Feminist anthropology最新文献

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?

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.