Feminist anthropology最新文献

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.

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