Feminist anthropology最新文献

Drawing on ethnography that involved in-depth online interviews with parents of adult autistic individuals in India, this article focuses on the experiences of five interlocutors to examine the nuanced understanding of disability, family, and care in the context of COVID-19 in India and, more broadly, in the realm of disability. Anchored in a feminist philosophical framework of care, the study addresses two pivotal questions. First, it explores how the narratives of the mothers interviewed challenge normative articulations of care. Second, it illustrates that care relations involving autism are characterized by considerable interdependence. Within the realm of autism advocacy in India, which is characterized by its inherent diversity, this article emphasizes that questions of care, (in)dependence, and kinship are shaped more by individuals’ social locations than by Western theorizations of inclusion and care. This article contributes to the ongoing discourse on disability, family, and care, providing rich insights into the lived experiences of mothers of autistic adults in the specific context of the COVID-19 pandemic in India. The findings offer a broader understanding of the complexities inherent in care relations and advocate for more inclusive and culturally sensitive approaches to support families of individuals with autism in urban India.

Pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) is an antiretroviral drug that effectively prevents an HIV infection, which German statutory health insurance has covered since 2019. The drug's use in Germany has (re)surfaced ambivalent emotions: hopes for an HIV/AIDS-free future and sexual liberation rub against enduring worries and moralizations of promiscuity. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Berlin's sexual cultures and prevention landscape, this article engages the affective economy that has emerged concerning PrEP and the hopes, worries, and accusations the drug has incited. To illustrate how the conflicting affects surrounding PrEP use haunt this economy, the article builds from the German notion of Sorglosigkeit/carelessness—a term intentionally straddling the ambivalence between being careless and carefree. Sustained by healthcare infrastructures and PrEP users’ practices of self-care, carelessness is not taken to be antithetical to, but operating on the affective terrain of, Sorge (worry, anxiety, concern, care). Ethnographically grounding carelessness in intergenerational hauntings of HIV/AIDS, the article examines gestures as they situate embodied emotions and personal experiences in the course of collective history. Three specific gestures—a sigh, finger-pointing, and palpation—mediate between biographies, bodies, and publics, and trace how carelessness circulates around PrEP.

This article revisits Kamala Kempadoo's publications on sex work in the Caribbean in the late 1990s and early 2000s. This period marks both the era before the framework of anti-trafficking consumed the field of sex work studies and the era when Black feminist ethnographic research on how race, class, and structural violence affected women's lives globally was making an impact across disciplines. By focusing on three key concepts (work, race and gender, and slavery), I show how Kempadoo recontextualized terms used by anti-prostitution feminists within the history of colonialism and the political economy of 1990s multilateral trade. In so doing, she offered feminist sociologists and anthropologists new possibilities for understanding sexual labor and sexual freedom. The paper then returns to Kempadoo's engagement with the history of enslaved Black women in Caribbean brothels to offer an alternative reading of the relationships between slavery and sex work that now dominate the public relations campaigns of anti-trafficking organizations. Taken together, Kempadoo's multidisciplinary contributions help feminist anthropology see how important global sex worker activism is to understanding race, gender, and work. This paper further demonstrates how combining critical engagement with feminist ethnographies with historical memory studies can shed new light on contemporary social issues.

In 2022, the Alabama Maternal Mortality Review Committee identified that substance use disorders (SUDs) were a key contributor in almost half of all maternal deaths. Substance use disorders (SUD) are chronic, relapsing conditions, and best practice recommendations include continuous harm reduction skills training for healthcare professionals; however, punitive policies, such as Alabama's Child Endangerment Law (ACEL), diminish the availability, accessibility, and utilization of healthcare for this population. The ACEL also negatively impacts the capacity of perinatal healthcare professionals in Alabama to adequately serve and advocate for pregnant people living with a SUD. As applied medical anthropologists, we challenged the notion of “advocacy” as solely being the responsibility of the healthcare professional or the patient and reimagined it as a collective process that can challenge perceptions of moral responsibility and personhood for pregnant and postpartum people who are substance involved. With a focus on knowledge translation and multi-stakeholder advocacy, we created two-versions of the Perinatal Self-Advocacy Toolkits (PSATs) that are framed using a healing-centered approach. We discuss how the PSATs are an essential component of improving the quality of care for pregnant patients with SUDs and facilitating systems change in Alabama.

Drawing on preliminary research in Italy in the months following Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the gradual lifting of pandemic-related public health measures, this essay explores the widespread economic, political, and environmental anxieties as well as calls for solidarity that were circulating at this time and their implications for ethnographers in attempting to “make sense” of sociocultural phenomena in a world that feels “unhinged.” From these swirling anxieties, hegemonic framings of “reality” by state actors contrast significantly with the lived experiences of the working class and reveal the function of salvage realism in reproducing racial capitalism. Following recent work in anthropology on the unhinged and affective possibilities in troubled times, I argue that these dynamics demand deeper anthropological engagement with theories that continue to be marginalized by the discipline, including from Black and Indigenous scholarship. These dynamics also raise important questions regarding the realities and temporalities of fieldwork and the onto-epistemological frames that inform anthropological research processes.

This article considers how care emerges as an integrated phenomenon that enfolds defendants, victim-witnesses, and their kin in complex ways. Care capacitates forms of racial sorting and resource allocations that manifest within sentencing hearings of persons found guilty of committing sexual offenses, a mode of dysselection as described by Sylvia Wynter. During sentencing hearings, the state asserts its authority to evaluate the inadequacies of the infrastructures of care to which the person being sentenced has access. While Black men are ostensibly the focus of these hearings, their participation in sentencing hearings becomes a portal through which the court scrutinizes Black women and girls who are often proclaimed to be inadequate caretakers. Simultaneously, the state claims that it can provide the care that will result in the rehabilitation of the person being sentenced, while protecting the community from the potential harms of the criminalized subject. The stark contrast between the state's characterizations of Black kinship and care, and the complex, subtle, and creative tactics narrated by Black interlocutors demonstrates the ways in which the state seeks to surveil Black mores of kinship, assign particular categories of worthiness or unworthiness to modes of care, and fix an anti-Black racial hierarchy in place.

This article uses feminist autoethnographic techniques to reflect on a set of interactions between a trans theorist and interlocuter I interviewed for my research, who I call Beth, and myself. In this work, I analyze how medical discourses of transgender transition, particularly that of transmedicalism, functions as an outgrowth of white supremacy. In this ethnographic vignette, binary [white] trans transition promises a coherent gender identity via recourse to anti-Blackness, rather than to cisheteronormativity. I argue that the binary assumptions built within transmedicalist approaches to trans life introduce gender not as an identity or even social phenomenon, but rather as a kind of successful or unsuccessful discursive and visual claim-making. These claims are reliant on whiteness and the ways in which white bodies can become invisibly normatively gendered because Black people are gendered as nonnormative. Contesting the boundedness of gender present within popular American conceptions, this series of interactions illustrates a fluid field of conceptual gender which relies on affective connections that mobilize through and across bodies in order to produce certain kinds of normativity.

Feminist anthropologists have long emphasized the mutual transformation that occurs with ethnographic fieldwork; in particular, life course interviews can be one such powerful tool. Based on an ethnographic case study with a Uruguayan domestic violence survivor, I draw upon mental health research, feminist traditions, and anthropological scholarship to argue that a life history interview can offer therapeutic benefits when utilized by either practitioners or researchers working with survivors of gender-based violence. Ultimately, allowing space for survivors to share their narratives on their own terms opens up possibilities for knowledge production towards survivor-driven support.

This article follows traders and entrepreneurs that live and work between Kyrgyzstan and China's northwestern region of Xinjiang. Looking specifically at Islamic marriage and business partnerships forged between persecuted Uyghurs and their Uzbek partners, it argues that commodity-mediated forms of transnational intimacy create spaces of safety and possibility in the face of political oppression, carceral violence, and gendered limitations. These transnational mobilities are forged in spite of structural immobilities. Taking seriously the imbrications of objects and people, it advances a view of intimacy as a multi-scalar, trans-subjective, and multiply entangled field of relationality.