Dana‐Ain Davis

• Professor at Queens College, CUNY

This chapter centers voices that are traditionally excluded from the anthropological canon in order to read a feminist praxis back into anthropology’s feminist theory and methodology. The authors excavate key debates and practices that yield insight into the liberatory potentiality of feminist anthropology. First, they explore questions around gend...

In this article, we examine the citational practices of US medical anthropology and seek to decenter Western-centric theory to minimize its theoretical dominance in the field. We call for a robust engagement with a broader variety of texts, genres of evidence, methodologies, and interdisciplinary forms of expertise and epistemology in response to t...

Purpose: We undertook a study to assess whether presence of community support persons (CSPs), with no hospital affiliation or alignment, mitigates acts of obstetric racism during hospitalization for labor, birth, and immediate postpartum care. Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional cohort study, measuring 3 domains of obstetric racism as define...

Pregnant people are more likely to die in childbirth today than was true a generation ago. This is particularly concerning given the recent Supreme Court decision overturning Roe that will mean more people are forced to carry pregnancies to term. Despite growing national attention on racist perinatal health disparities in the United States, little...

Optimizing postpartum care highlights the need for care coordination, enhancement, and expansion of health care services after childbirth. Yet the prioritization of disease surveillance, management, and mitigation during birth and beyond within the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology facilitates the medicalization and pathologization of B...

Background: Perinatal quality improvement lacks valid tools to measure adverse hospital experiences disproportionately impacting Black mothers and birthing people. Measuring and mitigating harm requires using a framework that centers the lived experiences of Black birthing people in evaluating inequitable care, namely, obstetric racism. We sought...

Research Objective To facilitate community participation in prioritizing perinatal improvement (QI) recommendations across six theorized domains of the Patient Reported Experience Measure of Obstetric Racism© (PREM-OB Scale™) to mitigate obstetric racism during hospital-based labor and birth. TABLE 1. Top Two Perinatal QI Recommendations by Domains...

Is feminist ethnography an epistemological perspective, a particular constellation of methods, a writing style, a commitment to social justice, or activist‐scholarship – or a combination of all of these? Attempts to define feminist ethnography reveal there is no one single definition. What is also clear is that in defining feminist ethnography one...

Black women bear the burden of a number of crises related to reproduction. Historically, their reproduction has been governed in relation to the slave economy, and connected to this, they have been experimented upon and subjected to exploitative medical interventions and policies. Even now, they are more likely to experience premature births and mo...

For decades, sociologists and anthropologists have been at the forefront of theorizing and empirically documenting how racism negatively affects the health and well-being of socially marginalized racial groups in the United States (e.g., Bridges 2011; Gravlee and Sweet 2008; Williams and Sternthal 2010). By contrast, most public health researchers’...

The first part of this book has emphasized birth stories told by Black women and two Black men. These have frequently been angst-filled narratives, often soldered with histories and interpretations of racial stereotyping and the experience of racism. Up to this point the chapters have interrogated premature birthing experiences from the vantage poi...

This chapter examines the definitions of prematurity over time and specifically explores how racial science has been used to animate the definitions and etiology, or causes, of premature birth. This chapter focuses on the birth stories of four women, who gave birth prematurely in different centuries, between the nineteenth century and the present,...

The premature birth rate in the United States has been persistently high among Black women for many decades. While most research on the topic of premature birth involves poor and low-income women, this book focuses on the experiences of more affluent women to show that race is as much a common denominator as class in adverse birth outcomes. Using t...

Having examined the history of prematurity, Black women’s experiences of pregnancy, labor, and birthing, and their assessments of medical racism, this chapter gestures toward some approaches to address Black women’s high rates of prematurity. These approaches may also be applied to rates of infant and maternal mortality, as well as to addressing th...

This chapter illustrates the connection between racialist thinking of the past and Black women’s contemporary medical encounters. It addresses the various ways in which medical racism is asserted when the care of Black women and their children is compromised due to racist concepts such as obstetric hardiness, hardy babies, and mothers’ being viewed...

This chapter offers ethnographic insight into the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), a space that is largely inaccessible to the general population. The chapter describes the physical space of the NICU. Parents reveal how they felt about having their newborn infants admitted to the NICU and the varying degrees of racism that saturated the experie...

In the nineteenth century, the United States began to address its embarrassingly high rates of infant and maternal mortality, and later premature birth rates, in earnest. Those efforts have often been racially disparate. Using a critical racial lens, this chapter explores the uneven racial outcomes of the technologies of saving, or strategies used...

The interventions used to address premature birth do not address the issue of medical racism. Moreover, interventions are not preventive. This chapter focuses on the role that radical Black birth workers, including doulas, midwives, and reproductive justice advocates, play in addressing Black women’s adverse birth outcomes. Radical birth workers at...

Administrators working within the public health approach to health issues generate information used to mobilize against a particular plight. The March of Dimes, which from its founding has developed public education campaigns to address child-related health issues such as polio and German measles, is no different. This chapter chronicles the organi...

In this article, I analyze the birth stories of Black women living in the United States. Their birth stories describe various forms of racism during medical encounters while they were pregnant or during labor and delivery. In the global women’s health arena, the issues raised are viewed as obstetric violence. However, obstetric racism—as both an oc...

This essay is based on comments for the panel Sorrow as Artifact: Black Radical Mothering in Times of Terror. Historically, Black mothers have faced the loss of their children in a myriad of ways, through enslavement, infant mortality, and police and state sanctioned violence. The normalizations of these losses are violent in and of themselves. In...

This article looks at how dominant feminist narratives regarding the expansion of women's political rights is limited by their inattention to issues of race, sexuality, class and other variables that limit women's freedom. The authors argue that rhetorical claims about "gender progress" mask very significant differences among various sub-groups of...

We stumble, gracefully, out of the blue-black club light. Walls painted with black acoustic tile and heavy velvet blackout curtains have cocooned our nascent comings, goings, and carryings on. “We are exhausted. [And] afraid of the passion that briefly consoles us.”1 Much has happened as time stood still—while we conjured moments of rapturous faggo...

:In the wake of neoliberalism, where human rights and social justice have increasingly been subordinated to proliferating "consumer choices" and ideals of market justice, this article suggests that feminist ethnographers are in an important position to reassert the central feminist connections among theory, method, and practice. It draws on experie...

Neoliberal values and ideology, which have broadly undermined social justice ideals, have been inserted into a range of public spheres both in the U.S.A. and internationally. Public higher education institutions have increasingly acquiesced to neoliberal strategies, which restrict access to public services, commodify the public sphere and challenge...

On January 26, 2009, Nadya Suleman gave birth to the nation's second set of octuplets. Over the course of 30 days Ms. Suleman became the subject of outrage and outrageous representations over her choice to have in vitro fertilization since she already had six children. Embedded in Suleman's public construction and representations are subtle transcr...

Intimate partner violence (IPV) theory often locates violence equitably between women and men. Women, however, sustain greater degrees of injury than men and often use violence as a measure of protection rather than as an act of aggression. Yet measures of protection must be viewed in multiple contexts. In this case, the context is poverty, which r...

This article explores the shifting nature of racism in the context of neoliberalism. The concept of muted racism and racializing is the lens through which welfare reform policy is viewed to illustrate the practices and processes of new forms of racism, the impact of welfare reform policy and examples from welfare reform research are viewed through...

This timely and compelling ethnography examines the impact of welfare reform on women seeking to escape domestic violence. Dána-Ain Davis profiles twenty-two women, thirteen of whom are Black, living in a battered women's shelter in a small city in upstate New York. She explores the contradictions between welfare reform's supposed success in moving...

The impact of economic restructuring from industry to service that began in the 1970s continues to leak across cities in the United States. One outcome of restructuring has been the targeted focus of corporate interests in realizing profits. To that end, corporations have become increasingly engaged in policy issues, specifically decreased wages an...

Debates continue regarding the efficacy of politically engaged anthropology, but when research agendas address issues of inequity, there is a responsibility to use the information in the service of social change. This article narrates the connection between practice and academics to illustrate what is encompassed in a politically engaged anthropolo...