Feminist anthropology最新文献

What does it mean for women bureaucrats to work “objectively?” How does the attempt to work objectively affect the hierarchal structure and the preservation of women in lower positions, two interrelated key elements of patriarchal ideology? The bureaucratic staff of the Israeli Sal Committee offers a unique case study to examine this question. Aware of the life-and-death implications of committee decisions, this all-women staff attempt to work “objectively,” which they interpret as compiling and presenting data that carries no marks of their positions. To fulfill this ideal, staffers inhibited themselves from speaking in committee discussions. Consequently, they were treated as “good bureaucrats” but also as “women bureaucrats” and their work remained mainly unacknowledged. Aspiring for non-positional objectivity thus contributed to preserving their lower positioning and reaffirming their bureaucracy's hierarchal structure. But this disposition also forged an a-hierarchal work style within the staff, presenting a feminist alternative to mainstream bureaucracy. This ethnography suggests that an ethics of objectivity may carry more diverse possibilities than is commonly hypothesized in feminist critiques of objectivity.

This article analyses how the sites of disability activism, special education, and online-matchmaking approach the sexuality of disabled people in India. It argues that across these distinct yet overlapping sites, the sexuality of disabled people is engaged as a problem in need of a fix, which ultimately leads to the narrowing of disabled people's sexual choices, behaviors, and identities. The article suggests that when these field-sites move away from a problem-centered approach which focuses on looking for normative solutions and instead engage in the process of “problematization” by facilitating the sexuality of disabled people, they end up opening non-normative, uncertain, yet perhaps more fulfilling sexual opportunities for disabled people.

We argue that discourses around forced sterilization and abortion restrictions too often focus on motherhood and fertility and ignore the multiple other harms they bring. To do this, we travel with the North American framework of reproductive justice (RJ) to think through experiences of (non)reproduction in Peru and consider its analytic possibilities. In this intervention, we wish to focus on the commonality between RJ's three tenets: the figure of the child and its analytic force. We argue that while the aim of the RJ framework is not to reify fetuses and children at the expense of adults nor to reinforce a pronatalist position, the fact that the tenets are formulated around children means that, when mobilized for political or analytical purposes, they can reinforce repronormative mandates. We use the examples of forced sterilization and abortion in Peru to consider the issues this figuration of the child brings into being and the landscape of meaning it produces.

Reading across a burgeoning scientific literature that conflates microbial dynamics between mother:child bodies with normative mothering practices, we offer a model of maternal microbis that troubles the distinctions between productive and reproductive relations. We ground this argument in a systematic analysis of the content and circulation of descriptive maternal microbiome research between 2007 and 2021 along with the proliferation of lay narratives about the maternal microbiome inspired by such research. Following this research across the species line between human and bovine bodies, we trace the gendered effects of using humans as model animals and tie current microbiome hype to a much longer history of entangling reproductive and productive labors. More than a microbial retread of a familiar story within a history of distributing reproductive labor to other bodies, our focus on the maternal microbis as a gendered model of microbial relations enables us to ask specific questions about the effects of centering microbes into models of reproductive bodies (both Homo and Bos), leading us to consider how expectations of gendered care and gendered bodies make certain paradigms possible and foreclose others.

The 2018 film Roma popularized the idea that domestic work is a site through which female employers and employees can support one another as they confront the relegation of reproductive labor to women. Echoes of this narrative can be heard in the workshops provided to Nahua men and women of the Huasteca region of Mexico by what I call gender trustees who are bent on modernizing rural men and women. This modernization is imagined as gender progress—one in which men and women come to redistribute housework and to adopt a dual earning marital model in which women work outside the home rather than as peasant women or housewives. These feminist notions of the good, therefore, demonstrate an affinity with neoliberal narratives of modernization that seek to move the Mexican rural population away from small-scale farming and into the service and maquila sectors of the economy. The ungendering experiences of Indigenous women domestic workers suggest that both the sororal narrative epitomized by the dominant interpretation of Roma as well as the idea that paid work makes women equal vis-à-vis their husbands continue to sanitize and euphemize the highly gendered and racialized and settler colonial labor niche which is domestic work.

This paper examines how relationships are ‘built’ among khwajasaras [non-normative non-binary persons] and female jouno karmis [sex workers] in two sites in Pakistan and India respectively. We focus on the non-normative nature of these relationships, first, to disassemble gender normativity itself; second, to argue that the colonial legacy of bureaucratic norming of kinship in South Asia, anchored in legal consanguinity and affinity on one hand, and territory and patriarchy on the other, erases these found relationships. Finally, in formulating what we term, ‘relative kinship’ –authenticating one's identity and belonging as a citizen typically through a male kin –we trace the current impetus in Pakistan and India to algorithmically converge biographies and biometrics to recalibrate citizenship. We ask, how may we understand the built lives of those deemed by the state to be legally out of place as ‘aliens’ or ‘foreigners’. Through the lens of kinship and gender modalities in marginalized communities, the article has wider implications for thinking about the kinship-nation continuum and the ways in which one does or can belong, if at all.

The debate around abortion is often constituted in terms of a tension between fetal personhood on the one hand and the right to bodily autonomy on the other. The supposed personhood of the fetus is widely invoked to restrict the right to abortion. In India however, one sees a paradoxical situation. Not only is there wide legal access to abortion, but this also exists simultaneously with an active legal imperative to protect the female fetus. How did the Indian state allow access to abortion while protecting a unique fetus? This paper argues that the question of reproduction and abortion in India is intimately tied to imaginations of national futures and risks and reproductive bodies have been entangled in those futures. The discourse around the legalization of abortion and the criminalization of sex-selection offered differing but stark visions of national endangerment which played a critical role in authorizing different state actions targeting reproductive bodies while sustaining this paradox. This paper expands the anthropological understanding of the different grounds of abortion debates globally.

In this article we use our collaborative work with a support group for families of incarcerated people in upstate New York—including participant observation, interviews and focus groups from 2019-2020—to highlight how COVID-19 exacerbated challenges they already faced in caring for kin across walls. We focus specifically during the summer of 2020 when New York state prison visitation was closed to prevent the spread of COVID, showing how families struggled to stay connected and also organized to fight the carceral system. We suggest that through these acts of resistance and care, people on the outside caring for incarcerated kin during the pandemic can be understood as what Joy James calls the “captive maternal.” Understanding these women as “captive maternals” within a system structured by racial capitalism renders explicit the way the logics of captivity extend beyond the walls of prisons and jails to shape the experiences of their kin on the outside. It reveals these women to be not simply compassionate individuals caring for people they love, but rather as resistors fighting through their acts of care the logics of abandonment, disposability, and anti-blackness on which contemporary American society is built, and which people nationwide were protesting.