Feminist anthropology最新文献

Parenthood is a transforming and enduring experience worldwide, yet it occurs in culturally distinctive ways. Anthropologists’ analyses of this aspect of social life need to attend to these distinctions by applying concepts that are flexible but offer meaningful insights. This article investigates the complexities of modern parent–child relations, making two propositions that expand the concept of parenthood. I begin by arguing that the term parenthood should be more widely utilized by anthropologists when investigating kinship, due to its specificity and ability to address and contest issues of care and inequality. The notion of parenthood can reflect a diverse array of practices far beyond those of childbearing heterosexual couples—fostering, adoption, surrogacy, queer parenthoods, and parenthood via assisted reproductive technologies (ART)—while acknowledging the continued salience of normative parenting relations. I propose that feminist anthropologists could use the term parenthood to challenge the gendered assumptions surrounding motherhood and fatherhood (which remain highly influential regardless of parents’ relationship forms and sexualities) and to recognize and facilitate less rigid, less binary parenting performances. Drawing on anthropological, sociological, and feminist works on kinship, reproduction, and gender, I thus advocate for the conceptual utility of the term parenthood and point to future directions for such research.

This methodological reflection invokes the legacy of Black women anthropologists, who have approached ethnography not as encounters with “The Other” but as part of African Diasporic projects. As two U.S. Black women ethnographers, who understand our fieldwork contexts in West Africa as sites of return, re-discovery, and struggle, we situate our work within Black feminist genealogies, which refashion anthropological tools to re-map and reconstitute relations and recognition amongst those we call our kinfolk. We draw on “co-performative witnessing” (Madison 2007) and “mutual comradeship” (Burden-Stelly 2018) as counter-modalities of ethnographic praxis, which follow in this tradition of disrupting and re-routing the disciplinarily legitimized stakes of ethnography. Specifically, we re-narrate gatherings, by which we mean moments of being “gathered,” or collected and corrected in love. Within our respective “itineraries of discovery” (Walker 2015) in Liberia and Nigeria, we were confronted with dilemmas of personal and professional benefit in youth performance ethnography and challenged to relinquish political neutrality in activist ethnography. We conclude by amplifying the call of Black women anthropologists and our kinfolk interlocutors that when we come to our ethnographic work, physically, intellectually, and relationally, that we also “come correct.”

Abolition is not a metaphor, and it is essential that our notion of “abolition” not get defanged and deracinated within the self-evident boundaries of a discipline or even the academy. Amidst the tangle of complicity that is anthropology, there are also parts of the disciplinary toolkit that are useful for worldmaking: listening deeply, bearing witness, challenging the inevitability of the state, and building deep transnational and cross-diasporic relation. In particular as surveillance, policing, and imprisonment become globalized as techniques of repression, anthropology can help disrupt US-centrism while cultivating thicker solidarities. In this essay, I draw on Chela Sandoval's theory of differential political consciousness to roughly sketch five interlocking ideology-praxes – five gears of abolition that at times are complementary, and at times contradictory. Within each gear, I lift up organizers and scholars whose work is shaping the theory and practice of abolition. Following the lead of activists, artists and movement builders, I invite academics to bring abolition home by contributing to ongoing campaigns happening on their campuses and in their neighborhoods.

Obstetric violence, a term coined by activists in Latin America to describe violence during pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum, is a controversial feminist term in global health policymaking as well as in obstetric and midwifery practice and research. We reflect on the term both theoretically and autoethnographically to demonstrate its feminist value in addressing the problem of violence as embedded within the obstetric institution.

We argue that obstetric violence as an activist and critical feminist concept can only be effective for change when it is clearly understood as institutionalized intersectional violence. Therefore, we propose an abolitionist framework for further study. Through this lens, we refract the concept of obstetric violence as institutionalized, intersectional, and racializing violence by (1) making an abolitionist historiography of the obstetric institution, and (2) centering anti-Black obstetric racism as the anchor point of obstetric violence, where the afterlife of slavery, racial capitalism, the impact of systemic racism, and the consequences of patriarchal biopolitics come together.

Abolition provides a unique approach to study obstetric violence since it not only refuses and dismantles violent institutions, but specifically focuses on building futures out of existing alternative practices toward a life-affirming world of care. We locate the abolitionist futures of maternity care in Black, Indigenous, and independent doula and midwifery practices.

The bodies of low-income Chicana-Indigenous women are often sites of chronic racialized and gendered stress, as well as tremendous potentiality. I examine the relationship between stress and possibility as shaped by Chicana-Indigenous spiritual healing among members of a women's healing collective in California. These women articulate chronic stresses as cargas, Spanish for burden, baggage, or charge. Unloading these stresses among each other, or descargando, leads to actions mobilized as anticarceral activism. Attention to their sense of stress carried collectively as cargas builds on Black feminist understandings of stress as structured by racialized criminalization and state and carceral violence while illuminating the materiality and potentiality of this embodiment in Chicana-Indigenous contexts. The strategies cultivated for healing in these conditions underscore that stress is a worldly phenomenon, requiring emergent coalitions addressing social and structural conditions rather than solely individual therapeutic remedy or resilience. Working from feminist and fugitive anthropological commitments, centering descargando as an embodied knowledge praxis, I argue that an anthropological concern with potentiality must have an active, liberatory ethics, rooted in intersectional solidarity, accountability, and care.

Feminist and multispecies anthropologies have decentered those most visible to appreciate the perspectives of those othered in society—but also to better understand society at large. This article goes beyond decentering the human toward decentering another analytical focus: the species dyad. Building on previous work on gender–species intersectionality and multispecies ethnography, as well as drawing on a set of five ethnographic and multispecies fieldwork studies involving gendered relations between humans, cattle, and horses on three continents, this article offers a conceptualization of the multispecies triad by outlining a multispecies intersectionality theory. This entails acknowledging the intersectionality of five sets of relations: (1) species as a power relation beyond biology; (2) intersecting power relations of humans (such as gender and ethnicity as well as local categories); (3) humans’ organization of nonhumans into intraspecies categories (by for example sex, breed, age as well as local categories); (4) nonhumans’ own intraspecies power relations; and (5) nonhumans’ relations to intraspecies groups of other species (including human subgroups). By situating a multispecies triad in this multispecies intersectionality, the article shows how relations of power intersect within and across species with consequences for individuals and groups of all species involved. Multispecies intersectionality can thus be of interest even to scholars primarily interested in humans.

This article seeks to contribute to a scholarly conversation about love beyond dominant assumptions of romance, desire, and attraction by exploring what love comes to mean as situated in and governed by violence and marginalization in the shadows of political conflict. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among Muslim women in Palawan, the Philippines, I unpack the empirical notion of learning to love as it occurred in their stories of marriage. The article argues that learning to love reflects the women's struggles to survive socially, emotionally, and materially, and to make a life and selves. In this way, love is rooted in patriarchal relationality, the cultivation of moral and religious ideals of womanhood as well as in the social and material dependency in the family revealing love as familial togetherness, attachment, and support. On this basis, the process of learning love captures the women's work of learning to live, reclaiming sociality and social worth within the violent and confining conditions that structure their lives.

This article aims to describe how contemporary societies dominated by racial capitalism and heteropatriarchy view and treat silence as an emptiness to be avoided. Without denying the importance of breaking from the silence of oppression, I argue that the dialectic between norms and silences is at the foundation of sociocultural life. Moreover, silence in feminist theory can be understood as a form of décrochage (lit. “unhooking”) from hegemonic norms, thus opening spaces of doubt and questioning (or spaces of vraisemblance). Dwelling in these spaces, which I believe is the predicament of feminist anthropology, allows us to craft the sociocultural, artistic, and theoretical tools to engage in a state of becoming and emancipation.

The notion of generations runs through feminist theory, rendering it singular and disciplining its proper subjects—but might there be modes of generational thought that explode the bounds of linearity and propriety, offering ways to think of kinship and generativity amid and despite conditions of violence? Drawing on ethnography situated in South Asia, and the gendered insights that emerge from it, we reflect on feminist knowledge as a site of kinship that complicates any simple picture of inheritance and lineage. Affiliations of thought, practice, and relating might be characterized instead by a range of gendered practices which are constituted by, and draw attention to, modes and processes such as gathering and dispersal; impasse and reconnection; and recognition and uncertainty.

In this article we offer the term otherwise as a keyword for feminist vocabulary. We consider how the otherwise is simultaneously a concept, an analytics, a method, and an ethico-onto-political commitment to the insistence of the possible against the pull of the probable. The otherwise conjures latent possibilities and potentialities held within a situation or formation—which we might only glimpse obliquely, yet which holds or opens to liberatory transformation. While a standard genealogy of the term might trace its theoretical lineage, we aim to enact the otherwise we write by decentering this genealogy. Our essay is situated in conversation with feminist Black studies, science and technology studies, and decolonial studies, seeking to potentiate the transformative possibilities of bringing together these literatures. We explore the world-making capacities of an otherwise anthropology through practices such as: attunement to the political in the mundane; speculative colaboring as a form of care; the fracturing of anthropological epistemologies; writing as a complex we; and not knowing. Finally, our collaborative essay is refracted through our respective experiences of social unrest and protests in Hong Kong and Colombia to enact an unruly and undisciplined genealogy of the otherwise, written from here, now.