Feminist anthropology最新文献

What is queer in contemporary transnational queer studies? In this essay, I explore queer as a political-intellectual orientation and aspirational field animated by its constitutive polarity: between a more constrained queer focused on sex, sexuality, and gender and a more expansive queer that bears an oblique relationship to these more proper objects. I trace how the desire to do justice to our objects of study produces queer’s characteristic inversions, so that when we seek to move “beyond” queer’s proper objects, we find ourselves drawn back into them and inversely, when we seek to center proper subjects of queer, we find ourselves elsewhere and otherwise. I illuminate this queer movement through a conceptual review of recent scholarship in queer anthropology (loosely 2015-21), drawing out queer as (1) a challenge to categorical legibility, (2) a way to rethink vitalities between bio- and necropolitics, (3) a field of political, social, and sensual erotics and desires, and (4) a deconstruction of normative knowledge projects and epistemologies. Throughout, I reflect on anthropology's place in a larger project of a queer theory from (and seeking) an elsewhere.

Feminist anthropology offers conceptual and methodological clarity to the study of backlash, a phenomenon made salient once more by the global conservative turn of the 2010s. As contemporary crises of social reproduction have, once again, focused majoritarian angst and anger on women, queer people, immigrants, and people of color, scholars have returned (again) to discuss backlash. Critically, feminist anthropology can move past media narratives of backlash, which often emphasize the emotional habits of backlash perpetrators, to understand how backlash operates as a specific mode of power through the experiences of its targets. This keyword entry joins recent retheorizations in conceiving backlash not as a reactive event but rather as an elaboration of the ongoing logics of structural oppression. Critically examining media and scholarly analyses of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro's election and rise of the extreme right in Brazil as its case study, this entry examines how fieldwork-based approaches offer expanded theoretical purchase on the backlash concept.

Historically and globally, Black people have engaged in practices of maroonage to resist bondage and re-make free homes and communities. In this article, I offer maroons as a keyword and assert that Blackgirls are present-day maroons in plain sight who resist structural bondage and re-make practices of survivance in the pursuit of freedoms on an everyday basis. Through the article, I share and analyze ethnographic data as well as poetry and lyrics written by Blackgirls and womxn who enact their/our resistance and maroonage in plain sight.

Self-care is everywhere these days. Unlike “care,” it is not yet a central term in anthropology, but recent ethnographic studies point up its potential. In this keyword entry, we trace out distinct yet co-present understandings of the term that stem from radically different worldviews and construct it in oppositional, mutually exclusive ways. The first is the Black feminist lineage, which defines self-care as a political warfare within and against an American system of intersectional oppression. The second is a multidisciplinary body of work which builds on Foucault and defines self-care as a neoliberal form of domination and subjectification. Finally, we examine a burgeoning literature on refusal that emerges from multiple disciplines, including queer and affect theory, Native studies, Black feminism, and disability studies. Centering the margins, this perspective directly speaks to processes of domination, elucidating the recursive relationship among self, care, and personhood—how practices of care produce persons, and in turn, how only those accorded full personhood are deemed worthy of care. Containing these multiple and conflicting definitions, self-care thus exposes the current experience of crisis as bifurcated: either hopelessly ongoing or hopefully at a breaking point that will lead to change.

Lila Abu-Lughod suggested saving as a keyword twenty years ago by imploring feminist anthropologists to “be wary” saving discourses and actions, especially when they appear in a sympathetic form. Heeding this call in a sustained way remains a crucial task. Being wary of saving in a systematic way investigates what gives it broad-reaching appeal and power; how and where saving rhetoric is wielded by diverse agents; and why and how particular life-forms are deemed worthy of protection while many others are not. Being wary of saving supports reflexive considerations of how saving discourses operate within anthropology broadly, and feminist anthropology specifically, toward clarifying what an otherwise world “beyond” or “without” saving could look like.

This article highlights the Testimonios of Boricua (Puerto Rican) women in their twenties who were pregnant and parenting in their high school-age years and whose gender and familial self-determination and freedom were severely regulated by a suffocating network of colonial state institutions. At the center of this network was school. Mechanized to uphold gendered ideologies and materialities in the repressive campaign against Boricua women, US schooling was the site and the story of state intrusion into the self-determined life of Testimonialistas. Their Testimonios offer a narrative theorization of the ways in which Boricua women and mothers experienced and resisted the network of colonial schooling, and struggled toward self-determination for themselves, their children, and their communities.

This article introduces the feminist praxis of duoethnography as a way to examine the COVID era. As a group of diverse, junior, midcareer, and senior feminist scholars, we developed a methodology to critically reflect on our positions in our institutions and social worlds. As a method, duoethnography emphasizes the dialogical intimacy that can form through anthropological work. While autoethnography draws on individual daily lives to make sense of sociopolitical dynamics, duoethnography emphasizes the relational character of research across people and practices. Taking the relational aspects of knowledge production seriously, we conceptualized this praxis as a transformative method for facilitating radical empathy, mobilizing our collective voice, and merging together our partial truths. As collective authors, interviewers, and interlocutors of this article, the anonymity of duoethnography allows us to vocalize details of the experience of living through COVID-19 that we could not have safely spoken about publicly or on our own.

This reflection examines the potential and pitfalls of “trans” as a keyword for feminist anthropology. Drawing on the experiences of one Black trans woman advocate in particular, the author argues for trans as a scalar project, with both potential and pitfalls. The author argues that trans as a scalar project in feminist anthropology pushes the field to recognize the limits, excess, and continuities between, across, and through different gender and sexual categories.

Patriarchy is more than just “sexism.” It is a social formation of male-gendered power with a particular structure that can be found with striking regularity in many different arenas of social life, from small-scale contexts like the family, kin groups, and gangs, up through larger institutional contexts like the police, the military, organized religion, the state, and more. At the same time, patriarchy never stands alone, and always exists in complex intersections with other forms of power. In this article, I look at patriarchy from both points of view—that is, from both an exclusively gendered perspective, and from a perspective in which patriarchy cannot be divorced from white supremacy, normative heterosexuality, and normative able-bodiedness. Finally I briefly consider contemporary right-wing extremist (fascist) politics, in which the toxic intersectional brew of patriarchy, white supremacy, heteronormativity, and ideologies of bodily perfection are mobilized in pursuit of mass political control and domination.