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Thinking about Gendered Binaries, Violence against Women, and the Praxis of Feminist Anthropology
This entry marks our departure as Contributing Editors for the Association for Feminist Anthropology’s (AFA) column in Anthropology News (AN). We write these words as a ritual of closure serving as appointed members of the AFA Executive Board. We also write to reflect on the works we patiently, lovingly, and laboriously shepherded into publication over the past four years and what they reveal about feminist anthropology. As we bid farewell to the AFA column in AN and as we welcome the new contributing editorial duo of Maja Jeranko and Anika Jugović-Spajić to this space, we look back on our tenure to reflect on what feminist anthropologists wrote about our contemporary moment and what this work can tell us about the current state of the field.
As Contributing Editors for the AFA section column in the larger space of AN, we were responsible for publishing content material, such as essays and interviews, that addressed all matters feminist anthropology, from fieldwork to current events, written in a journalistic style that drew from the authors’ scholarly sensibility and expertise. Our experience as Contributing Editors over the past four years taught us that boundaries between different writing themes are often blurry: we published pieces based on fieldwork experiences, innovative research, and current events, as well as pieces that consisted of entries on both current events and hot topics in the profession. We also learned that writing for this space from a sensible, expert feminist position is as varied as the diversity that makes up the community of who we are at AFA. What, then, can this body of work that avoids neat classifications and draws from various feminist positionalities tell us about feminist anthropology today? Put otherwise, what can these pieces convey about what is pressing for our feminist anthropological community?
Problematizing Gendered Binaries
We began our time as AFA AN Contributing Editors in March 2020, coinciding with the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, and are ending our tenure in a (presumably) post-pandemic world. Unsurprisingly, the pandemic’s ramifications became a central concern for the feminist anthropologists writing for this venue. These scholars show how binaries that feminist anthropologists have long problematized, such as productive/reproductive labor, public/private, professional/personal, fell into disarray during this time. Asha Abeyasekera describes how the strict lockdown enforced in Sri Lanka impacted urban middle-class women managing housework and childcare without the reproductive labor of household workers. She shows how the pandemic exacerbated the unequal gendered division of labor, where the reproductive labor necessary to make a family fell disproportionately on women, and where structures and schedules became necessary for these women to draw boundaries between working from home and home work.
In contrast to this experience, Jayne Howell wrote about the experiences of rural teachers in Oaxaca during Mexico’s lockdown, the lack of available resources for children to learn remotely, and the creative and dedicated ways rural teachers found to continue their instruction in these dire circumstances. As we learn how teachers navigate motherhood with their professional roles, Howell sheds light on how the public and private intersect, where women’s productive labor as teachers complements and supports their reproductive labor as mothers. Shiori Sakuto explored the gendered boundaries between work and life in the Japanese context, epitomized in the phrase “work-life balance,” through a creative graphic ethnography of academic researchers conducted during the pandemic. Through this work, Shakuto invites us to focus on how our collective experience of the pandemic may allow us to reflect on how work and life actually intermingle. She proposes we focus on the connections between work and life, understanding these not only as intertwined but also, often productively, as positively influencing each other as entangled domains.
The contestation of gendered binaries reverberates across other pieces, including Megan Steffen’s interview with Nicole Constable, which discusses surveillance and care, specifically the problems created by new biometric passports issued to Indonesian migrant workers by the Indonesian consulate in Hong Kong. Constable shared that in her book, Passport Entanglements, binaries related to passports allowed her to rethink other binaries such as ethnographer/research subject, state/society, care/control, and fake/real, as part of an epistemological approach that intertwines them. In a piece also focused on migration, Shelene Gomes demonstrates how contemporary Jamaican Rastafari spiritual repatriations to Ethiopia simultaneously challenge global racialized disparities while reproducing local gendered hierarchies. She shows that Rastamen in Shashamane disrupted normative gendered behaviors, and thus the breadwinner/homemaker binary, by engaging in housework and childcare out of need. However, Gomes also describes the continued framing of these activities as “women’s work.” Similarly, she discusses how Rastawomen challenged this same gendered binary by engaging in waged work outside the yaad, while perceiving this work as central to their responsibility to care for their families and thus integral to their unwaged work as women, wives, and mothers.
Addressing Gender-Based Violence
Other pieces published throughout our tenure focused on women’s resistance and resilience in the context of gender-based violence. Lucía Stavig explores Runa women’s preference for home birth in Peru, where home birth is legal, but access to it is restricted by criminalizing midwifery. Stavig details examples such as the prohibition of advertisement and offering of midwives’ services and legislation that stipulates prosecution of the midwife if the mother or child die in childbirth. Stavig situates Runa women’s reproductive and obstetric choices within the history of state violence against Indigenous women in Peru. Despite recent significant advances in the field of intercultural health in Peru, she demonstrates how it is still a history marked by racism, classism, and ethnocentrism against Indigenous women in the Peruvian medical establishment.
Considering the legal establishment, Fulya Pinar examines how, to litigate gender-based violence cases successfully, feminist lawyers instrumentalized the rigidity of the civil law system in Turkey to their advantage. Pinar shows that in their work, feminist lawyers had to consider that the legal system in Turkey often operates in the hands of heteronormative law enforcers with patriarchal mindsets who prioritize the protection of the Turkish family and manhood over gender equality. In this context, to successfully defend their clients who had been victims of crimes such as sexual assault and incest, feminist lawyers had to strictly adhere to the language ideology of the legal system in Turkey, which privileges the consistency, authority, and superiority of written laws over verbal arguments and dialogical in-court presentations.
Engaging Feminist Anthropological Praxis
In one way or another, all the pieces we published over the past four years reflect on the praxis of feminist anthropologists, revealing how such praxis often imbricates the personal, professional, ethnographic, theoretical, and political. These publications also reflect the creative worlds women engender and the importance of feminist methods for investigating such worlds. Three pieces in this collection more explicitly explore these questions. Alexandra St. Tellien examines the intersections between abolitionist anthropology and Black feminist thought toward theorizing a Black feminist abolitionist anthropology. St. Tellien posits Black feminist abolitionist anthropology as a collective endeavor, grounded in intersectionality and a love ethic, committed to dismantling institutional racism and sexism. She argues this approach is about challenging and changing internalized beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors that align with oppressive systems of power. She also contends this approach is about institutionally developing anti-racist interventions, policies, ongoing training, and systems of accountability rooted in transformative justice practices. In anthropology departments, St. Tellien argues that engaging with Black feminist abolitionist anthropology means building generative and equitable collaborations with local grassroots organizations, listening to and citing Black voices in and outside academia, and centering the stories and experiences of marginalized and oppressed communities. She also asserts that doing this means decanonizing the anthropological discipline, uprooting racist and discriminatory practices within the university, and doing research that keeps in mind why and for whom anthropologists do the work we do.
In a related piece, Diane L. Slocum reflects on her experiences conducting ethnographic research as part of a collaborative, community-centered archaeological project in Tahcabo, Yucatán, Mexico, from a decolonial feminist standpoint. Her experiences as part of this project led her to ponder how the dress code of archeologists plays an important role in facilitating engagement with collaborators and, simultaneously, in decolonizing fieldwork through a feminist praxis. Slocum shows that paying attention to and allowing for flexibility in dress code enabled her to problematize the constructed strict boundary between “field” and “home.” By problematizing this field/home binary through clothing choices, she contested a patriarchal, colonialist, masculinist, and extractivist understanding of fieldwork, epitomized in the model of the intrepid, lone (male) archaeologist carrying out fieldwork for the sole purpose of gathering information about the past. Simultaneously, it enabled her to move closer to a collaborative research model that centers the concerns of local and Indigenous communities, creates space to form bonds and exchange information with those communities, and provides room for multidirectional knowledge exchange between archaeologists and collaborators.
Finally, through the introduction of AFA Writes, the online writing group for feminist anthropologists, Annie Wilkinson invites us to consider not only how we may conduct fieldwork from a feminist positionality but also how we may actually write in a feminist manner. She acknowledges that while our work as feminist anthropologists frequently demands individual writing tasks, this does not mean we cannot write collectively. She hoped that AFA Writes would again change how we as feminist anthropologists write—by creating opportunities to write in community even while apart, to write together even while writing individually, and by offering chances to give and receive mutual support and mentorship in our collective writing practice. Following Wilkinson, this initiative is situated within a long tradition of feminist anthropological praxis that has, time and time again, changed how we write by theorizing ethnographic representation, innovating ethnographic form, interrogating our writing conditions and practices, and modeling feminist modes of collaborative knowledge production.
Extending an Invitation
As we end this column and our tenure, we would like to echo our sister publication, Feminist Anthropology, in affirming multidisciplinary, heterogenous, and rich perspectives of feminist anthropology that encompass various praxes within anthropology’s range of scientific and humanistic endeavors. During our term, we had the distinct honor of publishing the first piece ever written by an archeologist for this venue. Most of the pieces we published came from cultural anthropologists, which was also the case for our predecessor Contributing Editors. So, as we leave, we would like to invite archeologists, linguistic anthropologists, biological anthropologists, anthropological practitioners, and anthropology teachers, inside and outside of academia, to claim this as your space. We hope to see contributions from all subfields of anthropology here in the future.