Feminist anthropologyPub Date : 2025-05-31Epub Date: 2025-03-31DOI: 10.1002/fea2.70002
Meagan Copeland, Holly Horan
{"title":"Transitioning from punitive to healing centered healthcare for pregnant people with substance use disorder in Alabama","authors":"Meagan Copeland, Holly Horan","doi":"10.1002/fea2.70002","DOIUrl":"10.1002/fea2.70002","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In 2022, the Alabama Maternal Mortality Review Committee identified that substance use disorders (SUDs) were a key contributor in almost half of all maternal deaths. Substance use disorders (SUD) are chronic, relapsing conditions, and best practice recommendations include continuous harm reduction skills training for healthcare professionals; however, punitive policies, such as Alabama's Child Endangerment Law (ACEL), diminish the availability, accessibility, and utilization of healthcare for this population. The ACEL also negatively impacts the capacity of perinatal healthcare professionals in Alabama to adequately serve and advocate for pregnant people living with a SUD. As applied medical anthropologists, we challenged the notion of “advocacy” as solely being the responsibility of the healthcare professional or the patient and reimagined it as a collective process that can challenge perceptions of moral responsibility and personhood for pregnant and postpartum people who are substance involved. With a focus on knowledge translation and multi-stakeholder advocacy, we created two-versions of the <i>Perinatal Self-Advocacy Toolkits</i> (PSATs) that are framed using a healing-centered approach. We discuss how the PSATs are an essential component of improving the quality of care for pregnant patients with SUDs and facilitating systems change in Alabama.</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/fea2.70002","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144179398","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: 2025-03-17DOI: 10.1002/fea2.70000
Megan A. Carney
{"title":"Fieldwork in transition: Rethinking anxieties, solidarities, and ontologies amid compounding forms of distress","authors":"Megan A. Carney","doi":"10.1002/fea2.70000","DOIUrl":"10.1002/fea2.70000","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Drawing on preliminary research in Italy in the months following Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the gradual lifting of pandemic-related public health measures, this essay explores the widespread economic, political, and environmental anxieties as well as calls for solidarity that were circulating at this time and their implications for ethnographers in attempting to “make sense” of sociocultural phenomena in a world that feels “unhinged.” From these swirling anxieties, hegemonic framings of “reality” by state actors contrast significantly with the lived experiences of the working class and reveal the function of <i>salvage realism</i> in reproducing racial capitalism. Following recent work in anthropology on the unhinged and affective possibilities in troubled times, I argue that these dynamics demand deeper anthropological engagement with theories that continue to be marginalized by the discipline, including from Black and Indigenous scholarship. These dynamics also raise important questions regarding the realities and temporalities of fieldwork and the onto-epistemological frames that inform anthropological research processes.</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/fea2.70000","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144179320","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: 2025-05-07DOI: 10.1002/fea2.70008
Shubha Ranganathan
{"title":"Fieldwork in pandemic times: Poems on research and care","authors":"Shubha Ranganathan","doi":"10.1002/fea2.70008","DOIUrl":"10.1002/fea2.70008","url":null,"abstract":"<p>What is it like as an academic to be doing social science research in pandemic times? How do research engagements and interactions transform in the wake of a global crisis? This creative piece ruminates on questions of care and ethics in the context of doing fieldwork during the pandemic. These poems emerged from the need to reimagine anthropological research in terms of care relations and ethics rather than methods or tools. Writing allowed for self-expression and processing of life-shaking events and global crises during uncertain times. Writing bridged the professional and the personal, allowing for authentic engagements in research relationships. Given the increasing pressures of neoliberal academia, the care ethic symbolized by these poems becomes only more significant.</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/fea2.70008","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144178985","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: 2025-05-07DOI: 10.1002/fea2.70009
Sarah Mozayeni Bosworth
{"title":"The pilot and the flight attendant: Aviation's gendered performance tropes","authors":"Sarah Mozayeni Bosworth","doi":"10.1002/fea2.70009","DOIUrl":"10.1002/fea2.70009","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This paper uses a feminist poststructuralist approach to investigate how gender stereotyping and biases lead to the underrepresentation of women within the more prestigious and better-paid technical and operational sectors of the aviation industry. Sociocultural constructs of ideologies about gendered performances are deeply ingrained in men and women both in the industry and the society they live in; thus, the individual agents as well as the structures are accomplices in maintaining gendered tropes of the pilot and the flight attendant. Focusing the fieldwork on Austria as a non-Anglosphere Western society where aviation does not have a strong history or presence helps to contextualize gender disparity as a phenomenon intrinsic to the global industry. Through in-depth, semi-structured interviews and ethnographic explorations with participants from various sectors of Austrian aviation, added to my own lived experiences as a female pilot, my aim is to open aviation's Black Box to reveal the day-to-day behaviors that create, support, and sustain gender-based inequalities globally beyond the Anglosphere. I emphasize the powerful beliefs about appropriate gendered performances that are both pervasive in society and deeply embedded within the division between operational and customer service occupations, impacting career progression and communicative norms in ways that help reproduce inequalities.</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/fea2.70009","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144178988","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: 2025-04-09DOI: 10.1002/fea2.70001
Max Schnepf
{"title":"Care, and the less of it: Haunted gestures and the affective economy of pharmaceutical HIV prevention","authors":"Max Schnepf","doi":"10.1002/fea2.70001","DOIUrl":"10.1002/fea2.70001","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) is an antiretroviral drug that effectively prevents an HIV infection, which German statutory health insurance has covered since 2019. The drug's use in Germany has (re)surfaced ambivalent emotions: hopes for an HIV/AIDS-free future and sexual liberation rub against enduring worries and moralizations of promiscuity. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Berlin's sexual cultures and prevention landscape, this article engages the affective economy that has emerged concerning PrEP and the hopes, worries, and accusations the drug has incited. To illustrate how the conflicting affects surrounding PrEP use haunt this economy, the article builds from the German notion of <i>Sorglosigkeit</i>/carelessness—a term intentionally straddling the ambivalence between being care<i>less</i> and care<i>free</i>. Sustained by healthcare infrastructures and PrEP users’ practices of self-care, carelessness is not taken to be antithetical to, but operating on the affective terrain of, <i>Sorge</i> (worry, anxiety, concern, care). Ethnographically grounding carelessness in intergenerational hauntings of HIV/AIDS, the article examines gestures as they situate embodied emotions and personal experiences in the course of collective history. Three specific gestures—a sigh, finger-pointing, and palpation—mediate between biographies, bodies, and publics, and trace how carelessness circulates around PrEP.</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/fea2.70001","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144179039","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: 2025-05-23DOI: 10.1002/fea2.70006
Nora Goffre
{"title":"Family matters: Primary gender socialization and gender-based violence in paid domestic work in Bolivia and Peru","authors":"Nora Goffre","doi":"10.1002/fea2.70006","DOIUrl":"10.1002/fea2.70006","url":null,"abstract":"<p>As noted by Heidi Tinsman, in the 1990s, the scientific literature tended to overlook the structuring impact of the working-class gender regime on paid domestic work in the Americas. This tendency has barely been reversed since then. This article, based on an ethnographic study in Bolivia and Peru, closely examines the sexual division of labor, gendered socialization, and gender-based violence dynamics in the birth families of domestic workers in both countries. It reveals striking similarities in the forms of exploitation and violence these women typically face, not only in their birth family but also in their employers’ households and (for those who marry), in their conjugal family—all mutually sustaining each other. Paying particular attention to sexual and gender-based violence, this article proposes a feminist critique of the family as a space of solidarity and protection. It then places these phenomena in a broader context, shaped not only by patriarchal norms but also by racism and class-based oppression. Viewed through this intersectional lens, paid domestic work can be theorized as a regime of gendered and racialized “appropriated labor.”</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/fea2.70006","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144179151","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: 2024-11-11DOI: 10.1002/fea2.12156
Grace H. Zhou
{"title":"(Im)mobile intimacies: Commodities and marriage at the crossroads of Asia","authors":"Grace H. Zhou","doi":"10.1002/fea2.12156","DOIUrl":"10.1002/fea2.12156","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article follows traders and entrepreneurs that live and work between Kyrgyzstan and China's northwestern region of Xinjiang. Looking specifically at Islamic marriage and business partnerships forged between persecuted Uyghurs and their Uzbek partners, it argues that commodity-mediated forms of transnational intimacy create spaces of safety and possibility in the face of political oppression, carceral violence, and gendered limitations. These transnational mobilities are forged in spite of structural immobilities. Taking seriously the imbrications of objects and people, it advances a view of intimacy as a multi-scalar, trans-subjective, and multiply entangled field of relationality.</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/fea2.12156","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144179040","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: 2025-05-08DOI: 10.1002/fea2.70007
Yuliia Mieriemova
{"title":"The time of war and the time of peace on the gendered continuum in Ukraine","authors":"Yuliia Mieriemova","doi":"10.1002/fea2.70007","DOIUrl":"10.1002/fea2.70007","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The article provides an in-depth analysis of how wartime and peacetime are conceptualized by women against the backdrop of war, in what ways these conceptualizations of time are gendered, and what do “the before,” “the during,” and “the after” war mean in this timely Ukrainian context. It offers the discussion of wartime and peacetime as socially constructed concepts, the distinction between which is further problematized through close reading of women's experiences at war. The canvas of “eight years of war” (2014–2022) before the full-scale invasion used by the participants to navigate the reality of in-betweenness war and peace is closely analyzed along with the participants’ perceptions that the peacetime that comes “after the war” would not be identical to the peacetime “before the war.”</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/fea2.70007","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144178989","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}
{"title":"Evaluating care: Anti-Blackness and sexual assault sentencing in Milwaukee, WI","authors":"Sameena Mulla","doi":"10.1002/fea2.12154","DOIUrl":"10.1002/fea2.12154","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article considers how care emerges as an integrated phenomenon that enfolds defendants, victim-witnesses, and their kin in complex ways. Care capacitates forms of racial sorting and resource allocations that manifest within sentencing hearings of persons found guilty of committing sexual offenses, a mode of dysselection as described by Sylvia Wynter. During sentencing hearings, the state asserts its authority to evaluate the inadequacies of the infrastructures of care to which the person being sentenced has access. While Black men are ostensibly the focus of these hearings, their participation in sentencing hearings becomes a portal through which the court scrutinizes Black women and girls who are often proclaimed to be inadequate caretakers. Simultaneously, the state claims that it can provide the care that will result in the rehabilitation of the person being sentenced, while protecting the community from the potential harms of the criminalized subject. The stark contrast between the state's characterizations of Black kinship and care, and the complex, subtle, and creative tactics narrated by Black interlocutors demonstrates the ways in which the state seeks to surveil Black mores of kinship, assign particular categories of worthiness or unworthiness to modes of care, and fix an anti-Black racial hierarchy in place.</p>","PeriodicalId":73022,"journal":{"name":"Feminist anthropology","volume":"5 2","pages":"343-357"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2024-12-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/fea2.12154","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143248221","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}