Rachel Spronk, University of Amsterdam

Expertise

gender and sexuality
love and intimacy
personhood and agency
modernity and globalization
African middle-classes and cosmopolitanism
Ghana, Kenya

This site provides you with an overview of my academic activities. I am trained as an anthropologist and doing interdisciplinary research on culture, gender and sexuality. I work at the intersection of three scholarly fields - anthropology, gender and sexuality studies, and African studies. I have undertaken ethnographic research on the love and sexual relationships of young professionals in Nairobi, Kenya. In my current research I focus on shifts in the practices and imagination of intimacy and how these relate to the notion of modern personhood, from an intergenerational perspective, for which I study family histories in Ghana. I have been awarded with a NWO VENI grant for the research project "Transformations in intimacy. Sexuality and modern personhood among middle-class Ghanaians from 1940 to the present".

Deconstructing representations of gender and sexuality, especially the western pre-occupation with 'African sexuality' and how this continues to colour much research, is a main motivation of my research. I take up sexuality as a prism to study social transformations and how these generate new subjectivities. I work out the complexities of sexuality and culture by focussing on public debates about sexuality and culture on the one hand, and personal sexual relationships, intimacy and self-perceptions on the other. My work is part of a small but developing field of research on sexuality that seeks to correct the hegemonic trend of simplifying sex in Africa and consequently de-erotising it to an act devoid of meaning. Reflecting on current sexuality research in Africa has helped me to rethink how to study the experience of sexuality, rather than only focussing on how power relations frame sexuality.

The dominant constructionist approach in gender & sexuality studies and African Studies aims to study sexuality and identity as discursive practice and to show how subjectivity is the outcome of discursive practices. However, it tends to neglect the bodily, experiential and sensory qualities of life due to its pre-occupation with unveiling power relations and cultural patterns. Using a variety of theoretical perspectives, I am working on how to study sexuality and identity as mediators and shapers of social knowledge. In other words, complementary to the Foucauldian approach which emphasizes the self as an effect of subjectivation, we need to incorporate an analysis of the self by including the experiential aspect of being, which is constituted through theinteraction between bodily experience and cultural milieu.

Middle class formation is an important theme in my approach to study sexuality as a prism for understanding social transformations in Africa . I study class as it is ‘practised’, that is, I explore how middle class lifestyles become a way to self-realization. This theme offers both an intriguing perspective on how people participate(d) in a globalizing world, as well as makes an innovative contribution to African Studies, where the analysis of middle classes remains elusive. It also provides an important contribution to debates about modernity, cosmopolitanism and sexuality from a cross-cultural perspective.

Rachel Spronk

Last updated, May 2011