Anthropology of the Body

A sociocultural anthropologist, Angela Leocata is a Lecturer and First-Generation Outreach Liaison in the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies at Harvard University. Her work examines the embodied experience of gendered labor and inequality, bringing labor theory to bear on questions of gender, the body, and care. Her current book project traces migration between Massachusetts, United States, and Minas Gerais, Brazil, to explore how migrant mothers navigate lives shaped by underemployment and generational immobility. Drawing on twenty-four months of ethnographic fieldwork across both regions, the book investigates how migration from Brazil's emigrant interior is intimately shaped by intergenerational experiences of gendered labor and inherited forms of racialized subemprego (underemployment). It considers how underemployment is lived not merely as a labor condition but as a gendered, generational, and deeply embodied experience, particularly among women who navigate its bodily injuries, emotional weight, and social devaluation. Prior to this project, Leocata conducted ethnographic research on maternal depression and experience in the Lusophone context of Goa, India. She received a PhD in anthropology from Stanford University, where she was a Fulbright-Hays Fellow, and an AB, summa cum laude, in anthropology from Harvard University.