Feminist anthropology最新文献

Gaslighting has become a popular term to describe experiences of doubt and manipulation that make individuals or groups feel like their lived realities are not valid. Much of the theoretical work utilizing gaslighting as an analytic can be found in psychology literature or feminist domestic violence discussions. More recently, political scientists, philosophers, and sociologists have noted the structural, political, economic, and social processes that enable gaslighting to move beyond an interpersonal dynamic between women and their abusers. This essay extends these arguments through a Black feminist anthropological lens to examine how anti-Black medical gaslighting functions structurally within medical systems, individually through implicit biases held by healthcare workers, and collectively through cultural norms. Despite Black patients’ learned mistrust of the medical system and often after multiple failed attempts to receive care or answers, ethnographic vignettes reveal that Black people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and their caregivers continue to fight to be heard by the medical establishment despite being gaslit.

This article theorizes Palestinian feminism as an analytical lens and a political project. Grounded in histories and ongoing organizing for anticolonial liberation, it outlines contemporary challenges and possibilities for Palestinian feminist organizing in the homeland and the shataat. Further, it centers Palestine as a space for enacting feminist praxis more broadly, and calls on feminist scholars and activists to join the struggle for Palestinian liberation.

The study of masculinities is a recent growing field in Anthropology. Within this growing subfield, one must be careful to study masculinities within wide circuits of power. By examining masculinities instead of masculinity, I center the social context and multiplicities necessary to ethnographically chart masculinities without falling into the trap of just centering male bodies and only the social practices of men. Masculinities must be understood in relation to colonialism, postcolonialism, imperialism, racism, heterosexism, and heteronormativity. Black feminist theory, women of color feminism, Third World feminism, and queer of color critique provide important theoretical tools in ethnographic research to decipher power and can destabilize singular, hegemonic Western epistemologies about masculinity. Through such a theoretical engagement, I showcase the complexity, multiplicity, and contradictions in the performance of masculinities in the global South, in queer of color communities, in Indigenous communities, and across various institutions in social life.

Risk as a term invokes a sense of uncertainty and danger. Risk in androcentric discourses operates on gender binary modes postulating male and masculine as active risk-takers; embedded in themes that rarely account for women's knowledge, opinions, and decisions. In this paper, I oppose such notions and propose risk as a feminist keyword—a term that provides potential to women's everyday worlds and presents women as active technicians of their own lives. Risk in its feminist rendition emerged in my ethnographic fieldwork in Banaras (North India). Banaras is a Hindu holy city that has obscured its women inhabitants and their experiences in its sacred rhetoric. In mapping women's worlds in Banaras, by privileging lived and embodied experiences, risk surfaced as an integral part of the everyday for women to contemplate their ways of being vis-à-vis the control, containment and violence deployed by patriarchy and its custodians. The paper argues that risk-taking exists in ordinary domains and is not restricted to unique situations. It is taken by women to actualize their worlds through corporeal, experiential, and sensorial knowledge. Thus, risk as a feminist keyword provides unique ways to comprehend everyday insistences and resistances by marginal bodies.

This keyword entry explores the multiple genealogies of the term women of color and the ways in which social activism, anti-coloniality, and solidarity movements produced the term. By situating the multiple genealogies of women of color, the article demonstrates both its political potential for addressing forms of silencing and erasure about the experiences and scholarship by women of color through an intersectionality approach. The essay offers examples of how attention to intersectionality offers nuanced understandings of women of color experiences as well as how ethnographic methods can become more attuned to our interlocutors and our own experiences as researchers.

Parenthood is a transforming and enduring experience worldwide, yet it occurs in culturally distinctive ways. Anthropologists’ analyses of this aspect of social life need to attend to these distinctions by applying concepts that are flexible but offer meaningful insights. This article investigates the complexities of modern parent–child relations, making two propositions that expand the concept of parenthood. I begin by arguing that the term parenthood should be more widely utilized by anthropologists when investigating kinship, due to its specificity and ability to address and contest issues of care and inequality. The notion of parenthood can reflect a diverse array of practices far beyond those of childbearing heterosexual couples—fostering, adoption, surrogacy, queer parenthoods, and parenthood via assisted reproductive technologies (ART)—while acknowledging the continued salience of normative parenting relations. I propose that feminist anthropologists could use the term parenthood to challenge the gendered assumptions surrounding motherhood and fatherhood (which remain highly influential regardless of parents’ relationship forms and sexualities) and to recognize and facilitate less rigid, less binary parenting performances. Drawing on anthropological, sociological, and feminist works on kinship, reproduction, and gender, I thus advocate for the conceptual utility of the term parenthood and point to future directions for such research.

This methodological reflection invokes the legacy of Black women anthropologists, who have approached ethnography not as encounters with “The Other” but as part of African Diasporic projects. As two U.S. Black women ethnographers, who understand our fieldwork contexts in West Africa as sites of return, re-discovery, and struggle, we situate our work within Black feminist genealogies, which refashion anthropological tools to re-map and reconstitute relations and recognition amongst those we call our kinfolk. We draw on “co-performative witnessing” (Madison 2007) and “mutual comradeship” (Burden-Stelly 2018) as counter-modalities of ethnographic praxis, which follow in this tradition of disrupting and re-routing the disciplinarily legitimized stakes of ethnography. Specifically, we re-narrate gatherings, by which we mean moments of being “gathered,” or collected and corrected in love. Within our respective “itineraries of discovery” (Walker 2015) in Liberia and Nigeria, we were confronted with dilemmas of personal and professional benefit in youth performance ethnography and challenged to relinquish political neutrality in activist ethnography. We conclude by amplifying the call of Black women anthropologists and our kinfolk interlocutors that when we come to our ethnographic work, physically, intellectually, and relationally, that we also “come correct.”

Abolition is not a metaphor, and it is essential that our notion of “abolition” not get defanged and deracinated within the self-evident boundaries of a discipline or even the academy. Amidst the tangle of complicity that is anthropology, there are also parts of the disciplinary toolkit that are useful for worldmaking: listening deeply, bearing witness, challenging the inevitability of the state, and building deep transnational and cross-diasporic relation. In particular as surveillance, policing, and imprisonment become globalized as techniques of repression, anthropology can help disrupt US-centrism while cultivating thicker solidarities. In this essay, I draw on Chela Sandoval's theory of differential political consciousness to roughly sketch five interlocking ideology-praxes – five gears of abolition that at times are complementary, and at times contradictory. Within each gear, I lift up organizers and scholars whose work is shaping the theory and practice of abolition. Following the lead of activists, artists and movement builders, I invite academics to bring abolition home by contributing to ongoing campaigns happening on their campuses and in their neighborhoods.

Obstetric violence, a term coined by activists in Latin America to describe violence during pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum, is a controversial feminist term in global health policymaking as well as in obstetric and midwifery practice and research. We reflect on the term both theoretically and autoethnographically to demonstrate its feminist value in addressing the problem of violence as embedded within the obstetric institution.

We argue that obstetric violence as an activist and critical feminist concept can only be effective for change when it is clearly understood as institutionalized intersectional violence. Therefore, we propose an abolitionist framework for further study. Through this lens, we refract the concept of obstetric violence as institutionalized, intersectional, and racializing violence by (1) making an abolitionist historiography of the obstetric institution, and (2) centering anti-Black obstetric racism as the anchor point of obstetric violence, where the afterlife of slavery, racial capitalism, the impact of systemic racism, and the consequences of patriarchal biopolitics come together.

Abolition provides a unique approach to study obstetric violence since it not only refuses and dismantles violent institutions, but specifically focuses on building futures out of existing alternative practices toward a life-affirming world of care. We locate the abolitionist futures of maternity care in Black, Indigenous, and independent doula and midwifery practices.

The bodies of low-income Chicana-Indigenous women are often sites of chronic racialized and gendered stress, as well as tremendous potentiality. I examine the relationship between stress and possibility as shaped by Chicana-Indigenous spiritual healing among members of a women's healing collective in California. These women articulate chronic stresses as cargas, Spanish for burden, baggage, or charge. Unloading these stresses among each other, or descargando, leads to actions mobilized as anticarceral activism. Attention to their sense of stress carried collectively as cargas builds on Black feminist understandings of stress as structured by racialized criminalization and state and carceral violence while illuminating the materiality and potentiality of this embodiment in Chicana-Indigenous contexts. The strategies cultivated for healing in these conditions underscore that stress is a worldly phenomenon, requiring emergent coalitions addressing social and structural conditions rather than solely individual therapeutic remedy or resilience. Working from feminist and fugitive anthropological commitments, centering descargando as an embodied knowledge praxis, I argue that an anthropological concern with potentiality must have an active, liberatory ethics, rooted in intersectional solidarity, accountability, and care.