pandemic reshapes the intimate experience of birth when clients switch from hospital to home births. An analysis of doulas provides a unique way to think through the complexities surrounding reproduction precisely due to the latter's ability to navigate
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Practising Intimate Labour
Birth Doulas Respond during COVID-19
Angela N. Castañeda and Julie Johnson Searcy
Sue Frohlick, Kristin Lozanski, Amy Speier, and Mimi Sheller
What mobilizes people to take up reproductive options, directions, and trajectories in ways that generate the possibilities and practices of mobilities? People’s desires for procreation or to resolve fertility challenges or partake in sperm donation, egg freezing, or surrogacy; the need for abortion services; and forced evacuation for childbirth care all involve movement. Reproductive aspirations, norms, and regulations move people’s bodies, as well as related technologies and bioproducts. At the same time, these corporeal, material, in/tangible mobilities of bodies, things, and ideas are also generative of reproductive imaginaries and practices. Reproduction is mobile and movement affects reproduction. Building from an interdisciplinary workshop on reproductive mobilities in Kelowna, Canada, this article aims to push the mobilities framework toward the edges of feminist, affect, queer, decolonizing, materialist, and nonrepresentational theories in thinking through both reproduction and movement.
Householding and social reproduction
Comment on Newberry and Rosen
Deborah James
The central premise of this article can hardly be questioned: that the theoretical discussion of reproductive labor is “unfinished.” Whether one calls it unpaid work, unfree labor, care, or social reproduction, the topic seems increasingly to demand
Changes in Attitudes towards Marriage and Reproduction among People with a Genetic Illness
A Study of Patients with Thalassemia in Iran
Sachiko Hosoya
Purpose and Contexts of the Study The recent expansion of the application of genetic medicine to practices in reproduction has led to discussion of this as an ethical issue, in consideration of its impact on reproductive choices. Genetic medicine is
‘But Isn’t It the Baby that Decides When It Will Be Born?’
Temporality and Women’s Embodied Experiences of Giving Birth
Joanna White
structured around values such as efficiency – as well as medical knowledge and technology ( Davies 1990 ; Downe and Dykes 2010 ). Hence Hilary Thomas’s (1992) claim that as the gatekeeper of reproduction, medicine is also its timekeeper. As a result, it
On the Interrelation of Production and Reproduction
The Analytical Contribution of Marxist-feminism
Matthew J. Smetona
Contemporary social and political theorists generally recognise that Marx and Engels’ critical analysis of capitalist society centres on the production of value through the production of things. However, what is often unrecognised in considerations of Marx and Engels is how their analysis is based on the interrelation of production and reproduction. Nevertheless, the implications of this interrelation for feminist critique are explored in the writings of Marx and Engels only tangentially. These implications are developed from Marx’s analysis by Leopoldina Fortunati and Silvia Federici into a singular synthesis of the Marxist and feminist modes of critique. This development deserves greater recognition, and this essay will seek to articulate how the social implications of this interrelation (1) are expressed to a limited extent in the classical texts of Marxism and (2) are developed by Fortunati and Federici into the analytic framework of social reproduction as the core of Marxist-feminist revolutionary struggle.
Tania Murray Li
In this essay I briefly explore three themes I find important for an engaged anthropology of development. First, social reproduction: Anthropologists have a long track record of examining processes of social reproduction—how it is that particular patterns of inequality are actively sustained through practices and relations at multiple scales (Smith 1999).
Morgan Clarke
Anthropological debates on kinship in the Middle East have centred on the 'problems' of patriparallel cousin marriage and milk kinship. A focus on Middle Eastern reactions to assisted reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilisation allows a fresh perspective on the study of kinship in the region. My own research has investigated Islamic legal reactions to assisted reproductive technologies and the practice of assisted reproduction in Lebanon. Islamic legal reaction is diverse, as are the uses made of these techniques by non-specialist Muslims. Considerations of propriety and public reputation remain uppermost, although matters of kinship are debated and new patterns and ideologies of relatedness are potentially emerging.
Women and Children in social reproduction and the global womb
Comment on Newberry and Rosen
Olga Nieuwenhuys
Having worked on children's labor of reproduction from the very beginning of my career as an anthropologist, Jan Newberry and Rachel Rosen's piece, which engages with the complex and thorny issue of “women and children” from a feminist framework
Reproduction, Resistance and Hope
The Promise of Schooling for Boys
Michael C. Reichert and Joseph Nelson
Extended editorial introduction to a double special issue on boys and schooling. Adopting a developmental perspective on boyhood, the editors frame these special issues on boys' education by reviewing research on their experience of schooling. In particular, they endeavor to illuminate boys' agency and opportunities they can find in schools for resistance to restrictive masculine regimes.