Feminist anthropology最新文献

This collectively written essay reflects collaborations between three graduate students and their dissertation advisor. We turn to inspirations like Zora Neale Hurston to make our fieldnotes central to collective writing, thinking and translation across language and discursive traditions. We use small fieldnote in a subversive sense to illustrate a feminist mode of this pedagogical exercise and to refuse foreclosure of our analysis. We push back against the burden of working with complete pieces of writing, and the anthropological commitment to the thickness of description. Anthropological pedagogy conventionally attributes to thick description and completeness, not just scholarly superiority but also a moral one. Using a feminist pedagogical approach that centers the small as possibility troubles presumptions of conventional anthropological pedagogy. Instead, we picked notes from one or two ethnographic encounters or a single day of fieldwork to experiment collectively with where they could lead us. The essay that has resulted from this collective feminist classroom is what we see as a feminist-dividual piece of pedagogy and writing. We anticipate that it will provide others a hopeful way to begin and sustain intellectual collaborations and writing across scholarly generations by celebrating the potential of small, incomplete, and otherwise uncelebrated pieces of writing.

Maestra (woman teacher) is the most common occupation of Mexican women who pursue higher education. This coincides with perceptions that teaching is a public manifestation of women's prescribed responsibility for socializing children. And yet, like women teachers elsewhere, maestras who are mothers routinely struggle to juggle their household, childcare and employment responsibilities. This ethnographic study explores the extreme work-life imbalance experienced by rural maestras in the state of Oaxaca. Because the mountainous terrain and underdeveloped infrastructure complicate commuting, maestras assigned to isolated communities may stay in these villages while their children live with other relatives. This discussion explores ways that these women's extradomestic employment that is at odds with local ideals of the “good mother” who is at home with her children may actually help reshape constructions of maternal roles and responsibilities. Analysis of mothers' narratives reveals the emotional strains of being away from their children, and speaks to the pride these dedicated teachers take in “bringing home the milk” as economic providers. Ultimately, the tensions these agentive mothers confront and negotiate in their private and professional lives underscore ways that the prioritization of the latter in gender role norms limits women's options, choices and opportunities for full empowerment.

Grieving geographies are spaces of complex collective loss due to multiple interconnected forms of violence. Engaging with critical race theory, feminist geography and anthropology, and political ecology, this paper explores the intersections of gender, race, and the environment in Mexico. Black and Indigenous women in the Coast of Oaxaca grieve for the lagoons that are dying in front of them due to governmental and neoliberal policies, but also for the loss of members of their communities due to violence. I argue that facing the slow death of their lagoons system, plus everyday forms of violence, Black and Indigenous women organize to defend life, livelihood, and the lagoons in their community. These women have created everyday practices of resistance and alternative economies based on care and solidarity. This article explores environmental racism in Latin America, specifically where mestizaje ideology was imposed, and the affective relationship between human and other-than-human beings.

Year-end rituals give arbitrary transitions meaning, facilitate collective mourning or sensemaking, enable closure or catharsis, or, alternatively, their refusal. Through a blend of creative fiction and feminist auto-ethnography, this essay observes the end of 2020 with a both/and offer: a medium for processing the collective trauma of 2020, the Year of the Bindweed, and an invitation to whimsically imagine the otherwise in the insurgent thallopower of 2021, the Year of the Mushroom. As I strive to uproot its endless twists and turns through 2020, I follow the bindweed's path from Minneapolis to Mars and back as it courses through countless crises named and unnamed only to wind up back in my garden. There I find that this Convolvulus arvensis is deeply rooted in an entangled system of White supremacy, heteropatriarchy, imperialism, and capitalism, regenerating itself with no clear beginning or end to weed out or unravel. Theorizing in “ex-centric sites” (Harrison 2016), this essay is the compost pile of my ethnographic work on anti-feminism and right-wing populism. Drawing allegories from the garden as another way of knowing (Jones 2000), it “centers an embodied feminist ethos” (Berry et al. 2017) in a form fugitive to the conventional modalities of academic theory-making. [Corrections added on 25 October 2021 after first online publication: The abstract was added to the article.]

Created around, through and within discomfort, this piece weaves together the voices of five feminist scholars in an exploration of troubling affective and emotional experiences, offering material for critical theorizing and engaged scholarship. This inquiry started at a conference panel in July 2019. Taking on the invitation made by the editors of Feminist Anthropology for the five of us to write in conversation, this piece also responds to April Petillo's piece in the first issue of this journal where she compelled us, feminist anthropologists, to listen through discomfort in order to challenge hierarchies of power and knowledge production. Through a polyphonic composition that draws on the different backgrounds, research and life trajectories of five feminist scholars through a collective online writing process, this piece purposefully plays with form, presenting reflections on naming relational discomforts, unsettling academic affects with our writing, violence, precarity and privilege, and how to work with discomfort through feminist solidarity.

This article explores how the absence of a robust anthropological analysis of intersecting kinship obligations obscured a more complete public understanding of a horrific crime and the patriarchal (ir)rationality it underlined. The following court trial that I witnessed in its entirety on the CourtTV channel in the United States, necessitated an anthropological analysis that neither legal nor media analysts could perform, at the peril of failing to understand the contextual drivers of such criminal (ir)rationality. I argue that patriarchal affinities can often work beyond cultural, religious, or racial differences in reproducing gender and anti-Blackness through unlikely partnerships predicated upon a shared disregard for women's lives. I proceed, therefore, from a standpoint that views violence against women as rooted in what I call conspiratorial kinship not in culture, religion, race, or ethnicity (Abu-Lughod 2011, 17). The case in question will demonstrate how these social domains serve as validating proxies legitimating violence against offending women in the problematic name of honor.

In this article, we contend that the “strong Black woman” archetype constricts expressions of Black womanhood and girlhood and thus limits individual and collective liberation. We maintain that strength need not preclude tenderness, highlighting two forms: wounded tenderness—a raw and aching feeling pointing to the vulnerability of human beings—and liberated tenderness, a practice of meeting woundedness with embodied awareness and gentleness. We foreground the concept of poto mitan to illustrate how the “strong Black woman” archetype upholds virtues of strength at the expense of tenderness, thus taking up Faye Harrison's call to theorize from “ex-centric sites.” Translated as “center posts,” poto mitan describes the architecture of spaces for traditional ancestor worship and conventionally refers to Haitian women's central role as pillars of the family and community. We begin this article by discussing the limits of this discourse within feminist scholarship and activism. Second, we examine how this discourse both engenders and limits liberation for Haitian rural women. By concluding with “tenderness as method,” we argue that feminist anthropologists working with Black women must not only attune themselves to how discourses and performances of strength may occlude liberation but also call on our own vulnerability to allow space for liberated tenderness.

The discipline of anthropology is one of the foundational stones for performance studies, to the extent that it provided one of our most common methodologies for research: ethnography. However, in this essay, I am interested in what anthropology can learn from performance studies methodologically, namely, looking at performance as a valuable research method, especially for an intersectional feminist practice. Following Saidiya Hartman's scholarship, and Tavia Nyong'o's and Consuelo Pabón's readings of Gilles Deleuze, I use the concept of fabulation to explore and interpret the potency of performance as methodology. Through an analysis of a performance piece by the Ensemble Kashmir Theatre Akademi (EKTA), I argue that performance offers the possibility to enact a register of the past (based on an embodied archive) at the same time that it has the potential to produce ephemeral visions of a future of liberation. In the end, I argue that moving beyond looking and writing about embodied practices, which anthropologists have done extensively, toward the purposeful creation of performance in the context of anthropological research can serve as a fruitful tool to practice feminist positionality.