Marjo Buitelaar

'I Am the Ultimate Challenge' Accounts of Intersectionality in the Life-Story of a Well-Known Daughter of Moroccan Migrant Workers in the Netherlands

Keywords:

This article aims to demonstrate that the concept of the 'dialogical self' is an identity theory that provides useful tools for studying intersectionality. In terms of the dialogical self, the formation of identity is a process of orchestrating voices within the self that speak from different I-positions. Such voices are embedded in field-specific repertoires of practices, characters, discourses and power relations specific to the various groups to which individuals simultaneously belong. By telling one's life-story, the individual intones these voices and combines them in new ways, thus reshaping them as they use them. The article applies the theoretical concept of the dialogical self to the analysis of the life-story of a relatively well-known female Dutch politician of Moroccan background whose explanation of why she wears a headscarf allows her to combine the religious and political voices in her story with her more hesitant female voice. The words, images and self-evaluations used in her self-narratives demonstrate the ways in which her religious, ethnic and gender identifications are formed and are in dialogue.

INTRODUCTION

Since the arrival of Turks and Moroccans in the 1960s, and especially since the 9/11 attacks, Islam has become the dominant marker of the 'otherness' of migrant groups in the Netherlands. In this essentialist discourse, images of women wearing headscarves and, of late, bearded men function as symbols of the anti-modernity of Islam (see [START_REF] Lutz | Migrant Women of 'Islamic Background': Images and Self-Images[END_REF]. To be sure, not only non-Muslims appeal to essentialist conceptions of Islam. Muslim fundamentalists try to impose essentialist alternatives on fellow believers when, for instance, they call for a universal jihad against the West. These essentialist discourses are not unique to fundamentalists in that nonmilitant voices within European Muslim communities also sometimes express an essentialist view of Islam. It is, for example, argued by some that Islam is entirely incompatible with 'typical' western life-styles.

Self-essentializing as a rhetorical performance to invoke a positive 'imagined community' (see [START_REF] Anderson | Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism[END_REF]) may serve the group interests of collectivities that are caught in asymmetrical societal power relations (see Werbner, 1997: 230). It does not, however, allow space for internal power conflicts along the lines of class and gender, for instance, nor for differences between individual group members (Yuval-Davis, 1997: 200). In practice, what Islam or 'being Muslim' means varies for different individuals, categories and groups of actors. Moreover, as actors change contexts and take a different evaluative stance towards their actions, shifts occur in their accounts. Like other cultural phenomena, then, Islam is constituted through contested accounts by various actors about their actions and interactions, which together form a 'web of narratives' (see Benhabib, 2002: 7).

Having to respond to essentialist images of 'the Muslim' in the Netherlands has a strong impact on how intersectionality is experienced by those who, among other identifications, perceive themselves as Muslims. They are left with few generally accepted narratives to communicate the ways in which their various identifications are simultaneously (in)formed by prevailing conceptions about gender, ethnicity, religion, class, nationality, etc. (see [START_REF] Crenshaw | Whose Story Is It Anyway? Feminist and Antiracist Appropriations of Anita Hill[END_REF]. This is particularly so for the daughters and sons of Mediterranean Muslims who came to the Netherlands as economic migrants in the 1960s and 1970s. Within the dominant discourses of the groups with which they identify, their experiences of intersectionality have been marginalized, as illustrated by the claim that Muslim youth live 'between two cultures'.

Although this phrase also features in self-descriptions, the selfexpressions of Muslim youth sometimes demonstrate that there is no inherent cognitive dissonance in participating in a range of different social and cultural groups. Depending on context and purpose, they either affirm the dominant discourses of specific groups or engage in alternative ones. In doing so, they defy reification in terms of views on (religious) culture and community as well as the conflation of the two, redefining what 'community' might mean in any single context of identification (see Baumann, 1996: 34;[START_REF] Buitelaar | Negotiating the Rules of Chaste Behaviour. Re-Interpretations of the Symbolic Complex of Virginity by Young Women of Moroccan Descent in the Netherlands[END_REF]. Contrary to claims that Islam is the dominant marker of identity, many Dutch citizens from Muslim backgrounds refuse to define themselves first and foremost as Muslims.

In my present research project I have collected the life-stories of adult daughters of Moroccan migrants and analysed their accounts of intersecting identifications. In this article, I demonstrate how I do so using the concept of the 'dialogical self'. According to this view of identity, the self is dialogically constructed because we can act as if we were the other who addresses us or to whom we respond. Thus viewed, identity is the temporary outcome of our responses to the various ways in which we are addressed on the basis of our positions in the power relations in and between the different social and cultural fields in which we participate (Hermans and Kempen, 1993: 119-20).

At slight variance with Mead's concept of the 'generalized other', Hermans emphasizes the importance of 'collective voices' in the construction of identity [START_REF] Hermans | Conceptions of Self and Identity: Toward a Dialogical View[END_REF]. When individuals speak, they use the words of the groups to which they belong. These words, in turn, represent the rules, conventions and established worldviews of those groups. The dialogical self is developed by 'orchestrating' the 'voices' within ourselves that speak from the different I-positions between which we shift (Bell and Gardiner, 1998). These voices, in other words, represent our different 'sites of self' (see Holland et al., 1998: 29-30).

In narratives about intersecting identifications, we cannot but make use of the ways in which the meaning of words is embedded in field-specific repertoires of practices, social capital, characters and discourses that characterize the various modalities of the identity categories through which we are constituted. All words have the 'flavour' of a specific profession, for example, or a specific genre or generation, etc. (Bakhtin, 1981: 293-4). When we speak, however, we actively co-construct these collective voices. We innovate rules and conventions as we apply them. By using words within our own specific contexts, we intone them and place them in relation to other words, thus reshaping them as we use them (Shotter and Billig, 1998: 24).

There are, however, restrictions on the freedom to improvise upon discourses and add new flavours to the already existing 'flavours' of words. If our self-representations are to be understood by others, they must be oriented towards the specific conceptual horizon of our listeners. In turn, their anticipated 'answers' are significant to our experience of the self (Bakhtin, 1981: 280). Identity is therefore dialogically constructed in both listening to discourses and using them to construct our own narratives. Some voices that address the 'dialogical self' are more penetrating than others. Our social positions, for instance, create dispositions to voice opinions or to silence oneself, to enter into activities or to refrain from doing so (Holland et al., 1998: 136).

What makes the concept of the dialogical self so interesting in the study of intersectionality is that it provides tools to analyse how individuals speak from different I-positions within the self, switching between various collective voices and sometimes mixing them as they take different positions. It also draws attention to the ways in which different collective voices may or may not conflict, and to what contexts result in one or several voices becoming more dominant or organizing than others in selfnarratives.

Since people always belong to several groups and categories at the same time, they construct a series of alternative and often inconsistent self-representations. These self-representations are based on different chains of selected personal memories and may be organized in terms of quite different cultural schemata (Ewing, 1990: 253). Depending on the actual or imagined positions from which self-narrations are told, people tell different stories about their past, present and future. Through selfreflection and telling, a person is able to bring different experiences and views together in a composite whole. Some parts become more influential than others, and as the self shifts between I-positions, emotions are organized differently. Also, the basic narrative themes of agency and communion may receive differential attention in stories told from different I-positions (Hermans and Hermans-Jansen, 2001: 128).

One strategy to create a sense of wholeness in the face of these multiple self-representations is to construct a self-narrative in which they are integrated [START_REF] Mcadams | The Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self[END_REF]. If our life-story is to make sense, it should cohere in ways appropriate to the standards made available to a person of our identity in the groups in which we participate (Appiah, 1994: 160). Life-stories are therefore highly informative about the organization of intersecting identifications. Narratives about key events such as high, low and turning points in particular are pre-eminent dialogical moments in the construction of identity (see Josselson, 1995: 42). [START_REF] Mcadams | The Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self[END_REF] refers to life-stories as 'personal myths' to point to the fact that identity is created by organizing stories about multiple identifications into continually revised biographical narratives that form answers to the question 'Who am I?'

Rather than proposing specific topics, for this research project the metaphor of the life-story as a book containing different 'life chapters', 'characters' and 'story lines' was used to invite the interviewees to produce self-narratives. In this way, they themselves could select the topics that they judged to be of interest. Since narratives are always shaped by the audiences that each participant in the interview situation has in mind, to a large extent this 'freedom' was, of course, illusory (see Olson and Shopes, 1991: 193). For one thing, the responses of the interviewees were influenced by the fact that I had contacted them because of their Moroccan background. Also, precisely because Islam has become such a dominant identity-marker in the Netherlands, much of what the interviewees told me was organized for the purpose of challenging assumed misconceptions of presumed readers. Either tacitly or explicitly, then, the women who participated in the project had their own agenda when agreeing to participate (see [START_REF] Berger Gluck | Advocacy Oral History: Palestinian Women in Resistance[END_REF]. 1 This was particularly true in the case of Tahara, the woman whose lifestory I focus on here. Tahara is a very well-known political figure in Dutch society. I was elated when she agreed to be interviewed, but the interview itself initially disappointed me. Tahara poured out a deluge of words that allowed for no interruption. Rather than contemplating my questions, she used them as a springboard to tell a story that she had obviously prepared beforehand. The narrative she presented was a kind of press release. 2 Differing from most interviewees, Tahara saw no purpose in reading the interview transcript and marking passages that should not be used. 3 'You can use it all', she assured me, 'Do with it what you think is right.' Also, she would have had no objections to my revealing her identity. In fact, she was slightly disappointed to learn that pseudonyms would be used.

At first sight, Tahara's carefully constructed and oft-repeated public success story appears to consist of little more than a recital of achieved goals and ideological viewpoints. It is, however, exactly this public character that makes Tahara's story so interesting. Public stories depend heavily on the narrator's skilful use of local rules of discourse to make their stories intelligible to their audiences. In turn, the response of the audience determines not only the success of the story but also influences the identity of the narrator (Ochberg, 1994: 114). Fascinating questions are, therefore, what is it that makes Tahara's story so effective in the Dutch media and in what ways does this public story allow for expressions of her intersecting identifications?

I try to answer these questions by analysing what language or 'voices' Tahara employs as she speaks from different I-positions in her life-story and who constitute the audiences she addresses.

ARTICULATIONS OF I-POSITIONS

Tahara's self-narrative contains numerous self-descriptions. In the case of some it is immediately apparent to which I-positions they refer: 'I am Moroccan and Dutch in Westerdam' points to Tahara's social position in Dutch society and refers to her multiple ethnic identification. 'I am not all there is' is about her position in the universe and expresses her religious identification. 'I am the daughter of a guestworker' refers to her position as a lower-class migrant child. It is predominantly a statement about class identification. The related 'I am a social democrat' points to her political identification. 'I am not the norm of this society' again refers to her migratory background and illustrates her identification as a member of a minority group in the Netherlands.

When cited out of the context in which they were uttered, some statements, such as 'I am a tough female', 'I am critical' and 'I am flexible', are more difficult to relate to I-positions. One would be tempted to view such statements as expressions of Tahara's personal temperament, as references to her ego-identity that have no relation to the different I-positions in her story. Such 'personal traits', however, do not exist in a vacuum. They should be interpreted against the background of the social and cultural contexts in which they were developed in dialogue with others.

Tahara's story is the product of a skilful orchestration of the voices in which the characters representing her various I-positions speak. She gives the floor to different speakers. At times they speak in monologue, while at other times they are engaged in dialogue with each other. Some voices are allowed more room in her story than others, and sometimes the volume of a particular voice is alternately turned up and down again. As a first answer to the question why Tahara's story goes down so well in the Dutch media, I would argue that this is due to her understanding of the importance of addressing her audiences in voices that are familiar to them. What makes her story truly interesting is her talent in reshaping the words these voices speak in ways that allow her audiences to catch a glimpse of other perspectives.

This is no small achievement. Since collective voices are associated with socially marked and ranked groups, orchestrating voices is much more than sorting out neutral perspectives (Holland et al., 1998: 182-3). What Tahara has to deal with, for instance, is that the different audiences she addresses occupy different positions in Dutch power relations. In general, the Moroccan and wider migrant audiences she hopes to address are lower in rank than her Dutch audiences. Appealing too explicitly to the cultural capital of one audience may discredit her in the eyes of others.

To complicate matters, the characters that inhabit Tahara's life-story do not have the same shapes or 'tastes' in the different perspectives of her various audiences. Representations of the character of 'the Muslim' in Islamic discourses, for example, are very different from those in the discourses of Dutch policy-makers and the popular media. These discourses do, however, share one characteristic: they are all strongly gendered. For Tahara, as for me, this makes it difficult if not impossible to untangle her religious and gender identifications. Addressing her different audiences in the voice of 'the politician' demands even more skilful orchestration. Although certainly not gender-neutral, representations of 'the politician' in a Dutch discourse are less strongly gendered than those in the dominant Moroccan discourse, where the character of 'the politician' is almost invariably a man.

TAHARA'S MUSLIM VOICE

In Tahara's narrative of her life-story 'the Muslim' becomes 'a Muslim girl with a headscarf, brains and a big mouth'. Her self-representation as a self-confident and independent Muslim girl is Tahara's 'answer' to being addressed in terms of the dominant image in Dutch discourse of the oppressed, unintegrated, ignorant foreign Muslim woman who speaks no Dutch. At the same time, she responds to being addressed in terms of the dominant image in Dutch Islamic discourse of the obedient, caring and modest Muslim woman who guards her reputation by not calling attention to herself and who protects her Islamic way of life against bad Dutch influences by avoiding participation in the public sphere.

In one passage in her story, we can even witness how Tahara enters into a dialogue with several collective voices that represent restrictive cultural conceptions of 'the Muslim woman':

You can find me engaged in a debate with three men at 11 o'clock at night. Does that look like I'm being oppressed? Well no, actually it doesn't. I am the living proof -not only I but all those girls are the living proof -that all those ideas that we used to have in the past about women and headscarves were just a lot of nonsense. . . . What I do is challenge society. If you ask me, I am the ultimate challenge.

Voices representing Tahara's I-position as a Muslim predominate in her story. When the first interview session is only five minutes underway, they already announce themselves as Tahara elaborates extensively on how much she benefited from her parents' decision to send her to the mosque for Islamic education at the age of four. Her narrative also contains numerous evaluative statements in which she puts her experiences in the context of an Islamic discourse of Providence, e.g. 'God has made all these things possible for me', 'I can feel God's hand in my life', 'God did not choose this path for me without reason'. Furthermore, the spiritual dimension of her religious identity is the subject of one of the two most important episodes in Tahara's life-story: an anecdote about her decision to begin to wear a headscarf.

THE HEADSCARF ANECDOTE

'Key' or 'nuclear episodes' refer to the subjective memories of events that have assumed especially prominent positions in our understanding of ourselves (McAdams, 1993: 296). They represent nodes of change in which a person becomes other than, or more clearly, what he or she was. At such moments the relations between the planes of self are being reorganized (Josselson, 1995: 37).

The anecdote about Tahara's decision to begin wearing a headscarf is both the first and the most elaborate anecdote in her story and parts of it are repeated several times throughout the interview. Her life-story is organized around the episode both in content and in form. This depiction of her life preceding it is constructed as leading up to the moment she decides to cover her head, while nearly everything that she describes after it is presented as resulting either directly or indirectly from this decision.

One of the interesting aspects of this anecdote is that in the vocabulary and images that Tahara uses, parallels can be found with the life-story of the Prophet Mohammed. In the second sentence, for instance, she states, 'I am here with a message'. In Dutch, Tahara uses the word boodschap. The Arabic rasûl Allah is usually translated by Dutch-speaking Muslims as de Boodschapper van God, the Messenger of God. In several instances elsewhere in her life-story this statement is repeated, as is the statement that she has a 'mission'.

A second parallel with the life of the Prophet Mohammed in the headscarf anecdote is when Tahara gives a description of her ancestral village in Morocco where she decided to start covering her head. The village she describes reminds one of the highly idealized way in which the Ummah Muhammadiya, the first or 'original' community of Muslims led by the Prophet Mohammed is depicted in Islamic historiography. As in such hagiographic descriptions, Tahara presents the life in the 'very basic' village of her parents as extremely harmonious and she states that its inhabitants are 'one with nature', 'one with the origin' and 'live in peace with what they feel and what they have'.

The strongest parallel with the life-story of the Prophet Mohammed is when Tahara describes how she withdraws into the mountains 'to philosophize'. This is what the Prophet is also said to have done often. In fact, it is believed to have been on one of these retreats that God sent the first revelation to him through the angel Gabriel. Tahara does not speak about revelations, but she does mention that her retreats made her feel very close to God and led to the insight that putting on a headscarf was the right step to take.

The parallel between certain elements in the anecdote about Tahara's decision to cover her head and elements from the life-story of the Prophet Mohammed occurred to me only when analysing the material, so I did not discuss them with Tahara. That she herself was at least aware of the prophetic 'flavour' of her words is illustrated by how she comments on the anecdote itself. After concluding her narration, she states: 'It is not because I -. . . I have a message, I have something to tell.' She then repeats the sentence she had left unfinished to conclude it: 'It is not that I am a prophet or anything like that, but I do have something to tell.' This should not be interpreted to mean that Tahara deliberately adapted the headscarf episode to make it resemble the life-story of the Prophet Mohammed. The anecdote merely illustrates that people tend to coordinate their self-accounts with those of others by drawing on shared collective stories (see [START_REF] Mcadams | The Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self[END_REF][START_REF] Peacock | Religion and Life History: An Exploration in Cultural Psychology[END_REF]. The main characters that people use to represent themselves in self-narratives may assume prototypical 'guises' such as the warrior, the sage, the caregiver, the survivor, etc. McAdams calls such characters 'imagoes'. Imagoes express our most cherished desires and goals in life and give voice to both individual and cultural values. They refer to personified and idealized concepts of the self. 4 In terms of the dialogical self, one could say that an imago represents an aspect of the self that is applicable to several I-positions at the same time. An imago influences the ways in which several of the voices representing I-positions speak, and it plays a dominant role in how different voices may be orchestrated. In this way, imagoes provide a narrative tool for organizing intersectionality. Central dynamics and conflicts in one's life may be represented by interacting imagoes. The multitude of voices can thus be reduced to a manageable cast of characters who are engaged in dialogue, combat or peace making.

Because imagoes are modelled on prototypical characters from collective stories but shaped by personal experiences, they are both common and unique. Together with the fact that imagoes do not refer to specific Ipositions but are idealized concepts of the self, this explains why Tahara may be drawing on the role model of the Prophet Mohammed in her story.

It is often at a high, low or turning point that an imago comes onto the stage of a life-story, which is one more reason why the analysis of nuclear episodes is crucial to the study of the dialogical self. Once the imago of the Prophet has entered the narrative in the headscarf anecdote, for example, it becomes easier to recognize his voice in later episodes of Tahara's story. Also, reading backwards, it can be seen how, in earlier episodes, the stage was prepared for his arrival.

THE ORCHESTRATION OF RELIGIOUS AND POLITICAL VOICES

By improvising on elements from the life-story of the Prophet Mohammed, Tahara appeals to a highly valued story that she shares with her Muslim audiences. It is precisely this prophetic voice that allows her to translate her Islamic discourse in terms of a social democratic discourse that sounds more familiar (and less threatening) to her Dutch audience:

I am here with a message, because why has God bestowed all those blessings on me? I was raised in a European country. I have had all the chances that one could wish for: good parents, a good upbringing and a good education. I have to do something with that. I can't just keep it to myself. Because, as you can tell, I am a social democrat by origin: share fairly! It is, however, not always easy to translate the vocabulary of voices representing different I-positions into other positions. The most explicit dialogical moment in the headscarf anecdote is where Tahara, the daughter of migrants who romanticizes traditional Moroccan village life, enters into a dialogue with Tahara the social democrat and emancipated world citizen who frowns upon hierarchies and strict role patterns: 5 Although there are clearly role patterns, you could see that everyone was enjoying themselves, that those roles were accepted. Because, well, these people do not know better, so then you accept your roles. In contrast to the Moroccan villagers whose lives she idealizes, Tahara 'knows better' than to accept the roles that society has assigned her. In the text following the headscarf anecdote the tone of her narrative changes. She describes how the negative reactions of her schoolmates and other Dutch people to her headscarf are a 'wake up call': they rouse her political awareness. This gives the initial impetus to a political career in which she strives to improve both the social-economic situation and the image of Muslims and migrants in Dutch society.

McAdams distinguishes between 'agentic' and 'communal' imagoes, representing the often opposing desires for power and intimacy. Before the headscarf anecdote, Tahara's narrative is told by both agentic and communal voices. The prophetic voice in the anecdote, for example, talks about self-realization and changing the world as well as about sharing and caring. In the text following the anecdote Tahara represents herself as a Muslim and a politician by beginning to speak in more agentic and univocal voices. These voices speak a militant language when they counter the depreciatory image of, and discrimination against, Muslim migrants in Dutch society: 'I'll give them something to think about', 'I fight back just as hard'.

The words 'struggle' and 'fighting' are used repeatedly throughout the narrative. Tahara speaks about 'fighting on the barricades', 'fighting the battle with others' and 'fighting for the underdog'. These statements can be recognized by her Dutch audiences as familiar albeit somewhat dated socialist slogans. Indeed, Tahara emphasizes that her fight for justice not only concerns the Moroccan community in the Netherlands but also other disadvantaged people 'who go unnoticed'.

The phrase 'who go unnoticed' is linked to a recurrent theme in the narrative: to be or not to be seen. Referring to the situation of Moroccans in the Netherlands 15 years earlier, for instance, she states: 'They didn't know us. We were just another group. You knew they were there, but nobody spoke about them.' 6 The wish that she and people with whom she identifies should be seen and heard motivates Tahara to choose a political career. Talking about her breakthrough in the media, she proudly speaks of 'the launching on TV of Moroccan girls who not only wear a headscarf but even have an outspoken view on matters'. Equally triumphantly, she states: 'I got into the picture. I had a view that you were not able to get round'.

The importance to Tahara of being 'seen' is reminiscent of discussions on the politics of recognition in multicultural societies (see Fraser and Honneth, 2003;[START_REF] Taylor | The Politics of Recognition[END_REF]. The struggle for recognition consists of two mutually interconnected but distinct and irreducible dimensions of justice [START_REF] Fraser | Rethinking Recognition[END_REF]. Both dimensions can be recognized in Tahara's 'mission'. The first concerns a struggle for redistribution, and focuses on the equalization of rights, e.g. civil and voting rights on the one hand, and redistribution in the economic sphere on the other. The second dimension concerns the struggle for the recognition of difference, focusing on the right to a distinct identity. The underlying demand is that of participation and representation: the right not to be ignored, glossed over or assimilated to a dominant identity but to 'get into the picture' as full participants in Dutch society. Tahara's mission is not to acquire the right to be a full participant in Dutch society despite the fact that she is a Muslim woman who wears a headscarf, but the right to be respected participating as a Muslim woman who wears a headscarf (see Appiah, 1994: 161).

One of the difficulties with the politics of recognition in terms of a collective identity is that people always belong to several groups at the same time. Campaigning for the recognition of a particular dimension of identity could entail the neglect or suppression of other dimensions. Also, individual claims to self-expressions may divert from collective aspirations to cultural recognition (Benhabib, 2002: 53). What makes Tahara's life-story so fascinating is that onesidedness is carefully avoided and that she demands recognition as an individual. She does so by positioning herself in relation to the different groups she identifies with by using familiar words in unfamiliar contexts or vice versa, now claiming equality, then difference. It is against this background that her statement 'I am the ultimate challenge' should be interpreted. Tahara challenges the groups she identifies with by both appealing to, and defying, dominant social categorizations. The ultimate aim of her politics of recognition is to create a new niche in Dutch society for women like herself. To 'launch', to repeat her words, 'Moroccan girls who not only wear a headscarf but even have an outspoken view on matters'.

THE HESITANT FEMALE VOICE

In the construction of identity, however, nothing comes for free. Orchestrating different voices of the self can be an arduous task (see Bakhtin, 1981: 293-4). Indeed, towards the end of her narrative there comes a moment when Tahara deplores her lack of privacy and sighs: 'Sometimes . . . I wish I were invisible.' Looking at the context in which she expresses her wish for temporary invisibility, I believe that lack of privacy is not the only reason why she may feel ambivalent about being a public figure. The comment is made in conclusion to a narrative on the second main nuclear episode in her life. This time it concerns a crisis in her gender identity. It is caused by the breakup of a love relationship and having a serious illness seven months before the interview took place, which for a while looked as though it might threaten her fertility.

It is in relation to the end of her love affair that Tahara expresses insecurity about her feminine qualities. She explains why the relationship failed:

He has this feminine side to him, see, so very sweet and all that. While I am always a tough female. . . . I always have to play that male role, because I work in a man's world. . . . That masculine streak is very strongly developed in me. . . . So he took the feminine role while I became the man, I was always the one . . . taking decisions.

This quotation bespeaks the influence of the specific gendered 'flavour' of the voices that populate Tahara's story about her self-image as a woman. She links agentic voices with masculinity and communal voices with femininity. Since she is the one 'always taking decisions' she 'became the man' in her relation with her boyfriend, while he 'took the feminine role'.

Furthermore, she links 'outside' to masculinity and 'inside' to femininity. The phrase 'I work in a man's world', for example, is stated repeatedly throughout her story. It is striking how often she underlines her working with men. How should this be interpreted? Part of the answer to this question can be found in the following remark: 'You can find me engaged in a debate with three men at 11 o'clock at night. Does that look like I'm being oppressed? Well, no, actually it doesn't.' Part of Tahara's emphasis on working in a man's world is a narrative device to show how emancipated she is.

But it also reminds me of a Moroccan joke about a 'guestworker' in Amsterdam in the early days of migration. Returning to his home village in the Rif mountains for the summer, he was asked what Amsterdam was like. 'Brother', he replied, 'You wouldn't believe your eyes. In the whole city of Amsterdam, there is not a man to be found. All you see in the street is women!' The inhabitants of the Rif mountains in the north of Morocco are known for very strict adherence to regulations of sex-segregation.

Unaccustomed to seeing women in the street, let alone unveiled women, the guestworker had been so overwhelmed by the sight of Amsterdam women that they were all he noticed. Tahara, of course, is not as naive as the man in the joke. I surmise, however, that her consistent emphasis on mingling with men in the public domain does indicate that she is not left untouched by the fact that according to traditional Moroccan standards of the sexual division of space, she is trespassing. Moroccans tend to feel more at ease in same-sex situations. Sex-segregation is one of the main principles of Moroccan social organization and corresponds with conceptions of masculinity and femininity. Because women spend much of their time at home, they are said to develop the 'feminine' quality of sabr, patience or endurance. Men who spend much of their time at home are ridiculed as effeminate since they are expected to spend most of their time in public domains where they develop the more 'masculine' quality of 'aql, reason, the adroitness to negotiate successful transactions and communicate with strangers (see [START_REF] Buitelaar | Public Baths as Private Places[END_REF].

As a result of power shifts in gender relations, the observance of sexsegregation rules is diminishing both in Moroccan cities and in most Moroccan families in the Netherlands. Tahara's narrative recognizes that she is transgressing these rules by operating in a 'man's world'. Since their presence in her professional life is inconsistent with the traditional Moroccan practice of sex-segregation, she may, therefore, be more conscious of their presence than of women's presence.

The difficulty of shaking off the influence of cultural patterns of sexsegregation affects her self-image as a woman. This came to the fore in the quotation that 'because I work in a man's world. . . . that masculine streak is very strongly developed in me'. It is also expressed in less positive selfevaluations such as 'I am a tough battle-axe'; 'I am a difficult woman' and the even more negative 'I am an ogress'. These are all statements in which Tahara comments on herself from the perspective of traditional Moroccan representations of women. These representations are inconsistent with her wish to be publicly recognized and they affect her self-image as a woman.

It would not be correct, however, to refer only to Tahara's Moroccan background to explain her difficulty in reconciling her self-representations as Tahara the public figure with those of Tahara the woman. A similar tendency to link agentic voices more to public spheres and masculine qualities and communal voices more to private spheres and feminine qualities is present in the self-narratives of people from western backgrounds (see [START_REF] Mcadams | The Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self[END_REF]. Women in general appear to have more difficulty reconciling the two than men do [START_REF] Lieblich | Narrative Research: Reading, Analysis, and Interpretation[END_REF].

It is therefore more correct to argue that although Tahara defines herself first and foremost in terms that challenge restrictive Dutch and Moroccan representations of women, she has not been able to free herself completely from the specific cultural schemata on which these are based. The words that voice her wish for recognition in the public sphere 'as a Muslim girl with a headscarf, brains and a big mouth' appear to have a masculine 'flavour' that is difficult to harmonize with words that taste more feminine to Tahara. As a result, there is a tension in her self-image that leaves her searching for words.

There is, however, a hint in her story as to where this search might lead her. In one instance, Tahara does make a positive self-evaluative statement in terms of femininity. This is when she remarks how 'elegant' and 'beautiful' the headscarf makes her look. At this particular moment during the interview, she jumps up to fetch a stack of photographs. 7 The photographs show her variously in casual wear, professional suits and party dress. In different photographs, the headscarves she wears vary in colour, texture and shape, each time matching her various styles of clothing and make-up.

Like her use of familiar words in unfamiliar contexts, in donning the headscarf in these different and often novel ways Tahara uses a familiar symbol in unfamiliar contexts. The way Moroccan women from Tahara's mother's generation tend to cover their heads both indicates their religiosity and symbolizes adherence to the rules of sex-segregation by protecting them from the gaze of outsiders in the public sphere. In this context, it does not make sense to put on a headscarf without also wearing a 'djellaba' -a loose cloak with a hood worn when leaving the house in the Middle East and North Africa. Also, in the view of traditionally inclined women wearing a headscarf and make-up simultaneously is transgressive.

In experimenting with different ways of covering herself, Tahara consciously attempts 'to give new connotations to it [the headscarf]'. Fashioning the headscarf in new ways enables her to demonstrate to Dutch and Moroccan audiences alike that she participates in public spheres in the Netherlands without renouncing either her religion or femininity. 8 The 'new' headscarf provides her with a means to create an 'illusion of wholeness' in the face of the multiple, inconsistent self-representations that are related to her various I-positions in Dutch society. Parallel to use of familiar words in unfamiliar ways, it allows her to organize her experiences of intersectionality. Pointing to her headscarf helps her to declare with self-confidence: 'I am who I am. This is who I am. This is Tahara.'

ARTICULATIONS OF INTERSECTIONALITY: CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

Analysing Tahara's life-story as an act of orchestrating the different 'voices' related to her positions in various social and cultural contexts illustrates the analytical purchase of the concept of the dialogical self for studying intersectionality. This approach runs counter to notions that multiple identity is the product of summing up a person's different identifications. Instead, analysis is done in terms of dialogues between various voices within the self, each one embedded in field-specific repertoires of practices, characters and discourses informed by specific power relations. It allows the exploration of how particular identifications are always co-constructed with other categories of identity. The words, images and self-evaluations that Tahara uses in her self-narratives point to the ways in which her religious, ethnic and gender identifications are formed through 'webs of interlocution' constituted by her socialization into different communities of discourse (Benhabib, 2003: 56). The 'prophetic' Muslim voice is dominant in her life-story. This voice allows her both to express her religious identification and to translate the Islamic discourse in which she frames it into a Dutch political discourse. It is more particularly her 'mission' to explain her use of headscarves that allows her to combine the religious and political voices in her story with the as yet hesitant female voice. NOTES 1.

Towards the end of the interview, all participants were asked for their reasons for taking part in the study. The most commonly given reason was the importance of 'positive stories' to counterbalance misconceptions about Islam and the wish to provide Moroccan youth with positive role models.

2.

My initial disappointment about the interview itself has, of course, no bearing on my appreciation of Tahara's cordiality. I have very warm memories of the two long afternoons we worked on the interview: she invited me to her home, offered me lots of tea and sweets, and even taught me how to dress up like a Berber woman.

3.

As part of the conditions under which the women participated in the project it was agreed that they would receive the full transcripts. Using different coloured pens, they could mark passages which they did not want me to publish, and passages that should not be used when sketching their individual portraits. They also agreed that subsequently, on the condition that all interviews were anonymized, I was free to interpret the material as I considered best. Only five of the 27 women interviewed returned the marked transcripts of their interviews. 4.

How idealized personifications of the self express what we want most in life is also illustrated by the fact that when I asked the woman whose life-story is analysed in this article what pseudonym she would like me to use, she came up with Tahara. 'This means "the pure one"', she explained. 5.

The Note how in this statement Tahara switches between perspectives. 7.

See Ganzevoort (1994: 308), who draws attention to the fact that a life-story is not only told by the words used, but that other ingredients may be used, such as the way a person dresses, the furnishings of his or her house or, as in this case, photographs. 8.

For comparable arguments about present-day Muslim women using the headscarf to reconcile multiple identities in the Middle East, see, for example, El-Guindi (1999), [START_REF] Jansen | Contested Identities: Women and Religion in Algeria and Jordan[END_REF][START_REF] Macleod | Accommodating Protest: Working Women, the New Veiling, and Change in Cairo[END_REF].

  But if you can tell that people live in peace with what they feel and what they have, that's when I think: that's a pretty good life. If you compare that to what we fuss about in the West!

  voice of the 'world citizen' manifests itself in Tahara's narrative mostly by punctuating her Dutch account with English phrases, such as in: 'If you like it, leuk [ok by me]. If you don't like it, ook leuk [ok by me as well]'; 'ik ben altijd de brenger van bad news [I am always the messenger of bad news]'; 'Ik ben de dochter van een gastarbeider [I am the daughter of a guestworker] and I'm damn proud of it.' 6.

European Journal ofWomen's Studies 13(3)


Baukje Prins

Narrative Accounts of Origins A Blind Spot in the Intersectional Approach?

Keywords:

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.

Twenty years ago I leafed through a small booklet compiled to celebrate the 65th anniversary of my former primary school in a village in the north of the Netherlands. The booklet contained a series of portraits of school classes. Some are part of my family history: in a 1929 photograph I find my five-year-old father, while a 1963 picture shows me with my classmates. But whereas my father's class is all white, more than half my classmates are black. The difference signifies the symbolic passage from the colonial to the postcolonial era and the material passage of thousands of soldiers of the Royal Dutch Indies Army (the KNIL) who, in 1951, were shipped from the island of Java and housed in camps throughout the Netherlands.

I decided to go back to my Dutch and Moluccan classmates to find out to what extent our life trajectories had been marked by our early childhood experiences with the ethnic and cultural 'other'. 1 What kind of lifestory would each of us produce? How had our lives been affected by axes of difference and inequality such as gender, ethnicity, class and religion?

In this article, I make a distinction between systemic and constructionist interpretations of intersectionality. I argue that the constructionist approach offers the better tools for answering the above questions. Yet in my classmates' accounts, I stumbled across a narrative that I was unable to connect to the markers generally included in the list of possibly intersecting social categories, i.e. the quest for one's roots. I argue that this issue of origins can be elaborated within a constructionist perspective of intersectionality, without relapsing into either essentialist or systemic understandings of ethnicity or identity.

INTERSECTIONALITY, THE SYSTEMIC AND CONSTRUCTIONIST APPROACHES

When Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term 'intersectionality', it was welcomed by many as the refreshing rearticulation of an insight that had already been put forward by several Black scholars such as Angela [START_REF] Davis | Women, Race and Class[END_REF], Audre [START_REF] Lorde | Sister Outsider[END_REF] and Patricia Hill [START_REF] Collins | Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment[END_REF]. They had argued that systems of domination systematically glossed over the experience of marginal groups in the US, such as Black women, by implicitly taking white, middle-class women or black men as the exemplary victims of systems of sexism or racism. Since the early 1980s the idea of the intersectional workings of different categories of social inequality has been acknowledged and meticulously researched. British scholars like Floya [START_REF] Anthias | Racialized Boundaries. Race, Nation, Gender, Colour and Class and the Anti-Racist Struggle[END_REF], Paul [START_REF] Gilroy | There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack[END_REF], [START_REF] Hall | Het minimale zelf en andere opstellen[END_REF] and Beverley [START_REF] Skeggs | Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable[END_REF] emphasized how particular identities are lived in the modalities of other categories of identity, such that gender is always lived in the modalities of ethnicity and class, nationality in the modalities of gender and race, and class in the modalities of gender and nationality. The US and British approaches share an anti-essentialist perspective on identity, without relapsing into the 'anti-categorical' perspective of radical deconstructionism [START_REF] Mccall | The Complexity of Intersectionality[END_REF]. Intersectionality constitutes a critical alternative to identity politics insofar as, next to differences between groups, it also takes into account intra-group differences [START_REF] Crenshaw | Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color[END_REF](Crenshaw, : 1242)). Intersectionality can also be perceived as an alternative to 'additive' or 'multiplicative' claims that Black women are worse off than white women because they suffer from both sexism and racism, or that working-class Black women suffer from 'a triple jeopardy' [START_REF] Beal | Double Jeopardy: To be Black and Female[END_REF] because they have to deal with poverty as well.

Intersectionality instead emphasizes that the complexity of processes of individual identification and social inequality cannot be captured by such arithmetical frameworks. Categories like gender, ethnicity and class coconstruct each other, and they do so in myriad ways, dependent on social, historical and symbolic factors.

There are, however, significant differences in how intersectionality is treated on either side of the Atlantic. The US approach foregrounds the impact of system or structure upon the formation of identities, whereas British scholars focus on the dynamic and relational aspects of social identity.

According to [START_REF] Crenshaw | Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color[END_REF], the location of women of colour at the intersection of race and gender makes their experiences structurally and 'qualitatively different than that of white women' [START_REF] Crenshaw | Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color[END_REF](Crenshaw, : 1245)). Gender, race and class are conceptualized as systems of domination, oppression and marginalization that determine or structure identities. And when Mari [START_REF] Matsuda | Beside my Sister, Facing the Enemy: Legal Theory out of Coalition[END_REF] explains her method of asking 'the other question', she does so in systemic terms: 'When I see something that looks racist, I ask, "Where is the patriarchy in this?" When I see something that looks sexist, I ask, "Where is the heterosexism in this?"' [START_REF] Matsuda | Beside my Sister, Facing the Enemy: Legal Theory out of Coalition[END_REF](Matsuda, : 1189)). The significance of social identity categories is thus exclusively identified with the performative effects of social subordination and discursive disempowerment. Adherents to what I from now on refer to as the systemic approach to intersectionality use it both to expose the detrimental effect of the subordinate poles of gender, race and class, and simultaneously to problematize the dominant poles of these binary oppositions, such as masculinity, whiteness and middle-classness [START_REF] Wekker | Een hoogvlakte met koude winden. De geschiedenis van het gender-en etniciteitsdenken in Nederland[END_REF]. In her insightful exploration of the ways in which the gendered and racialized discourse of 'family values' contributes to the construction of US national identity, Patricia Hill Collins, referring to the work of Michel Foucault, defines disciplinary power as 'that by which people are classified and located on a knowledge grid' (Collins, 1998: 79 note 5).

In doing so, Collins makes selective use of the Foucauldian vocabulary. According to Foucault, modern power is indeed intimately connected to the power/knowledge configurations of the human sciences. Discipline and normalization work to shape human bodies and enable forms of life. Power, however, is not to be conceived of as a property, but as a relation. Power relations are constantly shifting, marked by conflicts and points of resistance. Power does not merely suppress, it also produces subjects. It involves strategic games that can only be played so long as the parties involved have a certain amount of freedom, in which the relations between them are reversible and unstable. It is only in cases where the 'infinitesimal mechanisms of power' have become reified into static structures with totalitarian traits that we may speak of domination and oppression [START_REF] Foucault | L'Éthique du souci de soi comme pratique de liberté[END_REF].

The British approach to intersectionality has adopted this more relational and dynamic view of power. It has elaborated a constructionist interpretation of intersectionality. Its conception of intersectionality builds upon Gramsci's view of power in terms of ongoing struggles over hegemony, and his notion of articulation as 'any practice establishing a relation among elements such that their identity is modified as a result of the articulatory practice' (Laclau and Mouffe, 2002: 105). Conflations of identity categories such as race with a system like racism are rejected on the basis that they assume a static view of both the meaning of the category of race, and of racism as a single system in which Whites dominate Blacks, thus ignoring the various ways in which Irish people, Jews or refugees from the Third World have been negatively racialized and subjected to racism.

Their foregrounding of structure does not mean that adherents of the systemic approach discard the perspective of agency. On the contrary, their critical analyses are meant to contribute to the empowerment of subordinated groups. Thus Crenshaw observes that processes of categorization are not unilateral since members of marginalized groups are able to challenge and subvert existing social categorizations: 'there is nonetheless some degree of agency that people can and do exert in the politics of naming' [START_REF] Crenshaw | Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color[END_REF](Crenshaw, : 1297)). And Collins notes how African-Americans have challenged dominant tropes of kinship by their creative reappropriation of the rhetoric of family -by, for instance, identifying Africa as the 'homeland', and addressing one another as 'brother' and 'sister' (Collins, 1998: 78). Still, intersectionality predominantly aims to reveal the unilateral power of social representations, e.g. the detrimental symbolic and material consequences for those groups whose lives are situated at the crossroads of different identities (Saharso, 2002: 22).

A second distinction between the systemic and the constructionist approach is that the first assumes a notion of the human subject as primarily constituted by systems of domination and marginalization. To become a subject means being positioned in more or less privileged social locations that shape one's experience. Individuals are taken to be the passive bearers of the meanings of social categories. According to the constructionist perspective, on the other hand, the processes by which individuals become subjects do not merely involve 'being subjected to', in the sense of being subordinated to a sovereign power or anonymous system. It also implies that the individual is 'becoming a subject', i.e. made into a source of his or her own thinking and acting. Markers of identity such as gender, class or ethnicity are not merely exclusive and limiting forms of categorization, but simultaneously provide narrative and enabling resources (see also [START_REF] Appiah | The Ethics of Identity[END_REF].

Third, within the systemic approach issues of social identity and identification are predominantly perceived as matters of categorization and naming. When Crenshaw stresses that identity is also an important site of resistance, she illustrates this by judging two forms of selfcategorization. The claim 'I am a person who happens to be Black' is disqualified as foregrounding universal personhood and suggesting that a person's race is merely a contingent part of her identity. The alternative statement 'I am Black' represents the better resistance strategy because it reappropriates the category of race that the dominant framework imposes upon Black people [START_REF] Crenshaw | Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color[END_REF](Crenshaw, : 1297)).

Within the constructionist approach, identity is not perceived as a matter of naming but of narration. We are both actor in and co-author of our own life-story, our (individual and collective) actions can be perceived as enacted narratives. Identity cannot be grasped by a list of characteristics that informs us about the 'what' of a person. It is about 'who' someone is, and that, as Hannah Arendt (1998) aptly remarked, can only be shown through storytelling. The narrative approach fits with the communitarian view of the embedded self, and with the psychoanalytical view of the non-unified subject. On the one hand, our stories of our selves and others are only partly of our own making: we enter upon a stage already set, and our lives for the most part follow the course of already available narrative scripts. On the other hand, our stories are multilayered and contradictory; the scripts of gender, race, ethnicity and class play a constitutive role, but never in the same way, never as mere determining factors. Stuart Hall reminds us of the lack and excess accompanying processes of identification: we are simultaneously less and more than the sum of the social categories with which we are identified [START_REF] Hall | Who Needs Identity?[END_REF].

AGENCY AND COMPLEXITY

Both the systemic and the constructionist approaches to intersectionality adhere to an anti-essentialist view of identity. However, the systemic approach simultaneously holds that the meanings of social identities are determined by racism, classism, sexism, etc., which are taken to be static and rigid systems of domination. This focus has two unfortunate effects.

First, the systemic approach tends to ignore the agency of individual subjects by interpreting identity constructions as not only made and as such contingent, but as made by the powers-that-be and as such false. However, constructionism defends the first claim, but rejects the latter: constructions of identity are not ideological distortions of a suppressed and authentic experience, but the (symbolic-material) effects of performative actions [START_REF] Butler | Gender Trouble[END_REF]. The systemic approach has adopted the notion of 'construction', while holding on to the epistemological assumptions of theories of ideology.

Second, the complexity that emerges from systemic intersectional analyses boils down to the complexity of ever more layers of oppression and domination. The 'interlocking', or 'intersection', of frameworks of gender and race is highlighted not to grasp the various ways in which social identity categories modify one another, but to highlight how, as different systems of oppression, they 'converge' [START_REF] Crenshaw | Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color[END_REF](Crenshaw, : 1245)).

The list of identity variables functions as an indicator of the measure of oppression suffered: the longer the list, the heavier the burden. One of the reasons for this reductionist tendency may be that the typical systemic case study focuses on groups who are positioned on the fringes of society, for whom mechanisms of social power have indeed become reified. But it is highly questionable to base one's general framework of identity upon such 'extreme' cases in which power works in a near totalitarian way.

In more 'ordinary' cases differences in power cannot be simply added up to a singular picture. Rather than exposing predictable plots of one party dominating the other, a constructionist approach, as I show in the remainder of this article, promises subtler accounts in which the effective operation of multiple axes of inequality can only be accounted for by the narration of multilayered stories.

ACCIDENTAL CLASSMATES: A PECULIAR SITE

The life-story narratives of my former classmates highlight how the lives of people in an affluent Western European society are affected by axes of difference and equality, e.g. gender, ethnicity, class and religion. 2 As an unremarkable assembly of working-and lower middle-class people, my classmates do not attract much attention from mainstream policy-makers and researchers. They are neither part of an (economic or cultural) elite nor of an underclass of social dropouts. They neither cause nor represent significant social problems. Nor do they figure in the work of critical cultural studies scholars, who focus on popular subcultures and cultural representations celebrating hybridity and creolization, or on political practices of empowerment and progressive coalition building. The stories of my former classmates are considered 'ordinary', i.e. not interesting enough to recount to the larger public nor to preserve for future generations. Most of my respondents agree with these hegemonic accounts. Frequently, when I contacted them, their first response was: 'but I have nothing to tell you . . .', 'but I don't know anything . . .' However, as Nick Couldry claims: 'when so many people's lives are standardly judged not "interesting" enough to hear, cultural studies should operate on the principle that each person's voice, and reflexivity, matters' (Couldry, 2000: 58).

In addition, my respondents cannot be said to belong to one social 'group'. This is not to deny that we share characteristics. We were all born in the mid-1950s, most of us in, or near, the village of Weemerloo (a pseudonym). We share working-class backgrounds, Protestantism and grew up in the same locality. But there are significant divisions among us. The most obvious is ethnicity: we clearly differ in culture, history, language and race. These differences might easily be summarized in dichotomous pairs such as Western vs Far Eastern, colonizer vs colonized, white vs black, or dominant vs oppressed. However, even those of us who are white and Dutch were not members of the 'majority' in some ways, both because we are predominantly from working-class backgrounds, and because our first languages are not Dutch, but Frisian or Stellingwarf. 3 Furthermore, we did not inhabit the culturally and economically dominant centre of the Netherlands called Holland, but an impoverished rural periphery of the province of Friesland.

To complicate things further, my Moluccan classmates cannot be simply categorized as belonging to the formerly colonized group. In the Dutch East Indies, Moluccans had occupied a privileged position. As inhabitants of the previously rich and Christian Spice Islands, since the 19th century they were welcomed as useful soldiers to the Royal Dutch Indies Army. Their loyalty to 'God, fatherland and [the royal house of] Orange' lasted up to the Japanese occupation and the subsequent Indonesian struggle for national independence. Consequently, most Moluccan soldiers refused to become part of the Indonesian federation, and in 1950 proclaimed the independent Republik Maluku Selatan (RMS) [START_REF] Smeets | Moluccans in the Netherlands[END_REF][START_REF] Steijlen | RMS: Van ideaal tot symbool. Moluks nationalisme in Nederland. 1951-1994[END_REF][START_REF] Wittermans | Social Organization among Ambonese Refugees in Holland[END_REF].

This particular history made the predicament of my Moluccan classmates more complicated than ours, their Dutch classmates. When in the 1970s they reached adulthood, they not only had to deal with economic recession and unemployment, but also with the inheritance of the political ideal of a free RMS. Frustrated about the way the Dutch government had betrayed their parents, young Moluccans engaged in violent protests, e.g. the train hijackings of 1975 and 1977, in which several people, both hostages and hijackers, were killed. At that time, relations between the Dutch and the Moluccan population were strained. In the longer run, however, the hijackings had beneficial effects: their dramatic endings forced Moluccans to recognize that a free RMS was unlikely, and triggered the beginning of Dutch policies of multiculturalism.

LIFE-STORIES

My research population consists of 48 individuals, who had been among my primary school classmates between August 1962 and June 1968. By the time I started the project in spring 2001, three of them (all Moluccans) had died. The remaining group consisted of 25 Dutch (14 women, 11 men) and 20 Moluccans (nine women, 11 men). Between 2001 and 2004, 36 people were interviewed: 14 Moluccans (five women, nine men) and 22 Dutch (13 women, nine men). 4 On educational and employment status they were predominantly working class and lower middle class.

The life-story narratives of my classmates furnish abundant evidence that individual identities are constructed at the crossroads of different axes of social difference and inequality, and that these positions are not static and given, but sites of constant struggle and negotiation. To illustrate this, I present fragments of the stories of two of my classmates: Sietse, a Dutch man, and Betty, a Moluccan woman.

Sietse, married with three children, works as a caretaker at a secondary school in Weemerloo. We communicate in the Stellingwarf dialect. As a working-class man, Sietse shows fierce resistance to suggestions that he is of 'lower' status. In Weemerloo his family name is often associated with antisocial behaviour and backwardness. He emphatically distances himself from other branches of this family: 'yes, sometimes they mix you up . . . if one was bad, you were all bad . . . and that is still the case today'. He illustrates this with a story about his son, who at that time attended the school where he works. Because of a traffic accident he was involved in as a child, the boy had become learning disabled and so was allocated to a special class. Sietse recounts a parents' evening at school: . . . the principal entered, I got along with him very well, and he said to me: 'that 1-A class, how many parents were there?' 'Well', I said, 'two'. 'Yes, that's what you get with those anti-social folk', he said. And I got so angry! I said to him: 'now let me tell you something . . . !' He said . . . [Sietse here indicates that the principal tried to respond, but was interrupted by him]. 'No', I said, 'my own son is in that class!' 'O sorry', he said. I said: 'boy, you think first before you say anything'. Yes, I can say anything to him.

Sietse here articulates a strong form of class consciousness: an acute awareness that people like him are often looked down upon. But he turns this account of a humiliating experience around by mobilizing different modes of authoritative masculinity: he puts the principal in his place by addressing him as a little boy, thus assuming the position of a wiser father ('boy, think before you talk'), but also by intimidating him as an offended, and therefore easily provoked male opponent (the phrase 'now let me tell you something' comes across as a -barely -concealed threat). He also affirms masculine authority in accounts of his dealings with recalcitrant (male) students -which are ethnicized when he relates his encounters with 'foreigners': 'African', 'Yugoslav' (in his usage) and Antillean students. He reports frequent fights between boys and disrespectful behaviour towards himself and the teachers. When they give him a hard time, Sietse stands up to them: . . . if, at a certain moment, you are faced with someone who has done something wrong, OK, and you want to explain that, and that person then immediately says: 'yes, but where we come from . . .' 'What?!' And then I think: 'no, not "where we come from", where we come from. You should stick to our rules. I don't care about the rules you have at home.'

Sietse's masculine insistence on discipline, respect for authority and rules can be linked to his working-class background and the way he himself was raised: not with words but deeds. If you did something wrong, you got beaten and: 'we accepted that, yes, you deserved it, it's as simple as that'. Sietse has to negotiate his position in-between the teachers, who are of higher status than himself, and the pupils, who, though of various nationalities, mostly share his working-class background. What the teachers are expected to do inside the classroom, and what they are supposed to be trained and paid for, Sietse (who is not trained and is paid less) is expected to do outside the classroom, i.e. to keep these often difficult boys under control.

Sietse's account is an apt illustration of the insight afforded by intersectional theory of how class identity intersects with gender (i.e. masculinity) and ethnicity (i.e. Dutchness), and how the narrative scripts available for these different collective identities modify one another to produce a singular and unique life-story.

Betty is a Moluccan woman who now lives with her Dutch husband in a city 200 km from Weemerloo. To their regret they have no children. When she was 16 years old, Betty fled from Weemerloo because her stepfather sexually assaulted her. She was never interested in education ('I always thought: I will become a housewife anyway'), and has worked in a factory most of her life. Her current job involves manufacturing gas heaters. She works only with men, expresses pride in doing a man's job and being just as strong as 'the boys' although she is very small and slim. She clearly enjoys outranking men who come to her for advice while being protective of her. The stories of her private life, however, revolve around violence. As a child she once watched her father hit her mother so hard that she was left with a permanent limp: I always blamed my father for that. . . . If he starts talking about my mother, then I say: 'no, what you did to mummy' . . . I say: 'I will never forgive you'.

This, together with memories of her father beating up her sister and herself, is one reason she distances herself from other Moluccans, especially men: 'I always said: me marry a Moluccan? Never in my lifetime!' And, like her sister, she never did. Instead, she has become part of her Dutch family-in-law and usually speaks the Saxon regional dialect. However, her decision never to get involved with a Moluccan was no safeguard against violent relationships. In her early twenties, she lived with a Dutch heroin addict. These were years full of tension and domestic violence -in this case with her as the perpetrator. There is a lot of aggression in her, she tells me: I strike back . . . nasty business, because I know that I can't win. . . . Still, I strike back, I do try! It's not for nothing that I had my ribs bruised three times . . . I was a rebellious thing [een opstandig ding].

Like Sietse's account, Betty's story illustrates the usefulness of the intersectional approach to identity. After finishing 'domestic school', anticipating the traditional (working-and middle-class Dutch) gender role that her mother followed, Betty now finds herself doing a 'man's job'becoming 'one of the boys' while remaining a 'girl'. Because of her early experiences, gender and ethnicity are intimately linked in that she associates Moluccan men with violence, whereas men of all other ethnic groups in her story figure as grateful and protective friends.

These readings of Sietse's and Betty's stories offer examples of the kind of interpretations which a constructionst version of intersectionality may yield. Their accounts consist of multilayered, contradictory stories in which the social and symbolic categories of gender, ethnicity and class play a constitutive role. Both Sietse's and Betty's narratives contain elements of resistance against the push-and-pull of traditional categorizations: Sietse in his articulation of working-class masculine consciousness vis-a-vis representatives of the middle class, Betty in her (seemingly) unambiguous exit from her own ethnic community. At the same time, their accounts show that not all counter-narratives are politically progressive or empowering (Yuval- Davis, 1997: 59). This becomes even clearer if we further analyse Betty's narrative.

ROOTS AND ROUTES

Betty's positioning at the intersections of gender, class, ethnicity, etc. is not sufficient to explain her story. For one of the main themes in her account is her preoccupation with her origins. To begin with: Betty has a halfbrother, Mark, who was fostered by a Moluccan family when her mother married Betty's father. Only in her teens did Betty learn about his existence, and it was to him she turned when running away from her violent stepfather. Second, Betty heard about rumours circulating in the Moluccan neighbourhood shortly after she was born, that she was really the daughter of a friend of the family. Third, years ago she found out that her grandparents were not really her mother's parents, but had adopted her. Betty's mother, who died 10 years ago, never managed to find out who her 'real' parents were. And just recently, Betty's father had made cryptic remarks suggesting that Mark's supposed father (an old army colleague of his) was not his 'real' father. Now Betty has a nagging suspicion that Mark might be her full brother after all.

Hence, Betty has repeatedly been faced with suggestions that her reality was not what she thought. These betrayals by those closest to her have hurt her deeply. No wonder that a dominant leitmotif in her account is how (not) to forgive and forget, both in relation to experiences with (Moluccan) male violence and female complicity and to the secretiveness around the question of her origin. Her present way of dealing with it is to declare the issue of her origins 'a closed book'. Thus she has declined invitations to travel to the Moluccas, claims to have forgotten her first language, and lets her father know that his stories about relatives in the Moluccas do not interest her. But during the interview, she also suddenly tells me that she feels like she is carrying 'a time bomb' inside, one she feels could just explode one day. Hence, underneath her determined posture, uncertainties linger, obstructing her attempts to reach narrative closure about 'where she is from'.

The theme of origins was evident in the stories of many of my Moluccan classmates. Episodes about finding out about 'where they came from' or their 'roots' often constituted a turning point in the accounts of their lives. The 'roots' that they attempted to reconstruct take various forms. In Betty's case, it is her family lineage. Another classmate spends all his time and energy in gathering and spreading knowledge about indigenous Moluccan customs. A third relishes memories of her childhood in the Frisian countryside. Some have dedicated themselves to the current struggle in the Moluccas against poverty and attacks by Muslims. Yet another tells me that in order to become 'truly Moluccan', he needed to become an individual and step out of the Moluccan community. If these quests find successful closure, they signify a positive turning point in the narrator's life-story. But in some cases they prove more disturbing. Betty's story is a case in point, as is the story of a Moluccan classmate who, feeling pressured by his relatives and his ancestors during his first visit to the Moluccas, suffered a psychotic breakdown, which has left him in a permanent state of psychic vulnerability.

At first sight, origins did not figure as an obstacle to be dealt with, a void to be filled or a book to be closed, in the stories of my Dutch classmates. We are part of clearly delineated family networks, our grandparents and other relatives lived close to our homes and at school we learned proud stories about the Dutch, the Frisians and even the Stellingwarfs, as peoples that bravely and successfully fought for their freedom and independence. Hence, we did not show a specific urge to articulate our identity in terms of forefathers, family lineage, ancient customs, ethnic descent or national pride.

Still, it is remarkable how most of my Dutch classmates stayed relatively close to home. Of my 14 Moluccan classmates, only one returned to Weemerloo. Eight moved elsewhere but remained in the north of the Netherlands, five live further away. In contrast, only two of my 22 Dutch classmates have left the north. Eleven moved to villages nearby, and nine still live in (or returned to) Weemerloo. In their younger years they studied, had work placements or jobs outside Weemerloo, but they always returned home at weekends: that was where their social life continued and where they helped their parents on their farms or in their households.

The life-story narratives of my classmates, Moluccan and Dutch alike, thus suggest, contrary to postmodern theories about us all becoming 'nomads' or 'migrants' with minimal and fragmented selves, that an attachment to one's 'origins' is important to many people's health and well-being.

BELONGING: A PRECARIOUS PREDICAMENT

The constructionist approach to intersectionality has emphasized that 'belongingness' is an essential ingredient of ethnicity. According to Anthias and Yuval-Davis, ethnicity revolves around the construction of a collective origin or destiny, and provides individuals with 'a sense of roots' which is often pivotal in their understanding of who they are (Anthias and Yuval-Davis, 1992: 6). Thus ethnicity is effectively dissociated from its essentialist and racist references to ties of 'blood' and 'earth', and redefined to express the insight that we are all situated subjects.

It seems that in these redefinitions the issue of belonging is unjustifiably linked exclusively with ethnic membership. But in the narratives of my classmates, belongingness, a sense of rootedness or feeling 'at home', did not merely pertain to ethnic community. It was also related to attachment to, or identification with, social class, family, forebears, a particular region or the landscape of one's childhood. Belonging refers to an experience of 'fitting into' certain intersectional locations -locations that may be manufactured by hegemonic discourses of ethnicity, nation, culture and race, but also by articulatory practices around family, gender, age, religion, sexuality or class. Furthermore, belonging does not refer to a state of being, but to a desire to belong, a 'longing to be' (see also Bell, 1999: 1). Hence, because identities are performatively produced in and through narrative enactments, belonging is never given, but always a precarious achievement.

The desire for narrative closure, the quest for a life that is unitary and whole is like the longing for a lost paradise; it will necessarily remain unfulfilled. This impossibility of returning to one's roots incites human subjects (individually and collectively) to trace out their routes [START_REF] Hall | Het minimale zelf en andere opstellen[END_REF]. Concerns for a (common) origin often tend towards essentialist and politically conservative conceptions of (common) destiny. At the same time, my classmates have taught me that if the quest for one's origins is frustrated, if the narrative of one's life lacks an account of the larger genealogy or collective identity into which it can be inscribed, this constitutes a serious obstacle to forging new routes. NOTES 1.

By using 'Dutch' and 'Moluccan' I remain close to everyday usage in the Netherlands, where the terminology of white and black is hardly ever used by any ethnic group.

2.

A similar research project has been undertaken by feminist anthropologist Sherry Ortner, who refers to her project as a form of interview-driven, 'delocalized' fieldwork, which starts from the former existence of a classical anthropological site (the school) where people formed a face-to-face community, to enable the researcher to deal with longer stretches of time and larger areas of space [START_REF] Ortner | New Jersey Dreaming: Capital, Culture, and the Class of '58[END_REF].

3.

Frisian is spoken by about half a million inhabitants of the Netherlands. In 1970 it was recognized as the official language of Friesland. Stellingwarf is a Low Saxon variant of the Saxon dialect spoken by some 50,000 people in the north and east of the Netherlands. 4.

Strictly speaking, I interviewed 35 of my classmates, as one interview was held with me (by Evelien Tonkens). My position in this project is therefore double: I am both the researcher and part of the group under research.

European Journal ofWomen's Studies 13(3)

Prins: Narrative Accounts of Origins


Book Reviews

WHAT IS MAKING CLASS? Beverley Skeggs Class, Self, Culture London: Routledge, 2004, 226 pp., ISBN 0-415-30086 Class cannot be made alone. (Skeggs, 2004: 3) Class, Self, Culture was published in 2004, but is less known than most of Beverley Skeggs's work. One reason for this is perhaps that the whole project she is developing is intimidating. Skeggs tries to build a complete analysis of how class is constructed through the history of classifications, academic perspectives, political rhetoric and popular representation. Much of this is a continuation of Skeggs's book Formations of Class and Gender from 1997. That book was built on ethnography among young northern UK working-class girls, and theoretically Class, Self, Culture continues where Formations left off. More than writing about something completely new, for example based on new empirical research, Skeggs brings together debates from different areas and contributions from different authors. The book contributes to answering several questions, which in themselves are academic fields: the existence of class in contemporary societies, the relationship between the economic and the cultural, the relationship between class and other classifications, such as gender and race, idealism in feminist epistemologies and many more. The text is so dense I am sure Skeggs could have written books on each and every one of these, but instead she aims at bringing it all together in 226 pages.

Skeggs rightfully claims that: 'As a concept, class is, therefore, being used to do many things: provide academic legitimacy, frame an academic discipline, speak to "the people", measure social change, stand in for the social itself' (p. 41). That is a lot of needs and concerns put into one concept, and needless to say, the term cannot always perform well -especially since it is the most defined subject in sociology at the same time as being poorly defined. Class is everything and nothing. It is therefore an important and brave task Skeggs takes on when she refuses to take the easy way out by concentrating only on a small part of the whole.

As a difficult endeavour, it is of course not easily pulled off or accessed. It is a highly technical book at times, and it is not an appropriate introductory book, but rather a text for scholars already interested in the making of class. I hope this does not discourage those in most need of the book: scholars who don't recognize the value of the concept of class in contemporary society and scholars who make use of it in a commonsensical way, making it do everything. Of course, these are not easy issues, and I don't mind that in itself, but I do believe the argument could be European Journal of Women's Studies Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks andNew Delhi), 1350-5068 Vol. 13(3): 291-295; http://ejw.sagepub.com DOI: 10.1177/1350506806066145 more accessible. However, the debate on class in the UK is generally more theoretical than in any other country I know. This is perhaps due to the obsession with class in the UK, as well as the normalization of class differences. In other countries, including my own, theoretical discussions on the concept of class are more of an acquired taste. Not to scare the potential reader, but I actually sat down and tried to read it several times before I managed to keep track of the various terms, processes and levels. In the first chapter, many terms and relationships are introduced, and many of them come with big debates attached, such as exploitation, exchange, value, capital and self. Chapter 1 made more sense to me when I reread it after finishing the rest of the book.

Even though I like the fact that this is a theoretical book, I find Skeggs to be at her best when she uses empirical examples showing us what she means. This is especially true when she explores the relationship between the concept of class and the concept of self. Here she directly continues her previous work in Formations. Skeggs claims that not all have access to selfhood and that this has consequences for which individuals can be included and how exclusion is constructed. Without a self, one is only a part of a mass: whereas middle-class people are individuals, working-class people may only become individuals through appropriating the values of the middle class. There are many practical and political implications of the realization that class is at the heart of how we conceive of a self and of questions of recognition. How subjectivity is understood is an increasingly important marker of difference between individuals and groups as modern societies go from direct to indirect governance. When proper selves are being delegated the responsibility of self-governance, they serve as a contrast to those in need of governance. The professional reformers growing in numbers every year need to deal with the differences between themselves and those in need of reform, and the framing of this difference is one of the most important sites of class struggle today.

The question of whose narratives can be identified as claiming a self, has epistemological consequences. Skeggs poses a serious challenge to feminist standpoint theory:

The debates over identity and epistemological justification, therefore, are about the claim and right to know. This is a moral articulation. It is also a naïve formulation of 'position must equal truth must produce authority and legitimation'. . . . These debates assume that there is an identity that can be used as a resource, and that people want to tell their stories in order to produce a moral claim from the telling. (p. 127)

The demand on researchers, both feminists and others, to be 'reflexive' has in many instances come to mean that scholars have to sum up their positions. It is important that we don't believe that this gets rid of power and privilege and the ways in which they influence knowledge.

Skeggs is arguing for the continuing importance of the concept of class and she shows us what writing it off is all about and how using other terms often places responsibility for the consequences of class on the individual. Skeggs insists that we should be aware of ways in which we risk losing sight of class. With the working class increasingly becoming multiethnic, it is important that that doesn't lead us to believe that the importance of class is being replaced with ethnicity or race. That the composition of the working class changes doesn't mean that class isn't still the proper framing. Skeggs insists that the making of class has to be linked to other classifications, and her book is therefore a valuable addition to mainstream feminist scholarship. More and more we realize that no concept alone can do the job for us. We need to understand the relationship between classificatory schemes and between concepts, positions and experiences. These days, most agree that we need to be sensitive to issues of class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, etc. in doing empirical work. But that is easier said than done. There is no way that one scholar can have knowledge of the making of class in the detail that Skeggs has at the same time as paying full attention to gender, race, sexuality, geography, etc. This book provides an example of what we stand to lose if we demand a democratic representation of everything everywhere. But still, Class, Self, Culture is about the intersections between class, gender and race, because it shows how understandings and representations of class are gendered and racialized.

As Skeggs points out, there are some scholars who would place class in the realm of the economic, while placing other classifications, such as gender and sexuality, in the cultural. Skeggs's book is a comment on such a division, making visible how class needs to be understood in cultural terms. The book is therefore also on the relationship between the cultural and the economic, or rather on how the cultural is not an area of life operating in a different logic than the economic, that it is also about appropriation, exploitation and resistance. An example in the book is how while the working class is generally constructed as wrong in opposition to the middle class, who are right, there are still parts of working-class culture that can be claimed and used as resources by the middle class. This is called selective appropriation.

I am hardly doing justice to the complexity of the book or the concept of class here, but I hope that I have been able to convey that I find Class, Self, Culture to be a good and important book. The question of what class is in its totality is important, and there are too many scholars dealing with small pieces of the puzzle compared to the few people trying to solve it. In Black Skins, Black Masks, Shirley Anne Tate explores and challenges discourses of Black authenticity that equate Blackness with dark skin and a Caribbean and/or African heritage. She is concerned with an 'everyday' hybridity that challenges these powerful discourses, arguing that an in-depth study of hybridity provides us with new insights into 'race', racism, politics and culture. She critiques much of the theorization of hybridity dating from the early 1990s, arguing that it has excluded Black women's voices and Black women's experiences. Tate's aim is to move beyond hybridity to examine how Blackness is transformed and reformed in women's talk and through their social actions.

  REFERENCESkeggs, Beverley (1997) The Formations of Class and Gender. London: Sage. May-Len Skilbrei FAFO Institute for Applied International Studies, Oslo BEHIND THE MASK: BLACK HYBRID IDENTITIES Shirley Anne Tate Black Skins, Black Masks: Hybridity, Dialogism, Performativity Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005, 181 pp., ISBN 0-7546-3641-0

European Journal ofWomen's Studies 13(3)