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Paper short abstract

This paper explores ethnographic refusal as epistemologically significant framework in European semi-periphery. Based on ethnographic research in Croatia, it focuses on representational polarisation and argues for ethnographic practice grounded in contradictions and polyvocal modes of knowledge.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores ethnographic refusal as a site of epistemological insight within queer feminist ethnography. Situating my research in the post-transitional European semi-periphery, marked by conceptual and temporal disjuncture in non-Western gender-transformative mobilization, I reflect on a double tension and the practice of refusal surrounding my ethnographic work on queer and gender futurities in Zagreb.

Ethnographic refusal emerged when certain activist interlocutors declined participation after encountering the term queer. Their hesitation and often polarizing reaction to the term was less a rejection of the term's political potential than a critique of its perceived foreignness and its role in academic knowledge production. Concerns centered on how their practices and identities might be represented, extracted, or misread within scholarly discourse. This response pointed to a deeper concern with ontological colonialism as the imposition of conceptual categories over context-specific meanings.

This epistemic unease was also reflected in the Croatian feminist landscape, which, while not hostile to queer or trans* frameworks, lacks established theoretical engagement with them. At the same time, academic emphasis on identity-based authority often narrows the space for ethnographic research, allowing reductions to persist through absence and silence.

These layered dynamics pose deeper questions about the ethics of representation, the circulation of feminist and queer knowledge, and the limits of translation across conceptual, regional and political contexts. By foregrounding the significance of both being refused and navigating partial legibility within academic spaces, I argue for a queer feminist ethnography attuned to contradiction, opacity and the right (not) to be fully known.