Feminist anthropology最新文献

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.

This article offers the device as a methodological tool and concrete space for feminist praxis that can challenge the order of a world that is patriarchal, racist, and organized around capital extraction. Material or immaterial in form, a device is a tool through which different actors ground, produce, and concretize technological, legal, scientific, and political work. Many objects can become devices when pragmatically activated toward a particular effect; the challenge is to grasp them as such in the field and assess them for their political power and potential to bring forth possible worlds. Through examples from anthropology and adjacent literatures, we show how people accomplish three kinds of political work through their devices. Devices are sometimes used to solidify a domain of social life, such as the economy, the population, or race. Devices can constellate and produce a patterned effect, such as anti-Blackness. Moreover, devices can be used to clear space for new and maybe unexpected possibilities. We end by articulating how the device, by way of its artificiality, offers potential pathways for furthering ethnographic and analytic practices and performing feminist political work.

Gaslighting has become a popular term to describe experiences of doubt and manipulation that make individuals or groups feel like their lived realities are not valid. Much of the theoretical work utilizing gaslighting as an analytic can be found in psychology literature or feminist domestic violence discussions. More recently, political scientists, philosophers, and sociologists have noted the structural, political, economic, and social processes that enable gaslighting to move beyond an interpersonal dynamic between women and their abusers. This essay extends these arguments through a Black feminist anthropological lens to examine how anti-Black medical gaslighting functions structurally within medical systems, individually through implicit biases held by healthcare workers, and collectively through cultural norms. Despite Black patients’ learned mistrust of the medical system and often after multiple failed attempts to receive care or answers, ethnographic vignettes reveal that Black people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and their caregivers continue to fight to be heard by the medical establishment despite being gaslit.

This article theorizes Palestinian feminism as an analytical lens and a political project. Grounded in histories and ongoing organizing for anticolonial liberation, it outlines contemporary challenges and possibilities for Palestinian feminist organizing in the homeland and the shataat. Further, it centers Palestine as a space for enacting feminist praxis more broadly, and calls on feminist scholars and activists to join the struggle for Palestinian liberation.

The study of masculinities is a recent growing field in Anthropology. Within this growing subfield, one must be careful to study masculinities within wide circuits of power. By examining masculinities instead of masculinity, I center the social context and multiplicities necessary to ethnographically chart masculinities without falling into the trap of just centering male bodies and only the social practices of men. Masculinities must be understood in relation to colonialism, postcolonialism, imperialism, racism, heterosexism, and heteronormativity. Black feminist theory, women of color feminism, Third World feminism, and queer of color critique provide important theoretical tools in ethnographic research to decipher power and can destabilize singular, hegemonic Western epistemologies about masculinity. Through such a theoretical engagement, I showcase the complexity, multiplicity, and contradictions in the performance of masculinities in the global South, in queer of color communities, in Indigenous communities, and across various institutions in social life.

Risk as a term invokes a sense of uncertainty and danger. Risk in androcentric discourses operates on gender binary modes postulating male and masculine as active risk-takers; embedded in themes that rarely account for women's knowledge, opinions, and decisions. In this paper, I oppose such notions and propose risk as a feminist keyword—a term that provides potential to women's everyday worlds and presents women as active technicians of their own lives. Risk in its feminist rendition emerged in my ethnographic fieldwork in Banaras (North India). Banaras is a Hindu holy city that has obscured its women inhabitants and their experiences in its sacred rhetoric. In mapping women's worlds in Banaras, by privileging lived and embodied experiences, risk surfaced as an integral part of the everyday for women to contemplate their ways of being vis-à-vis the control, containment and violence deployed by patriarchy and its custodians. The paper argues that risk-taking exists in ordinary domains and is not restricted to unique situations. It is taken by women to actualize their worlds through corporeal, experiential, and sensorial knowledge. Thus, risk as a feminist keyword provides unique ways to comprehend everyday insistences and resistances by marginal bodies.

This keyword entry explores the multiple genealogies of the term women of color and the ways in which social activism, anti-coloniality, and solidarity movements produced the term. By situating the multiple genealogies of women of color, the article demonstrates both its political potential for addressing forms of silencing and erasure about the experiences and scholarship by women of color through an intersectionality approach. The essay offers examples of how attention to intersectionality offers nuanced understandings of women of color experiences as well as how ethnographic methods can become more attuned to our interlocutors and our own experiences as researchers.