Feminist anthropology最新文献

In South Africa, a disparate coalition of law enforcement, human rights workers, health officials, and activists claim that women don't know they have been raped. Claims of misrecognition typically follow from the observation that most women who experience gendered violence in South Africa do not report to the police and are especially leveled at Black women living in rural areas under the judicial authority of customary leaders. This article examines this assertion about not knowing gendered violence and the interventions it inspired. Dwelling on the story of one survivor's search for justice in Thohoyandou, South Africa, I argue that in the years following the transition from apartheid to democracy, a consensus coalesced around Black Indigenous women, who were seen as key political agents in post-colonial nation-building. During this time, knowing rape was touted as a gendered civic duty, one that enacted moral citizenship for the sake of a more orderly, democratic and vigorous multicultural nation. In spite of the consensus around knowing rape, “rape,” I suggest, remains an ambivalent sign for both those who encourage its recognition and for survivors. Amidst these disjunctures, survivors’ demands for justice often go denied.

Changing discourses and laws related to women's rights and intimate partner violence (IPV) in rural Ecuador have profoundly reshaped how local women experience and respond to violence. Women once understood violence as one strand of social suffering embedded in everyday rural life, and they resisted and managed this violence through various collective idioms of distress. Over the last two decades, however, state and non-governmental organization (NGO) campaigns have isolated gender violence as a discrete phenomenon, emphasizing the “wrongness” of IPV, the validity of righteous anger, and the importance of a legal response to secure the separation of “liberated” women. In this article, I draw on 20 years of fieldwork to discuss how emotional responses to gender violence have shifted in tandem with changing state and transnational discourses and policies in the coastal region of Las Colinas. A deep disjuncture between neoliberal discourses of feminist empowerment and the material reality of rural women's life options leaves many women experiencing new forms of shame when they are unable to turn anger into liberation and escape gender violence in their families and communities. Focusing on the emotional states that states create reveals how political-economic and discursive shifts are mediated through emotions and collective idioms.

Obstetric violence is endemic in Cuba, a highly medicalized society where the obstetrics institution is unquestioned and, in the afterlives of Atlantic slavery and US occupation and intervention, emotions of fear and gratitude work to normalize obstetric violence and control birthing bodies for the state. I draw on ethnographic observations, birth stories, and experiences as a patient to examine how birthing people, providers, and the Revolutionary state negotiate care and responsibility for health. I describe three fears: the fear of failure to protect maternal-infant health (and its repercussions for clinicians and the state); the fear of physiological childbirth; and fears of inadequate or violent care. Obstetric violence in Cuba is structural. As birthing people shift between primary and tertiary healthcare infrastructures with distinct epistemologies of care, they exert ambiguous agency to domesticate the hostile space of the hospital, building relations of reciprocity and performing docility and compliance. Finally, I look at the gratitude expected of patients and the consequences of refusing to recognize healthcare as a “gift.” This contemporary account of obstetric violence in Cuba contributes to calls by abolition feminists to study the obstetric institution in order to refuse and dismantle it, building life-affirming futures for maternity care worldwide.

This piece weaves together the voices of four feminist disability studies scholars and anthropologists whose work has been profoundly shaped by Russia's war of aggression. Composed via a dialogic encounter, it is based on a panel presentation on the topic of disability studies in war and care that took place at the University of Massachusetts Amherst just before the 1-year mark of the full-scale invasion. We came together to share insights and consider the best ways to practice horizontal solidarity, our approach inspired by recent work on feminist epistemology and methodology and scholarship on care, and disability studies. The text assumes a dialogic form, presenting our reflections as well as the contexts that shape our knowledge production and sharing the process of scaffolding our “Dis-Fem” conversation. In dialogue with the decolonizing discussions that animate feminist, anthropological, and Slavic Studies, as well as critical disability scholarship, it centers on the work of Ukrainian scholar-activists associated with the organization of people with disabilities (OPD) Fight For Right. In foregrounding their work, it traces the creative ways they've mobilized data and the experimental and collaborative data practices they've harnessed. Finally, it asks questions about trans-local solidarities we can enact and ways we might forge novel, “otherwise” ways to collaborate.

In the summer of 2020, shocking headlines reverberated across global media outlets, revealing harrowing stories of forced sterilizations and reproductive abuses committed against Uighurs in China and immigrant women in the United States. The simultaneity of these events sheds light on essential aspects of a transnational order characterized by mass surveillance and detention, a defining feature of diverse contemporary political regimes. This article explores how reproductive violence intertwines with systems of detention and mass surveillance through these two cases. I do so by weaving together the decolonial feminist framework of body-territory and the principles of reproductive justice that allow for a nuanced examination of how the control of the reproductive lives of Uighur and immigrant women reinforce the mechanisms of exclusion and surveillance embedded in state infrastructures. The demand for the right to bear children and to parent them under dignified conditions, free from violence, is increasingly pressing in a world where reproduction has become an instrument of surveillance and containment. This article engages in an ethnographic exploration of electronic paper trails, adopting what Geiger and Ribes aptly termed “trace ethnography.”

This article analyzes how the practice of cascading disaster responses and the relative erasure of increasing cases of gender-based violence (GBV), including feminicidio, or feminicide, by the government in Puerto Rico evidence the structural and regularly reproduced vulnerability of marginalized populations. Drawn from fieldwork in southwestern Puerto Rico between 2019 and 2020, this essay juxtaposes the lived experience of frontline GBV service providers with the relative absence of GBV from the public record until 2022. For activists and scholars, the prevalence of GBV and its relative exclusion from state discourse and records is rooted in ideological, cultural, and operational concerns: operationally, GBV is too often excluded from planned disaster response. Culturally, state-supplied statistics on GBV minimized and otherwise naturalized GBV into a cultural norm or reality-to-be-expected. Ideologically, the exclusion of GBV is also tied to the colonial relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States. We argue that GBV and its relative exclusion from the public record sustains high levels of violence that have already fueled notable public protest and the constrained working conditions of GBV frontline service providers. The article's focus on frontline worker experiences highlights their important role at the forefront of decision-making on how to mitigate GBV during and in the wake of cascading disasters.

Gender affirming care for youth is currently under political attack across the United States. Critics of affirming care often leverage a biological and fixed notion of gender as assigned at birth, which is at odds with how gender has been theorized academically for decades. Yet for some feminist clinicians, the popularized version of SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION present within rhetoric about the purpose of affirmative intervention also seems to undercut the legitimacy of care. In this article, I track how the difficult problems of the origins of gender itself, problems seemingly exposed by the invocation of the SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION of gender, are managed within the field of gender affirming care. I show how by drawing on the narrative power of very young gender expansive people, and by orienting clinical care away from identity towards DISTRESS, medical providers can align themselves both with feminist desires to change how gender ideology functions in the social world, and with the need to provide interventions that allow youth to embody the gender they desire.

In dialogue with the rich scholarship on affect and the role of emotions in feminist knowledge production, this article explores how compassion is mobilized by activists in the struggle for reproductive justice. The author centers emotional knowledge by drawing on conversations with a reproductive justice advocate in central Florida, the musical anthem of Viva Ruíz and the Thank God for Abortion Collective, and her own personal experience with pregnancy loss. This includes a discussion of the ways that coloniality persists in the racialized and gendered landscape of reproductive politics, with particular attention to the experiences of Puerto Ricans. Ultimately, the article argues that an attunement to “a radical compassion”—that is, a deep concern and understanding of the intersectional oppressions that place value on certain bodies over others—engenders the possibilities of reproductive justice and produces alternative ways of knowing and feeling.

After a 35-year-long constitutional ban on abortion, the Eighth Amendment was repealed in May 2018 and the Health (Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy) Act 2018 was introduced in the Republic of Ireland. Although “Repeal” and the legalization of abortion marked a significant transformation in reproductive governance, many aspects of the new abortion policy continue to complicate abortion care access and provision. In this article, I explore the mobilizations of health and rights in political discourses on abortion after legalization. In doing so, I identify how moral governance operates in post-Repeal abortion politics. I critically consider restrictive strategies in abortion politics in Ireland and compare these to a number of recent key anti-abortion tactics in the United States. As such, I situate post-Repeal and post-Roe abortion debates within parallel temporalities of abortion governance and highlight the adaptability of discourses on health and rights in shifting legal contexts.