Feminist anthropology最新文献

This article explores umoja, a Swahili worldview of relational personhood, as an alternative cultural form to rights-based approaches for seeking gender justice in Zanzibar. Since the colonial era, umoja— which translates roughly as “unity”—has become increasingly gendered in political discourse and used by various civil society and government groups to negotiate diverse visions of gender justice. Based on ethnographic observation of a women's savings cooperative, or vicoba, of working-class women migrants from the Tanzanian mainland, and a feminist civil society coalition, this work explores umoja as a form of feminist solidarity and as a feminist ethic. As a type of feminist solidarity, umoja is exemplified by the vicoba, which maintains relational dignity among members and structurally mitigates within-group inequities. As a feminist ethic, umoja involves intricately negotiating subgroup interests amidst constantly shifting individual and group relationships while maintaining conviviality in larger collectivities. By prioritizing collective conviviality, umoja avoids directly confronting patriarchal social structures, which raises questions about its potential to ensure gender justice. However, its emphasis on conviviality also acknowledges a shared humanity, which together with its treatment of inequities as intersectional and relational make umoja a holistic complement or alternative to rights-based approaches for ensuring gendered social change.

Under the pressure of work's devaluation and the state's retrenchment, men and women in Spain manage their extended family resources in a struggle to provide for their dependents. These resources have become the main axis of inequality in Spain's financialized economy. Drawing on fieldwork in Madrid, I show that men and women understand themselves in terms of this responsibility, internalizing capitalist pressures on social reproduction as a family matter. This self-identification cuts through the solidarities that exploited waged work and gendered domestic work might generate, and it makes family one's ultimate reference point. Instead of the refusal of a responsibility that used to be socialized being a principled and political stance, then, it is dismissed as selfish.

Contact refers to the moment of encounter between different populations, and the social, cultural, and linguistic negotiations that ensue. It refers back to a specific time and place when difference and “otherness” is constructed. As a feminist keyword, "contact" can help us critically interrogate various axes of difference, and the conditions that enabled their emergence. Through the meeting of different populations and groups, it demands attention to issues of power and its role in shaping and enacting “othered” identities. It entails both larger, macro-historical events, and smaller moments of face-to-face, intersubjective interactions. Fundamentally, contact is about social change and the potential for it. Social change is interactionally emergent from the contestations that occur between individuals and groups in contact with each other. But the potential for change via contact can also help us see alternative possibilities, allowing us to push against existing typologies, universals, and binaries so that we can better capture the dynamic fluidity of social identities and group boundaries

In recent years, feminist anthropologists have contributed to an interdisciplinary debate on beauty, which focuses on gendered desires, affectivity, and projects of self-making amid a global boom in beauty products and services. Drawing on the emergent field of critical beauty studies and ethnographic research on middle-class femininity in urban Turkey, this article explores the salience and potential of beauty as a feminist keyword in anthropology. It argues that despite men's increasing investments in beauty, beauty continues to be tied to “women” in existential ways. Moreover, while beauty still means work for women, this work is often outsourced to female migrant or racialized workers. Beauty norms and body images materialize in intimate encounters and particular settings. In Turkey, the recent extension of the urban beauty economy has created spaces of possibility and aesthetic desires for ordinary women to “take care of themselves.” With its neoliberal emphasis on self-care, the urban beauty economy has fueled the emergence of new female subjectivities and affective desires. Finally, the article argues in favor of a relational feminist ethnography and pedagogy of beauty, which is conscious of what we define as beautiful, desirable, harmful, or healthy and what the implications are of doing so.

This experimental essay examines citation as a multifaceted feminist keyword and praxis that is political, epistemological, mathematical, personal, temporal, navigational, correctional, capital, methodological, and aspirational. The piece itself is a performative journey through the myriad processes, politics, and poetics of citation, an attempt to embody citation's inherently in/elegant awkwardness, the way it can serve as a deeply personal window into the process of writing, living, and being. This journey reveals how citation, though often portrayed as a neat kind of resolution, remains splayed open and unresolved in numerous ways. It is an attempt to lay bare the process of building toward something that is not entirely one's own, a process routinely contained in a tidy footnote or cradled between two parentheses. Intentionally raising more questions than it answers, the following prompts the reader to interrogate various assumptions about how certain words become keywords, the boundaries of their definitions, and the emotional, epistemological, and conceptual baggage that accompanies them.

This article is a meditation on the state of anthropological studies of race in the postgenomic era through its particular analytical obsession with the resurrection of biological racism as presumably embodied by genetic African ancestry. Drawing on Hortense Spillers' psychoanalytic framework on race, this essay argues that the failures ascribed to genetic African ancestry and those who build relations with one another through it, is a desperate plea to salvage the last vestiges of anthropology's anti-racialist position against biological determinism at a moment when the instability of field of biology betrays that possibility. This essay builds on feminist kinship studies to trace how genetic African ancestry is discursively put to work to naturalize the disciplinary refusal to reckon with racism – especially when it is perpetuated by the discipline itself. By reframing genetic ancestry through the grammar of black kinship practices, this article compels anthropologists to reflect on the ways critiques of genetic African ancestry traffic biological and historical essentialisms to reposition ourselves as "right" on race rather than take on a perspective on contemporary processes of racialization at this moment as the circulation of genetic African ancestry demands.

In this article I discuss an Argentine workfare program as an entry point to challenge dominant understandings of the relationship between masculinity and the nation-state. By examining this program as it is enacted in Huerta Maipú, a community farm in the outskirts of Córdoba, Argentina, I explore how materializing nationally appropriate masculinity can impede the realization of the substantive benefits associated with national inclusion. Drawing upon Lauren Berlant's (2011) Cruel Optimism, I develop the concept of Pyrrhic Nationals to describe this dynamic. My argument builds upon a subordinated approach to understanding masculinity which I put into conversation with anthropological analyses of the role of civil society in neoliberal regimes. Even though Huerta Maipú was explicitly constructed as an anti-market, anti-capitalist and anti-patriarchal site, materializing masculinities through social and community activism entailed becoming the exact subjects required by neoliberal projects.

This contribution to feminist vocabulary provides a genealogy of the term seed. We both work on practices of care and control related to seeds, from seed banking and agricultural development projects to everyday practices of keeping, saving, and tinkering with seeds. As a term, seed evokes gendered ideas about human reproduction that center masculinity and virility, even though the botanical seeds are in fact already-fertilized embryos. This entry takes up the gendered dimension of seeds (and the elisions it produces) as a lens to interrogate ideas of use, usefulness, and uselessness (Ahmed 2019) in the world of biodiversity banking and plant genetic resources. With examples from seed banking and farming in West Africa, and with inspiration from feminist philosophers and anthropologists Sylvia Wynter, Marilyn Strathern, and Sara Ahmed, this provocation contributes to the vocabularies of feminist anthropology and science studies. Since the stories we tell about the world are filled with metaphor, why not complicate the vernacular understanding and usage of seed to reflect the queer and matrilineal possibilities that we see all around us, instead of the potent patrilineality that remains as a vestigial reminder of the values we would rather leave behind?