Articles and Media

Selected peer-reviewed Articles

Obstetric violence is endemic in Cuba, a highly medicalized society where 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. This contemporary account of obstetric violence in Cuba contributes to calls by abolition feminists to study the obstetric institution in order to refuse and dismantle it, building life-affirming futures for maternity care worldwide. Read the article

June 2022 issue of the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology.

Bastian, H. and Berry, M.J. (2022), Moral Panics, Viral Subjects: Black Women's Bodies on the Line during Cuba's 2020 Pandemic Lockdowns. The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, 27: 16-36.

Moral Panics, Viral Subjects: Black Women's Bodies on the Line

The ethnographic article describes a moral panic during the first summer of the COVID pandemic in Cuba which attempted to obscure class, race, and gender inequalities and structures that have made Black women vulnerable in the aftermath of successive waves of economic reforms. The article is a collaboration with Anthropologist and Performance studies scholar Maya Berry.

Cuban Food Security in a Time of COVID-19

The re-dollarization of the economy and daily life is exacerbating inequalities across different regions of the island. In this article written with Anthropologist Hanna Garth, working in Santiago, Cuba’s second largest city, we examine the impacts of these changes on food insecurity and the everyday labor of household reproduction across the island.