Atheist zonder missie

Column, uitgesproken bij de presentatie van Ceylan Pektas-Weber: Moslima’s. Emancipatie achter de dijken (Bulaaq 2006) in de Balie, Amsterdam 5 maart 2006. Gepubliceerd in Waterstof. Nieuwsbrief van Waterland nr. 13, april 2006

Narrative Accounts of Origins

This article uses a study of the life-story narratives of former classmates of Dutch and Moluccan descent to argue that the constructionist approach to intersectionality, with its account of identity as a narrative construction rather than a practice of naming, offers better tools for answering questions concerning intersectional identity formation than a more systemic intersectional approach. The case study also highlights the importance of the quest for origins in narratives. It demonstrates that theories of intersectionality are not justified in subsuming the issue of belonging under the identity marker of ethnicity, when all identities are performatively produced in and through narrative enactments that include the precarious achievement of belonging. The case study demonstrates that if narrative accounts of a (singular or collective) life fail to achieve narrative closure regarding roots, attempts to trace routes are seriously hampered

Mothers and Muslima's, Sisters and Sojourners;The Contested Boundaries of Feminist Citizenship

In the early 1990’s, many feminist philosophers found that the practice of the women´s movement as well as those of other new social movements, could be articulated most adequately in terms of citizenship. The classical political vocabulary of citizenship seemed to offer a viable alternative to the vocabularies that until then had been dominant in feminist political theory: the individualistic, rights-oriented discourse of liberalism, and the structuralist, interest-oriented perspectives of socialism and marxism