Feminist anthropology最新文献

Reproductive governance and anti-abortion discourse increased dramatically after the Dobbs decision ended Roe. To reproductive justice advocates, this decision came after the pandemic lockdown that left staff working from home and they see it as a human rights crisis. In light of these radical changes, how are reproductive justice debates framed in the United States by women of color? Drawing on ethnographic research, I suggest that while the abortion landscape has provoked more polarization, reproductive justice activists, particularly women of color, have deepened their commitment to their human rights and intersectional approach that advocates for the most structurally vulnerable.

In the United States adverse reproductive outcomes are often understood in terms of Black and White differentials within the context of US-centric racism and as an afterlife of slavery. Yet similar racial variances in outcomes are found globally. How might we understand the persistence of adverse reproductive outcomes among Black women compared to White women in transnational contexts? Building on the concept of uneven development, this article uses the framework of uneven reproduction as one way to examine how inequalities are seared on reproducing bodies. Such framing shifts the analysis of adverse reproductive outcomes from a narrow view of racial disparities to one that explains those outcomes because of complex patterns of investment and disinvestment that reconfigure reproduction. In framing reproductive outcomes as uneven reproduction, this paper excavates three distinct historical cases in three geographic areas. Drawing from imperial and colonial contexts we can track different forms of disinvestment that were and continue to be detrimental to Black women.

This approach serves as a lens against which to read the persistent racial differentials in reproductive outcomes facilitated by a transhistorical, transnational and intersectional understanding of the constraints that impede Black women's successful reproduction over time and across space.

Passed in December 2019, the Citizenship Amendment Act intensified Hindu majoritarian rule, emerging as another legal measure to systematically deny citizenship to Muslims and other minoritized populations. These legislations were met by protests which were responded to by police violence. Young Muslim women at Jamia Milia Islamia University followed the lead of elders in Shaheen Bagh, crafting an intergenerational feminist-led protest which emerged at the forefront of resistance efforts. This article attends to young women's spatiotemporal claims of recognition and belonging. Dwelling on the collective and corporeal nature of their engagement, I highlight the theoretical significance of this unwavering collective still presence that characterizes their participation. In an India that increasingly questions their belonging, these student protesters craft home as an expanded political site. They make embodied claims to the university, public space, and by extension, the nation, as home.

What does it mean for women bureaucrats to work “objectively?” How does the attempt to work objectively affect the hierarchal structure and the preservation of women in lower positions, two interrelated key elements of patriarchal ideology? The bureaucratic staff of the Israeli Sal Committee offers a unique case study to examine this question. Aware of the life-and-death implications of committee decisions, this all-women staff attempt to work “objectively,” which they interpret as compiling and presenting data that carries no marks of their positions. To fulfill this ideal, staffers inhibited themselves from speaking in committee discussions. Consequently, they were treated as “good bureaucrats” but also as “women bureaucrats” and their work remained mainly unacknowledged. Aspiring for non-positional objectivity thus contributed to preserving their lower positioning and reaffirming their bureaucracy's hierarchal structure. But this disposition also forged an a-hierarchal work style within the staff, presenting a feminist alternative to mainstream bureaucracy. This ethnography suggests that an ethics of objectivity may carry more diverse possibilities than is commonly hypothesized in feminist critiques of objectivity.

This article analyses how the sites of disability activism, special education, and online-matchmaking approach the sexuality of disabled people in India. It argues that across these distinct yet overlapping sites, the sexuality of disabled people is engaged as a problem in need of a fix, which ultimately leads to the narrowing of disabled people's sexual choices, behaviors, and identities. The article suggests that when these field-sites move away from a problem-centered approach which focuses on looking for normative solutions and instead engage in the process of “problematization” by facilitating the sexuality of disabled people, they end up opening non-normative, uncertain, yet perhaps more fulfilling sexual opportunities for disabled people.

We argue that discourses around forced sterilization and abortion restrictions too often focus on motherhood and fertility and ignore the multiple other harms they bring. To do this, we travel with the North American framework of reproductive justice (RJ) to think through experiences of (non)reproduction in Peru and consider its analytic possibilities. In this intervention, we wish to focus on the commonality between RJ's three tenets: the figure of the child and its analytic force. We argue that while the aim of the RJ framework is not to reify fetuses and children at the expense of adults nor to reinforce a pronatalist position, the fact that the tenets are formulated around children means that, when mobilized for political or analytical purposes, they can reinforce repronormative mandates. We use the examples of forced sterilization and abortion in Peru to consider the issues this figuration of the child brings into being and the landscape of meaning it produces.

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.