The Argument
Human reproduction is routinely ''assisted'' in infertility clinics, using many of the same techniques of modern biology that inform dominant systems of Western kinship reckoning, such as genetics and evolutionary biology. Paradoxically, in reproductive technology clinics there are both more explicit biological definitions of relatedness, on the one hand, and more precise social definitions of parenthood, on the other, but these are not always complementary. One might expect to find the...
Ideological and Socioeconomic Contexts of Reproductive Labor
Childcare workers' and employers' differential experiences of stratified reproduction are con-textualized, in part, in the complex, shifting, and conflicting ideologies and behaviors surrounding reproductive labor in dominant North American culture since the 1950s. A central strand of 1950s gender ideology, which masked women's waged work KesslerHarris and Sacks 1987 72-4, Ryan 1983 278-80 , continued to be influential in the 1970s and 1980s. It assigned reproductive labor to women, held...
The Complex Nature of Work Culture
In this article, I take the position, following the work of Nina Shapiro-Perl,10 that although a work situation may generate resistance, it may also generate adaptation and consent. The formation of a work culture involves a complex set of relationships between cultural meanings or ideology on the one hand, and behavioral strategies or practice on the other. It also involves both management policies and worker responses to those tactics and strategies. Susan P. Benson and Barbara Melosh have...
From Research to Writing
When I returned to the United States to write about this research, I faced new challenges of navigating scholarly constituencies. One divide of particular concern for my research trajectory was the separation between African studies and African American studies. Historically these have been different worlds.36 Until recently, African American students and scholars of African American studies have been actively discouraged from contributing to African studies. Researchers of European background...
Intergenerational donor egg ivf
case 5 flora Summary Flora will gestate embryos made from her daughter's eggs and sperm from Flora's second husband. Flora will give birth, and her second husband will be the father. Flora's daughter will be the baby's half sister, not its mother. A fifty-one-year-old woman, Flora, came in for treatment. She was perimenopausal and had five grown-up children from a previous marriage. She didn't fit the typical patient profile of the elite, white, postponed-childbearing woman. Flora was Mexican...
Reconfiguring Chicana Feminist Ethnography
To be sure, I will continue to honor some of the norms of Chicano academic discourse, some of which are critical and in some ways parallel the concerns of feminist scholars - such as the importance of activist scholarship. I believe that Chicano scholars, like feminists and others who aim to reconstruct the canon and the structure of the academy, should continue their self-critical reflections on ethical and research dilemmas. In contesting the dominant discourses about women, in this case...
Conclusion Tactical Humanism
The critiques of anthropology that have emerged recently from various quarters have encouraged us to question what we work on, how we write, and for whom we write. I have been arguing that cultural difference, which has been both the ground and product of anthropological discourse, is a problematic construction and have proposed a number of strategies, most already taken up by others, for ''writing against culture.'' I gave examples from my own work of the way in which one strategy -...
The Oedipus Hex
Until the late 1920s, the psychoanalytic movement did not have a distinctive theory of feminine development. Instead, variants of an ''Electra'' complex in women had been proposed, in which female experience was thought to be a mirror image of the Oedipal complex described for males. The boy loved his mother, but gave her up out of fear of the father's threat of castration. The girl, it was thought, loved her father, and gave him up out of fear of maternal vengeance. This formulation assumed...
Abortion Self Vs OtherMutilation
Most rural women answered my query with, ''Yes, the fetus is a person from conception.'' By this they meant that God creates pregnancies and brings babies into being and that at some unspecifiable point during gestation God gives the fetus a soul. Because mortals do not know precisely when this happens, it is better to err on the generous side. Fetuses are ''persons'' from conception, then, because God made them but not because the community yet accepts them as such. The women were equally...
The Search for Origins
The significance of these all too general remarks for anthropology becomes clear when we consider the following observation. Few historians, sociologists, or social philosophers writing today feel called upon - as was common practice in the nineteenth century - to begin their tales ''at the beginning'' and probe the anthropological record for the origins of doctors in shamans or of, say, Catholic ritual in the cannibalism of an imagined past. Where turn-of-the-century thinkers one thinks here...
Fetal Death and the Amorphous Auca
The persistence of faith in the auca is perhaps the best evidence of the inherent ambiguity of the unborn in the rural highlands of Ecuador. The auca has long been a part of Andean ethnography, functioning as a master metaphor for the uncivilized and for several categories of quasi-person. Elsie Clews Parsons reported in 1945 that '' a n infant or anyone dying unbaptized is called auca . . . and becomes a night-wandering spirit.''22 In Quito, said Parsons, any unbaptized person was referred to...
Sanjek And Shellee Colen Ethnologist
Examining the cultural construction of parenting and childcare for West Indian workers and their U.S.-born employers illustrates some of the many ways in which reproduction is stratified. Although parenthood and reproductive labor are central in the lives of both West Indian childcare workers and their employers, they are valued and experienced differently. Both groups are caught in the squeeze of reproduction - both try ''to do the best for'' their children, sharing similar aspirations for...
Daddy daddy you bastard Im through Sylvia Plath
In the course of this essay I have tried to construct a theory of women's oppression by borrowing concepts from anthropology and psychoanalysis. But Levi-Strauss and Freud write within an intellectual tradition produced by a culture in which women are oppressed. The danger in my enterprise is that the sexism in the tradition of which they are a part tends to be dragged in with each borrowing. ''We cannot utter a single destructive proposition which has not already slipped into the form, the...
Plural Identities
I want to pull together the various threads of my argument to reveal how one particular tomboi is situated within these narratives of gender, sexuality, and culture. Many representations of femininity circulate in Indonesia Sears 1996a . In like manner, female subjects who are masculine, erotically attracted to women, or both are represented in many different ways. They are seen as ''deviants'' from the model of mother and wife so central to Indonesian state ideology, as the stereotypic-ally...
Conclusion Bmn
Identity for tombois in West Sumatra at this point in time is a bricolage, a mix of local, national, and transnational identities. If their identity growing up was shaped by local cultural forces that emphasized oppositional genders, their movement between cities and rural areas means that they have been exposed to other models of sexuality and gender identity that they have used to construct a new sense of themselves. The complexities of their gender identity make it impossible to align...
Beginnings
Deliberations, meditations On the subject of anthropology and on the intersection of feminism, black feminism. Suggested frame ''autoethnography,'' interpreted here as an exploration of the intersection of autobiography and anthropological practice. Critical question What are the terms under which one can proceed to address these subjects Through an intimate consideration of both form and content, I explore the topics of anthropology, feminism, black feminism, and autoethnography. It is my...
RacialEthnic and Gender Diversity
After a decade of research on women and wage labor, it is becoming clear that capitalism has specifically recruited workers on the basis of race, and of gender and family relations within specific racial-ethnic communities. But this is part of a historical dialectic whose other pole was the age marital status and gender of those who were ''expendable'' in a particular culture's division of labor - as for example, the contrast between male-centered farming systems in Euroamerica with...
Emergence
As an academic field, feminist anthropology began modestly, with some papers and panels offered at conferences, almost exclusively the work of graduate students and very junior faculty, initially presented with great trepidation. In 1970, for example, Sally Linton later Slocum presented a paper at the American Anthropological Association annual meeting entitled Woman the Gatherer The Male Bias in Anthropology.'' Later published in Rayna Reiter's collection Toward an Anthropology of Women, the...
Conclusion Vgv
I have attempted to show that a Foucauldian notion of power as force relations is not incompatible with an interpretative anthropology sensitive to the ''deep play'' of subjectivity. Departing from the premise that the Dirty Protest was a violent contest of power, I have tried to elucidate the dynamics that organized it in that form and not others, as well as its social and political consequences in a shared universe of meaning. I have conceptualized the feces and blood characterizing the...
Lynn M Morgan
Fetal personhood is not a property that can or will be discovered with greater scientific knowledge or increased technological capabilities, but is produced in and through the very practices that claim merely to reveal it. Valerie Hartouni, ''Fetal Exposures Abortion Politics and the Optics of Allusion,'' Fetuses are rapidly being granted the status of cultural icons, present not only in the industrialized West but also as actors on the international reproductive rights scene.1 It is useful,...
Practical Metaphysics and the Dynamics of Naturalizing
It has become commonplace to talk of the implosion or collapse of nature and culture to claim that all concepts of nature, including scientific ones, are always already shaped, marked, and interpenetrated with the imprimatur of culture, and somewhat less frequently that all concepts of culture invoke legitimizing natural grounds for their systems of classification. Critics of these postmodern sensibilities rightly distrust the looseness or voluntarism that this seems to imply. Onto-logically,...
Multiplicitous Subjectivities
Analyzing the parts of the odo ''I am a gold coin,'' we first find an identification with gold. By inserting this adjective, women indicate that they consider themselves inherently worthy and valuable, which is symbolized by the allusion to the most desirable, durable, and precious good available in Surinamese society. Furthermore, gold is wanted to adorn and placate instantiations of the multiplicitous self as it is envisioned within the framework of the Afro-Surinamese Winti folk religion....
Performing Masculinity
Tombois model masculinity in their behavior, attitudes, interests, and desires. Dayan often spoke of being berani brave , a trait commonly associated with men, as an important part of who s he was. S he attributed the ability to be a tomboi to being berani it meant, among other things, that one could withstand family pressures to get married. S he said the ones that are berani become cowok. In talking about Agus's situation with hir lover Yul, Dayan commented that Agus was not brave enough to...
Motherhood and the Body
The early interest of feminist anthropologists in women's reproductive health has expanded in recent years into a diverse field allied variously with medical and applied anthropology. Perhaps the most contentious issue currently under discussion is the set of practices known by terms such as female circumcision'' and female genital mutilation,'' depending on one's position. Some feminist anthropologists have been active in campaigns to eradicate these procedures, viewing them as serious public...
West Indian Caregivers Perspectives on their Work
For West Indian women, paid childcare work entailed complex and contradictory experiences. They generally valued childcare activity, were proud of their knowledge and skills, and were comfortable caring for children. However, inadequate pay, the lack of health, pension, and other benefits, and the lack of respect from employers offended them. Workers expected respect from parents who entrusted them with children. Yet every worker including those with the ''best'' employers related incidents in...
Mermaids and the Wild
The wild for the male Bakweri is particularly well differentiated, because of the many striking forms in which it expresses itself. This people occupies the southeastern face of the 13,000 foot Cameroon Mountain, on the West African coast of Cameroon - an environment of romantic contrasts. The mountain rises straight from a rocky sea coast through zones of forest, grass, and bare lava to the active volcanic craters of the peak. The Bak-weri proper occupy the forest, and hunt in the grass zones....
Why is Woman Seen as Closer to Nature
It all begins of course with the body and the natural procreative functions specific to women alone. We can sort out for discussion three levels at which this absolute physiological fact has significance 1 woman's body and its functions, more involved more of the time with ''species life,'' seem to place her closer to nature, in contrast to man's physiology, which frees him more completely to take up the projects of culture 2 woman's body and its functions place her in social roles that in turn...
Humiliation and Violence The Deep Play of Subjectivity
Feces are a primordial symbol of revulsion as well as a primary mechanism for aggression and the assertion of will to power. As we know from Freud, they become especially significant in childhood during the period of sphincter training, an early systematic discipline applied on the body and a crucial step in socialization. The disciplines and ritual punishments enacted in jail were deliberately aimed at socializing the prisoners into the new social order of the prison. To that end the identity...
Womens Work Culture in the Context of Building a Loyal Work Force
In plant A, an electronics plant, women workers place components on boards as part of the assembly of electronically regulated thermo stats. In a work force that is predominantly female, and with a substantial proportion of Hispanics, informal activities such as potlucks and birthday parties not only help to bridge ethnic differences, but also fit in well with management's attempt to build a loyal work force in the context of a philosophy of participation. In this plant, unique in the whole...
On the Diverse Experiences and Meanings of Motherhood
A majority of women in CO-MADRES are mothers. While these women share the biological experience of giving birth and or adoption and a general socialization of what it means to be a Salvadoran mother, this by no means ensures that they joined CO-MADRES with uniform interpretations about what motherhood meant. The diversity of class and occupational sectors represented and the varied political experiences of women when they joined CO-MADRES ensured a variety of perspectives on motherhood. Once...
Womens Work Culture in Support of a Union
''Humanizing the work place'' can, of course, be incorporated into a union's program and become part of building strong relations among workers in the context of union membership. This happened to some extent in the apparel plant where I worked in New England, but the possibilities for union use of women's informal celebrations to build stronger ties among workers is best illustrated in one of the unionized plants we studied. In this case, plant C, which produces jet engine parts, the union -...
Lynn Stephen
Women are the backbone of a wide range of social movements in Latin America, including rural and urban movements for improved living conditions, student movements, feminist movements, and movements for human rights, land reclamations, relatives of the disappeared, labor unions, abortion and reproductive rights, democratization of political systems, and more Saporta Sternbach et al. 1992 . Self-labeling by movement activists has resulted in the division of women's movements into feminist...
Employers Perspectives on Caregivers
Employers depended on caregivers to take responsibility for children for eight to twenty-four hours a day and to stabilize and make possible their busy lives. They acknowledged that ''your life depends on your childcare person.'' One mother who employed a valued caregiver since her son's birth said, ''I want her to stay at least until my son goes to college.'' I concentrate here on employers' conceptualizations of childcare, the qualities sought in workers, notions of appropriate age-specific...
DomesticPublic as Explanation
A common feminist response to the facts that I have outlined here has been, essentially, to deny their weight and argue that the evidence we have itself reflects male bias. By focusing on women's lives, researchers have begun to reinterpret more conventional accounts and school us to be sensitive to female values, goals, and strengths. If formal authority is not something women enjoy, so this research claims, we ought to learn to understand informal female powers if women operate in...
How are Gender Class and Racial Oppression Related
When early North American second-wave feminists first claimed ''the personal is political,'' they probably did not realize the theoretical depth and breadth that later theorists would discover in so simple a slogan. Initially, ''the personal'' meant the politics of experience, of interpersonal and sexual relations with men, but it was not long before it expanded to encompass lesbian sexualities, reproductive rights, heterosexism, ''private'' violence against women and public complicity in...
Man Mouse Ape and Water Spirit
According to a story of the Bakweri of Cameroon in a male recension 'Moto, Ewaki, Eto, and Mojili were always quarrelling and agreed to decide by a test which of them was to remain in the town and which should go into the bush. All were to light fires in their houses in the morning and the person whose fire was still burning on their return from the farms in the evening was to be the favoured one. Moto being more cunning than the others built a fire with big sticks properly arranged, whereas...
Conclusion Who Speaks
Soon after the opening of the film Warrior Marks 1993 , an op-ed piece appeared in the New York Times written by two African professional women, Seble Dawit and Salem Mekuria, with the named support of six others, all of whom oppose and have been working to abolish female genital operations. They wrote, We take great exception to the recent Western focus on female genital mutilation in Africa, most notably by the author Alice Walker. Ms. Walker's new film ''Warrior Marks'' portrays an African...
Introduction Feminist Anthropology A Reader
Feminist anthropology first burst onto the scene only about 30 years ago, in the early to mid-1970s. Along with similar efforts taking hold throughout the academy in this period, it was inspired and shaped by the women's liberation movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, with scholar-activists asking questions that they thought might help them to formulate strategies for addressing persistent social injustices. Departing from anthropological conventions of the time, their concern was not...
Michelle Z Rosaldo
This is an article about questions. Feminists have managed, in recent years, to impress a matter of undeniable importance on both academic and popular audiences alike. Previously blinded by bias, we have begun a discovery of women and have reported a good deal of data on women's lives, needs, and interests that earlier scholars ignored. Sexist traditions have, of course, made our records uneven. Now more than ever we see just how little is known about women. And the urgency experienced by...
Foremothers and Other Genealogies
Feminist anthropology may be said to have its roots in the work of a number of earlier scholars, including many who would have been surprised to know that their writings had inspired this particular disciplinary turn. Who may be counted as ancestors varies, of course, but I would argue that they should include both stylistic and intellectual predecessors, as well as individuals whose professional contributions stood as beacons to women anthropologists who followed after them. There were...
Theorizing SameGender Sexual Behavior CrossCulturally
Finally, what does all of this mean in light of our ongoing efforts to theorize same-gender sexual behavior cross-culturally First of all, I hope to have made a case for the critical investigation and bracketing of the concept ''homosexual identity.'' The deeply essentialist strand it often unwittingly introduces hampers rather than facilitates our understanding of the behavior we are trying to understand cross-culturally. In the second place, emic constructions and explanations of same-gender...
Substance vs Genes
Most people are used to thinking of there being just two biological parents who both donate genetic material what is termed a bilateral or cognatic kinship pattern is inscribed in the understanding of biogenetics. A baby is the product of the fusion of the mother's and father's genetic material. Kin are divided into blood relations and non-blood-relations, and it is usually assumed that blood relations share biological substance with one another in a manner that simply reflects the genetic...
Nature and Culture
How are we to explain the universal devaluation of women We could of course rest the case on biological determinism. There is something genetically inherent in the male of the species, so the biological determinists would argue, that makes them the naturally dominant sex that ''something'' is lacking in females, and as a result women are not only naturally subordinate but in general quite satisfied with their position, since it affords them protection and the opportunity to maximize maternal...
Contents
Part I Discovering Women across Cultures 39 1 Belief and the Problem of Women and the 'Problem' Revisited 47 2 A Note on the Division of Labor by Sex 66 3 Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture 72 4 The Traffic in Women Notes on the Political Economy'' of Sex 87 5 The Use and Abuse of Anthropology Reflections on Feminism and Cross-cultural Understanding 107 6 Toward a Unified Theory of Class, Race, and Gender Part II Questioning Positionality 147 7 Writing against Culture 153 8 My Best...
Part V Interpreting Instability and Fluidity
19 Like a Mother to Them'' Stratified Reproduction and West Indian Childcare Workers and Employers in New York 380 20 Femininity and Flexible Labor Fashioning Class through Gender on the Global Assembly Line 397 21 Tombois in West Sumatra Constructing Masculinity 22 What's Identity Got to Do with It '' Rethinking Identity in Light of the Mati Work in Suriname 435
Charis Thompson
What might California infertility clinics in the 1990s reveal about contemporary kinship This essay raises that question by going inside clinics and analyzing the work done during gestational surrogacy and egg donation to establish and disambiguate kin relations. Patients, practitioners, and third-party reproducers egg and sperm donors and surrogates , with the help of medical techniques, lab standards, body parts, psychological screening, and rapidly evolving laws, all take on part of this...
Gestational surrogacy where the surrogate is a family member
case 3 rachel, kay, and michael Summary Rachel will gestate embryos made from Kay's eggs and sperm from Kay's husband, Michael. Rachel will give birth, but Kay and Michael will be the parents. In addition, Rachel is Michael's sister. Michael and Kay had a history of long-term infertility, including two unsuccessful attempts to get pregnant with ivf. They decided to maximize their chances on one last attempt at ivf by using a gestational surrogate, Michael's sister, Rachel. Rachel was referred...
Women Unite to Off the Oedipal Residue of Culture
The precision of the fit between Freud and Levi-Strauss is striking. Kinship systems require a division of the sexes. The Oedipal phase divides the sexes. Kinship systems include sets of rules governing sexuality. The Oedipal crisis is the assimilation of these rules and taboos. Compulsory heterosexuality is the product of kinship. The Oedipal phase constitutes heterosexual desire. Kinship rests on a radical difference between the rights of men and women. The Oedipal complex confers male rights...
Learning from Kids about Race Consumption and the Question of Queer
This paper moves at once outward to corporate and cultural politics and inward to children's personal territories. This dual focus serves first to stress the relationship between commodities and consumers, a relationship that has been somewhat neglected until recently in anthropology Miller 1995 . This approach also engages recent work on identity that emphasizes it as a process that is flexible, dynamic, and multifaceted.1 The relationship between commodities and consumers is particularly...
Resisting Normalization
With the escalation of the political crisis that followed the riots of 1969 in Northern Ireland, large numbers of people in the working class Catholic communities of Belfast were arrested. Most of them were accused of crimes against the state, a general label that included a wide variety of actions ranging from the wearing of combat jackets to participation in demonstrations to the use of firearms. After a hunger strike in 1972, the British government agreed to give the prisoners ''special...