Feminist anthropologyPub Date : 2025-05-31Epub Date: 2025-04-14DOI: 10.1002/fea2.70005
Shubha Ranganathan, Jayaprakash Mishra, S. V. Chetan, Bindhulakshmi Pattadath
{"title":"Making things work, practically: Care relations in parent-led autism advocacy in urban India","authors":"Shubha Ranganathan, Jayaprakash Mishra, S. V. Chetan, Bindhulakshmi Pattadath","doi":"10.1002/fea2.70005","DOIUrl":"10.1002/fea2.70005","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Drawing on ethnography that involved in-depth online interviews with parents of adult autistic individuals in India, this article focuses on the experiences of five interlocutors to examine the nuanced understanding of disability, family, and care in the context of COVID-19 in India and, more broadly, in the realm of disability. Anchored in a feminist philosophical framework of care, the study addresses two pivotal questions. First, it explores how the narratives of the mothers interviewed challenge normative articulations of care. Second, it illustrates that care relations involving autism are characterized by considerable interdependence. Within the realm of autism advocacy in India, which is characterized by its inherent diversity, this article emphasizes that questions of care, (in)dependence, and kinship are shaped more by individuals’ social locations than by Western theorizations of inclusion and care. This article contributes to the ongoing discourse on disability, family, and care, providing rich insights into the lived experiences of mothers of autistic adults in the specific context of the COVID-19 pandemic in India. The findings offer a broader understanding of the complexities inherent in care relations and advocate for more inclusive and culturally sensitive approaches to support families of individuals with autism in urban India.</p>","PeriodicalId":73022,"journal":{"name":"Feminist anthropology","volume":"6 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2025-05-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/fea2.70005","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144179308","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Feminist anthropologyPub Date : 2025-05-31Epub Date: 2025-04-17DOI: 10.1002/fea2.70003
Erica L. Williams, Svati Shah
{"title":"Kamala Kempadoo's influence on sexual economies scholarship in South Asia and Latin America","authors":"Erica L. Williams, Svati Shah","doi":"10.1002/fea2.70003","DOIUrl":"10.1002/fea2.70003","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In this article we outline Kamala Kempadoo's influence on research on sex work, transactional sex, and sexual economies in South Asia and Latin America, focusing on Brazil and India, the authors’ respective areas of expertise. We draw on our own research arcs to show how Kempadoo's work enabled generations of ethnographic and ethnographically informed research on sexual commerce that centered questions of labor and critiques of policing and impoverishment. Kempadoo's work offered both an exemplar and episteme for research on sex work that mobilized anti-teleological critiques of the “Third World Other,” while showing that a structural analysis of class and capital could critique the harms of the anti-trafficking framework. Kempadoo's influence is apparent in work that uses ethnography to center the lens of labor in arguing against reductive accounts of transacted sexual services. We show that Kempadoo's work is more relevant than ever, considering state-sponsored violence against migrants and the need for re/producing ethnographically situated accounts of the ways in which sexual commerce operates in navigating precarity.</p>","PeriodicalId":73022,"journal":{"name":"Feminist anthropology","volume":"6 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2025-05-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/fea2.70003","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144179318","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Feminist anthropologyPub Date : 2025-05-31Epub Date: 2025-03-31DOI: 10.1002/fea2.70004
Lyndsey P. Beutin
{"title":"Trading sex for freedom: The influence of Kamala Kempadoo's early scholarship","authors":"Lyndsey P. Beutin","doi":"10.1002/fea2.70004","DOIUrl":"10.1002/fea2.70004","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article revisits Kamala Kempadoo's publications on sex work in the Caribbean in the late 1990s and early 2000s. This period marks both the era before the framework of anti-trafficking consumed the field of sex work studies and the era when Black feminist ethnographic research on how race, class, and structural violence affected women's lives globally was making an impact across disciplines. By focusing on three key concepts (work, race and gender, and slavery), I show how Kempadoo recontextualized terms used by anti-prostitution feminists within the history of colonialism and the political economy of 1990s multilateral trade. In so doing, she offered feminist sociologists and anthropologists new possibilities for understanding sexual labor and sexual freedom. The paper then returns to Kempadoo's engagement with the history of enslaved Black women in Caribbean brothels to offer an alternative reading of the relationships between slavery and sex work that now dominate the public relations campaigns of anti-trafficking organizations. Taken together, Kempadoo's multidisciplinary contributions help feminist anthropology see how important global sex worker activism is to understanding race, gender, and work. This paper further demonstrates how combining critical engagement with feminist ethnographies with historical memory studies can shed new light on contemporary social issues.</p>","PeriodicalId":73022,"journal":{"name":"Feminist anthropology","volume":"6 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2025-05-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/fea2.70004","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144179399","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Feminist anthropologyPub Date : 2025-05-31Epub Date: 2025-05-22DOI: 10.1002/fea2.70010
April Petillo, M. Gabriela Torres, Allison R. Bloom, Sreeparna Chattopadhyay
{"title":"Resilience requires discomfort: Broad brushstrokes for the common good","authors":"April Petillo, M. Gabriela Torres, Allison R. Bloom, Sreeparna Chattopadhyay","doi":"10.1002/fea2.70010","DOIUrl":"10.1002/fea2.70010","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":73022,"journal":{"name":"Feminist anthropology","volume":"6 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2025-05-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/fea2.70010","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144179219","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Feminist anthropologyPub Date : 2025-05-31Epub Date: 2024-11-19DOI: 10.1002/fea2.12157
S. J. Dillon
{"title":"Transmedicalism's seduction: Normative gender, affectual productions, and white trans legitimacy","authors":"S. J. Dillon","doi":"10.1002/fea2.12157","DOIUrl":"10.1002/fea2.12157","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article uses feminist autoethnographic techniques to reflect on a set of interactions between a trans theorist and interlocuter I interviewed for my research, who I call Beth, and myself. In this work, I analyze how medical discourses of transgender transition, particularly that of transmedicalism, functions as an outgrowth of white supremacy. In this ethnographic vignette, binary [white] trans transition promises a coherent gender identity via recourse to anti-Blackness, rather than to cisheteronormativity. I argue that the binary assumptions built within transmedicalist approaches to trans life introduce gender not as an identity or even social phenomenon, but rather as a kind of successful or unsuccessful discursive and visual claim-making. These claims are reliant on whiteness and the ways in which white bodies can become invisibly normatively gendered because Black people are gendered as nonnormative. Contesting the boundedness of gender present within popular American conceptions, this series of interactions illustrates a fluid field of conceptual gender which relies on affective connections that mobilize through and across bodies in order to produce certain kinds of normativity.</p>","PeriodicalId":73022,"journal":{"name":"Feminist anthropology","volume":"6 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2025-05-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/fea2.12157","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144179221","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Feminist anthropologyPub Date : 2025-05-31Epub Date: 2024-11-19DOI: 10.1002/fea2.12158
Allison Bloom
{"title":"“I never had a problem with anyone”: The benefits of a life course interview and ethnographic narrative for domestic violence survivors","authors":"Allison Bloom","doi":"10.1002/fea2.12158","DOIUrl":"10.1002/fea2.12158","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Feminist anthropologists have long emphasized the mutual transformation that occurs with ethnographic fieldwork; in particular, life course interviews can be one such powerful tool. Based on an ethnographic case study with a Uruguayan domestic violence survivor, I draw upon mental health research, feminist traditions, and anthropological scholarship to argue that a life history interview can offer therapeutic benefits when utilized by either practitioners or researchers working with survivors of gender-based violence. Ultimately, allowing space for survivors to share their narratives on their own terms opens up possibilities for knowledge production towards survivor-driven support.</p>","PeriodicalId":73022,"journal":{"name":"Feminist anthropology","volume":"6 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2025-05-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/fea2.12158","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144179222","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}