Abstract The emotional experiences of incarceration are directly tied to state-sanctioned gendered violence. Most incarcerated women have a history of trauma, stemming directly from broader socio-political and economic forces, which is further rendered throughout the incarceration and reentry process. The carceral system in the United States disrupts family and social support systems, fails to provide accessible and adequate mental health and substance use services, and denies stabilization resources such as housing, employment, and citizenry for women once released from prison, yet their emot ..read more

Abstract Changing discourses and laws related to women's rights and intimate partner violence (IPV) in rural Ecuador have profoundly reshaped how local women experience and respond to violence. Women once understood violence as one strand of social suffering embedded in everyday rural life, and they resisted and managed this violence through various collective idioms of distress. Over the last two decades, however, state and non-governmental organization (NGO) campaigns have isolated gender violence as a discrete phenomenon, emphasizing the “wrongness” of IPV, the validity of righteous anger ..read more

Abstract In South Africa, a disparate coalition of law enforcement, human rights workers, health officials, and activists claim that women don't know they have been raped. Claims of misrecognition typically follow from the observation that most women who experience gendered violence in South Africa do not report to the police and are especially leveled at Black women living in rural areas under the judicial authority of customary leaders. This article examines this assertion about not knowing gendered violence and the interventions it inspired. Dwelling on the story of one survivor's search fo ..read more

Abstract Obstetric violence is endemic in Cuba, a highly medicalized society where the obstetrics institution is unquestioned and, in the afterlives of Atlantic slavery and US occupation and intervention, emotions of fear and gratitude work to normalize obstetric violence and control birthing bodies for the state. I draw on ethnographic observations, birth stories, and experiences as a patient to examine how birthing people, providers, and the Revolutionary state negotiate care and responsibility for health. I describe three fears: the fear of failure to protect maternal-infant health (and its ..read more

Abstract This piece weaves together the voices of four feminist disability studies scholars and anthropologists whose work has been profoundly shaped by Russia's war of aggression. Composed via a dialogic encounter, it is based on a panel presentation on the topic of disability studies in war and care that took place at the University of Massachusetts Amherst just before the 1-year mark of the full-scale invasion. We came together to share insights and consider the best ways to practice horizontal solidarity, our approach inspired by recent work on feminist epistemology and methodology and sch ..read more

Abstract In the summer of 2020, shocking headlines reverberated across global media outlets, revealing harrowing stories of forced sterilizations and reproductive abuses committed against Uighurs in China and immigrant women in the United States. The simultaneity of these events sheds light on essential aspects of a transnational order characterized by mass surveillance and detention, a defining feature of diverse contemporary political regimes. This article explores how reproductive violence intertwines with systems of detention and mass surveillance through these two cases. I do so by weavin ..read more

Feminist Anthropology, Volume 4, Issue 2, Page 133-135, November 2023 ..read more

Abstract After a 35-year-long constitutional ban on abortion, the Eighth Amendment was repealed in May 2018 and the Health (Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy) Act 2018 was introduced in the Republic of Ireland. Although “Repeal” and the legalization of abortion marked a significant transformation in reproductive governance, many aspects of the new abortion policy continue to complicate abortion care access and provision. In this article, I explore the mobilizations of health and rights in political discourses on abortion after legalization. In doing so, I identify how moral governance ope ..read more

Abstract Gender affirming care for youth is currently under political attack across the United States. Critics of affirming care often leverage a biological and fixed notion of gender as assigned at birth, which is at odds with how gender has been theorized academically for decades. Yet for some feminist clinicians, the popularized version of SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION present within rhetoric about the purpose of affirmative intervention also seems to undercut the legitimacy of care. In this article, I track how the difficult problems of the origins of gender itself, problems seemingly exposed by the ..read more

Abstract In dialogue with the rich scholarship on affect and the role of emotions in feminist knowledge production, this article explores how compassion is mobilized by activists in the struggle for reproductive justice. The author centers emotional knowledge by drawing on conversations with a reproductive justice advocate in central Florida, the musical anthem of Viva Ruíz and the Thank God for Abortion Collective, and her own personal experience with pregnancy loss. This includes a discussion of the ways that coloniality persists in the racialized and gendered landscape of reproductive polit ..read more