. Writing bridged the professional and the personal, allowing for authentic engagements in research relationships. Given the increasing pressures of neoliberal academia, the care ethic symbolized by these poems becomes only more significant.

This paper uses a feminist poststructuralist approach to investigate how gender stereotyping and biases lead to the underrepresentation of women within the more prestigious and better-paid technical and operational sectors of the aviation industry. Sociocultural constructs of ideologies about gendered performances are deeply ingrained in men and women both in the industry and the society they live in; thus, the individual agents as well as the structures are accomplices in maintaining gendered tropes of the pilot and the flight attendant. Focusing the fieldwork on Austria as a non-Anglosphere Western society where aviation does not have a strong history or presence helps to contextualize gender disparity as a phenomenon intrinsic to the global industry. Through in-depth, semi-structured interviews and ethnographic explorations with participants from various sectors of Austrian aviation, added to my own lived experiences as a female pilot, my aim is to open aviation's Black Box to reveal the day-to-day behaviors that create, support, and sustain gender-based inequalities globally beyond the Anglosphere. I emphasize the powerful beliefs about appropriate gendered performances that are both pervasive in society and deeply embedded within the division between operational and customer service occupations, impacting career progression and communicative norms in ways that help reproduce inequalities.

In this article we outline Kamala Kempadoo's influence on research on sex work, transactional sex, and sexual economies in South Asia and Latin America, focusing on Brazil and India, the authors’ respective areas of expertise. We draw on our own research arcs to show how Kempadoo's work enabled generations of ethnographic and ethnographically informed research on sexual commerce that centered questions of labor and critiques of policing and impoverishment. Kempadoo's work offered both an exemplar and episteme for research on sex work that mobilized anti-teleological critiques of the “Third World Other,” while showing that a structural analysis of class and capital could critique the harms of the anti-trafficking framework. Kempadoo's influence is apparent in work that uses ethnography to center the lens of labor in arguing against reductive accounts of transacted sexual services. We show that Kempadoo's work is more relevant than ever, considering state-sponsored violence against migrants and the need for re/producing ethnographically situated accounts of the ways in which sexual commerce operates in navigating precarity.