Feminist anthropology最新文献

Feminist scholars have noted how motherhood opens avenues for women to access political authority. For African and Black women, scholars have noted how presenting themselves as mothers in the political sphere allows them to capitalize on an identity that traditionally allowed them access to power. However, these perspectives on motherhood and politics privilege a perspective on motherhood that deems the role as selfless and sacrificial. In this article, I propose moving beyond the caretaking dimensions of motherhood when analyzing how women politicians utilize motherhood. Drawing on evidence from research among Kenyan women politicians between 2017 and 2020, I argue that political motherhood often emerges as a transaction. Rather than interpreting the actions of women politicians as an extension of maternalistic impulses into the political realm, I illustrate how women politicians present the benefits of motherhood in exchange for citizens’ votes. By diversifying the meanings of political motherhood beyond caretaking and communal roles, this article counters perspectives that assume women politicians are less corrupt or are the victims of patriarchal politics. Instead, by foregrounding the transactional dimensions of political motherhood, this article illustrates how women politicians strategically use gendered identities to build political authority.

This article integrates human rights and abortion mobilities frameworks to demonstrate the ramifications of abortion restrictions and highlights historic and emergent forms reproductive justice and resistance. It engages with and critiques narrow conceptualizations of reproductive rights and biopolitics and considers the complex ways that abortion legislation becomes embodied in the post-Dobbs era. Mobility is explored across three frames—repression, privilege, and resistance—to highlight the interconnections between reproductive (in)justice and place-based resistance. Situating the analysis within human rights scholarship and reproductive justice and mobilities scholarship, the article outlines the continuities and current configurations of place-based reproductive (in)justice across three interconnected axes. The first axis traces the embodied ramifications of anti-abortion laws for marginalized individuals and communities; the second axis explores the complex personal, political, and economic costs of travelling to access abortion care; and the third axis reflects on historic and current forms of community-based resistance and care. Read together, these axes challenge binary assumptions of agency or subjugation and instead reveal how embodied experiences of abortion restrictions for marginalized individuals and groups also run alongside radical forms of community care to resist these restrictions and address broader forms of lived intersectional inequalities.

Widespread economic and social precarity has made care essential to sustain life while simultaneously unremarkable due to its ubiquity. Failure to attend to care inadvertently accepts associated inequalities and ignores the potential for resistance. I explore in this paper the potential for anthropological investigations of care to overturn assumptions of care as ordinary amid precarity. Drawing on transdisciplinary anthropological, feminist, and disability studies scholarship on care and my own ethnographic work with people with disabilities and their family caregivers in Appalachian Kentucky, I argue care is best characterized as an expansive conceptual frame to understand and contest conditions of protracted precarity. Moving beyond assumptions of care and caregiving as ordinary, I theorize care as a relational, moral, and practical act; situate care within the context of neoliberalism, inequality, and repression; and recognize the persistence of resistance enacted through care practices to center efforts for justice. Care as a focus of feminist scholarship and practice must move beyond oppression. Care is an everyday means for interdependent resistance amid the conditions of precarity, offering vital recognition of personhood and worth for precarious lives. Caring labor sustains life when industrial capitalism cannot. Care persists as a way to survive and thrive amid injustice.

The Sonke Gender Justice Network, a South African non-governmental organization that strives for gender equity and strengthening democratic institutions, was founded in 2006 and has a long history of diverse community programming and advocacy. In this paper, I draw on ethnographic work conducted within the organization's walls to show the ways in which employees’ narratives of becoming part of Sonke mirror the structure and language of religious conversion narratives. Within these narratives, I use the theoretical framework of “economies of affect” to show how affective experiences and displays serve as valuable tools that employees use to reach community participants. I propose that this analysis allows us a unique lens into NGO work around gender equality, as it considers the importance of affect and conversion in the creation of liberal masculine subjects.

Doulas in the United States offer embodied, informational, and continuous one-on-one care to birthing people. Doulas have historically sought certification to gain knowledge through training and to gain legitimacy for healthcare providers and clients. During the COVID-19 pandemic, hospitals required doulas to provide proof of certification. The COVID-19 pandemic, and the proliferation of state-sponsored doula programs, has sparked a shift in how doulas are viewed and regulated, enabling new forms of bureaucratic oversight and control. Based on participant observation, surveys, and semi-structured interviews, we examine the connection between certification and care including motivations doulas have for certification, the perceived value of certification, certification as a form of gatekeeping, and increased bureaucratization of doulas. Using a critical feminist approach, we argue that increased bureaucratization and surveillance of doulas has not improved standards of care or led to more equitable access. Indeed, doulas provide a window into the negative impact of bureaucratization on care. While some of these negative impacts are byproducts of policies intended to increase oversight and access to doula care, we argue that increased bureaucratization and surveillance of doulas is also intended to act as a gatekeeping mechanism demonstrating how policies contribute to uneven reproduction.

Our article recovers the obscured intellectual trajectories and contributions of Wang Tonghui (1912–1935AD), a pioneering female Chinese anthropologist, introducing her story for the first time to the Anglophone anthropological audience. By tracing her life, death, and after-life, we critically examined how Wang's image as an ambitious and talented anthropologist was gradually erased and replaced by that of a supportive wife and a muse of a prominent male scholar. This shift highlights the challenges faced by female scholars within the entanglement of anthropology and China's political process since the early 20th century. Through interrogating the gendered power dynamics in the historical process of knowledge production in anthropology, we further seek to better understand our own condition as female anthropologists from the perspective of a non-Anglophone context.

Feminist anthropologists have long emphasized the cultural, social, economic, and political contexts of gender violence rather than only focusing on interpersonal relationships between intimate partners or within the family. This commentary situates the five articles in the Gender Violence, Emotion, and the State Symposium within that context while noting their “evocative ethnographic” approach as a vital contribution to feminist anthropological thought, paying particular attention to power and its exercise within institutions and various forms of structural violence.

Changing social, political, and cultural processes in Vietnam are reshaping people's emotional and social responses to domestic violence on multiple levels. Socioeconomic reforms instituted in the 1980s, the related state revival of Confucian gender ideologies, and the influences in recent decades of international and local nongovernmental organizations’ approaches to domestic violence are significant shifts that have influenced these emergent responses. Using the framework of feminist critical medical anthropology, I explore how different emotional experiences of violence provide insight into patterns of help-seeking and interventions addressing marital violence. I suggest that Vietnamese state discourses and laws shape people's feelings in diverse and sometimes contradictory ways. State actors, for one, are particularly influenced to express and experience emotional responses in support of the nation. On the other hand, abused women, community members, and professionals experience more ambivalent feelings toward state discourses and practices as they engage moral emotions of care, love, and concern, prioritizing abused women's health and safety. Complicating this is some state actors grappling with their own ambivalent and tangled feelings as they assist abused women. Awareness of the diverse cross-cultural range of emotional complexity can aid feminist anthropologists and activists in attempts to understand and prevent domestic violence.

The emotional experiences of incarceration are directly tied to state-sanctioned gendered violence. Most incarcerated women have a history of trauma, stemming directly from broader socio-political and economic forces, which is further rendered throughout the incarceration and reentry process. The carceral system in the United States disrupts family and social support systems, fails to provide accessible and adequate mental health and substance use services, and denies stabilization resources such as housing, employment, and citizenry for women once released from prison, yet their emotional experiences are largely absent in analyses of this gendered violence. Drawing from a larger intimate ethnography project with a woman, LaTasha, recently released from a 25-year to life prison sentence, this article examines how women negotiate and express emotions within the context of prison reentry contributing to feminist anthropological scholarship on state-sanctioned gender violence. Through an in-depth analysis of the challenges LaTasha faces in rebuilding relationships with family, navigating a system in which she has been outcasted, and asserting herself after being systematically disempowered, we gain insight into the ways in which carceral systems have prevented emotional complexity resulting in a form of incipient and largely invisible violence.