Feminist anthropology最新文献

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.

This article examines the relationship between diversity and urban livability in Portland, Oregon, as ideological and pragmatic projects. I argue that diversity enregisters the city as livable, because the progressive ideals that diversity puts forth index one of many innovative approaches that Portland has taken to resolve the challenges of urban life. Black professional women are both rhetors and subjects of this enregisterment process. They are routinely called on to make public arguments about diversity. However, I show that diversity work just as routinely creates situations where the communicable power of whiteness in the city is both evident and maintained. Women describe navigating this dynamic as “feeling more Black in Portland” than anywhere else they have lived. I contend that this feeling of racialized affect is engendered by diversity's subordination to livability—a structural relation that indexes both the neoliberal underpinnings of local belonging and how narrowly the space is constructed to include Blackness and womanhood.

In this article, I explore the affective landscape of matrifocal kinship in Brogodó to examine how the emotional intimacy that Black women shared with their women kin buffered the effects of unmet marital expectations, marital conflict, and divorce. I describe how women viewed their relationships with their families as a source of love and emotional intimacy that was more reliable and fulfilling than what they could expect from husbands who did not meet the romantic love ideal. Research that relies too heavily on functional assumptions about the relationship between matrifocality and marriage dissolution misses how the desire for emotional intimacy influences women's perspectives on and decision-making around marriage dissolution. I argue that women's reliance on consanguineal kin as an affective alternative to romantic love and companionate marriage was a critical factor in their decisions to end their marriages. I also assert that rather than weakening extended family ties, in Brogodó the spread of notions of romantic love and companionate marriage strengthened the matrifocal family model by reinforcing women's views that consanguineal rather than affinal kin were at the center of their worlds.