Feminist Ethnography: Thinking Through Methodologies, Challenges, and Possibilities by Dána-Ain Davis and Christa Craven (review)

Dána-Ain Davis and Christa Craven, feminist anthropologists and coeditors of the anthology Feminist Activist Ethnography: Counterpoints to Neoliberalism in North America (2013), collaborated to produce a valuable resource for those who want to learn about or conduct feminist ethnographic research. The intersectional and transnational feminist textbook is organized into eight chapters that introduce readers to key concepts, methods, and histories of interdisciplinary feminist knowledge production in predominantly, though not exclusively, North American universities. Each chapter addresses a different aspect of feminist ethnography, which the authors describe as

1. Involv[ing] a feminist sensibility and commitment to paying attention to marginality and power differentials; these include not only gender, but also race, class nation, sexuality, and other areas of difference, 2. Draw[ing] inspiration from feminist scholarship . . . 3. Challeng[ing] marginalization and injustice, 4. Acknowledg[ing] and reflect[ing] upon power relations within the research context, and 5. Aim[ing] to produce scholarship—in both traditional and experimental forms—that may contribute to movement building and/or be in the service of organizations, people, communities, and issues we study.

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The chapters open with guiding questions about the content and include sections Davis and Craven call "Spotlights" (showcasing the work of a wide range of feminist scholars), "Essentials" (excerpts from influential texts), and "Thinking Through" (suggested activities).

This review is shaped by my experience teaching from Feminist Ethnography in "ANTH 270: Anthropology of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality," a lower-division general education course that is cross-listed with women's and gender studies (WGS) and counts towards our undergraduate Queer Studies Certificate. At the beginning of the semester, most students in the ninety-person class have no background in anthropology and have likewise never been exposed to feminist inquiry or discussions about feminist topics or social movements. The units of the course are 1) introduction to anthropology, 2) introduction to the social construction of sex, gender, and sexuality, 3) ethnographies of sex, gender, and sexuality, and 4) feminist anthropology. I designed the course in a way that layers information for students. For instance, by the time we get to the final unit, they have already learned about different kinds of feminism, been introduced to new terminology (e.g., androcentrism, heteropatriarchy, imperialism), read sections from feminist ethnographies, conducted basic intersectional analyses, and practiced reflexivity specifically by considering positionality and knowledge production.

Feminist Ethnography became the students' guide for the unit on feminist anthropology, which I crafted in relationship to the issues raised in recent years by The Movement for Black Lives. The textbook replaced a range of readings and films that focused on Black feminist frameworks, recounted different histories of feminist anthropology, and exposed students to feminist activist ethnography. I was pleasantly surprised to find that most of what I have been teaching is mentioned or excerpted in Feminist Ethnography, from canonical feminist texts like This Bridge Called My Back: Writings By Radical Women of Color (1983) and The Combahee River Collective's "A Black Feminist Statement" (1986) to lesser-known sources in my area of expertise, like the documentary Poto Mitan: Haitian Women Pillars of the Global Economy (2009). I still included these materials in their entirety on the syllabus, and the textbook provided a helpful contextual framing for students to understand their importance.

Davis and Craven's descriptions of feminist activist ethnography were given greater depth and texture by an honors student presentation in ANTH 270 about one of the activist scholars highlighted in the textbook, Gina Athena Ulysse.¹ Her Downtown Ladies: Informal Commercial Importers, A Haitian Anthropologist, and Self-Making in Jamaica (2007) is excerpted in chapter 6: "Producing Feminist Ethnography" (134–35). The honors student screened a clip from Ulysse's multilingual and multimodal performance "Untapped Fierceness/My Giant Leaps" (2013), provided a summary of her academic publications, and showcased Ulysse's work as a public intellectual to creatively intervene in dominant discourses...