Paper short abstract:
Short Bio: Kathrine van den Bogert has an MA in Gender & Ethnicity and is PhD-candidate in Cultural Anthropology. She sees feminist and queer ethnography as an opportunity to challenge and open up the academic and intersectional categories (e.g. "Muslim girls") where people find themselves stuck in.
Paper long abstract:
LongBio:
Kathrine van den Bogert has an RMA in Gender and Ethnicity and is currently PhD-candidate in Cultural Anthropology. Her dissertation on Muslim girls who play street football in an urban, working-class, multicultural neighbourhood in the Netherlands is based in interdisciplinary gender studies and feminist and urban anthropology.
Having moved from anthropology to gender studies, and back to anthropology, I have always been asking myself what the specific contributions of feminist and queer ethnography are to both disciplines (Abu-Lughod 1990).
In the Netherlands, anti-racist, feminist, and intersectional scholars take up the task to criticise constructions of Muslim women as "other", structural oppression, homonationalism, etc. However important that work is, for me the real challenge is how to do justice to the daily life experiences of "Muslim" girls and women themselves, without getting them "stuck" in the persisting category of "Muslim women". The experiences of the girls in my research could not only be described in an intersectional way with categories like "Muslim", "girl", "Moroccan-Dutch". Even more important were the categories of "footballer", "winner", and "players" in their daily lives; precisely the domain of feminist ethnography.
Next to feminist and queer ethnography as self-critical and self-reflexive ways of conducting research for social justice; in my perspective feminist and queer ethnography also poses challenges to the (intersectional) categories that are used in gender studies and anthropology, and that not always "do justice" to the rich daily lives of women and men, and girls and boys (see also Valentine 2004; "The categories themselves").