Katrina Daly Thompson
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 88806 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Katrina Daly Thompson |
| PRENOMES | Katrina Daly |
| SOBRENOME | Thompson |
| ASSINATURA | THOMPSON K D |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Wisconsin–Madison |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4526-9869 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 33 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 91 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 32 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 2 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2001 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 7 |
Love’s grammar
A Woman Is Not Created Mute
This article explores how Muslims in Tanga, Tanzania, navigate theological and social constraints on the female voice through participation in Islamic radio. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at Radio Nuur, a nondenominational station, it examines how women engage with the contested notion of the female voice as ‘awrah—a source of both modesty and moral risk. Through on-air participation, behind-the-scenes conversations, and listener engagement, …
Swahili Coast
From the Time of Ignorance to the Afterlife
This study examines Swahili-language Islamic marital booklets ( vijitabu ) written between 1932 and 2020, focusing on their gendered chronotopes and nostalgic elements. These booklets, written by and for Muslim men, offer advice on marriage, sexuality, and related topics, reflecting societal changes and the influence of reformist Islam in East Africa. The analysis identifies four prominent chronotopic formulations: the contemporary East African c…
Performativity in Africa
Judith Butler’s theory of performativity has been highly influential in anthropological studies, particularly of gender and sexuality. Drawing on J. L. Austin’s concept of language as action, Butler’s theory challenges identity categories and emphasizes the role of language and other semiotic resources in constructing, reproducing, and resisting social identities and power relations. While much research has focused on applying Butler’s theory to …
Muslims on the Margins
Offers vivid stories of nonconformist Muslim communities The turn of the twenty-first century ushered in a wave of progressive Muslims, whose modern interpretations and practices transformed the public’s perception of who could follow the teachings of Islam. Muslims on the Margins tells the story of their even more radical descendants: nonconformists who have reinterpreted their religion and created space for queer, trans, and nonbinary identitie…
‘Significant errors of fact’? A response to Simon Bright on nationalism, colonialism and anti-essentialism in Zimbabwe’s Cinematic Arts
This response article addresses the misinterpretations, misrepresentations and disparagements of my research by filmmaker Simon Bright. Drawing from my book, Zimbabwe’s Cinematic Arts , which is rooted in my doctoral research conducted in 2001, this response aims to rectify factual errors and clarify the nuanced arguments that were misread by Bright. While acknowledging the importance of continuously reshaping and reforming identities, as highlig…
African Studies Keyword
Autoethnography-a methodology that foregrounds personal experience both during research and in writing about it-is a useful keyword for scholars working in Africa and the diaspora. Mara and Thompson argue that by exploring new forms of writing and engaging in critical self-reflexivity regarding (shifting) positionalities, autoethnography-particularly collaborative approaches-is vital to ongoing efforts to decolonize African Studies. Mara and Thom…
Culture Shock
Fictive Fathers in the Field
Through my own narrative about my relationship with my fictive father in Zanzibar and the impact of this relationship on my research, in this autoethnographic essay I explore three themes: fictiveness, fatherhood, and the field. These themes tie together different aspects of the term “patriography,” linking them to ethnography and its subgenre autoethnography. Drawing on the term “patriography” as the science or study of fathers, I use the concep…
Becoming Muslims with a “Queer Voice
This article examines LGBT Muslim erasure by hegemonic Islamic and homonormative ideologies and how those involved in nonconformist Muslim groups queer those ideologies in order to forge narratives of belonging. I analyze the work of ‘queering’ Muslim voices among LGBT Muslims and allies involved in a multisited community of nonconformist Muslim face‐to‐face and online groups, and what such queering explains about the relationship among erasure, …
Queering language socialization
Making Space for Embodied Voices, Diverse Bodies, and Multiple Genders in Nonconformist Friday Prayers
In contemporary North American Muslim congregations involved in the "progressive Muslim movement," prayer practices rework tradition in recognizably Muslim ways while nevertheless differing markedly from those of most mosques. Ethnographic description and participant narratives shed light on the process through which intercorporeality impacts interpretation of Islamic gender norms, outlining the connections among epicene prayer space, bodily prox…
When I Was a Swahili Woman
Combining evocative and analytic autoethnography, I explore the ambiguous and ambivalent relationship between conversion, "going native," and socialization through a case study of my own experience. I examine fieldnotes written during my two-year marriage to a Zanzibari man and audio recordings from my linguistic ethnographic fieldwork among Zanzibari women during the same period, not only revealing my own previously concealed secrets but also ar…
America Dancing
Reviewed by: America Dancing: From the Cakewalk to the Moonwalk by Megan Pugh Katrina Thompson Megan Pugh. America Dancing: From the Cakewalk to the Moonwalk. New Haven: Yale UP, 2015. 416 pp. $32.50. In America Dancing: From the Cakewalk to the Moonwalk, Megan Pugh poses a simple yet highly debated question: “What makes a dance American?” (3). Pugh does [End Page 82] not attempt to answer the question, but through over 400 pages, illustrates ins…
Beginnings and Endings
In this autoethnographic essay, I explore my identification with a young Zanzibari woman I call Asha, whose premarital activities and wedding I took part in while doing ethnographic research on Zanzibari Muslim women's weddings and marriages in 2011. When both of our marriages ended abruptly, my relationship with Asha was severed, and I use this loss to examine why I was so invested in it to begin with. [loss, marriage, Swahili, weddings, Zanziba…
Secrets of a Swahili Marriage
I am a cultural studies scholar with a primary interest in African discourse, and my research thus intersects with and draws on linguistic anthropology. I teach a course in literary ethnography and am interested in redeeming ethnography for African cultural studies, where it is still largely perceived as tainted by colonialism and orientalism. This piece of fiction draws on my fieldwork in Zanzibar and Zimbabwe, particularly my linguistic anthrop…
Discreet Talk about Supernatural Sodomy, Transgressive Gender Performance, and Male Same-Sex Desire in Zanzibar Town
Very little is known about the communicative practices of men who transgress gender and sexual norms in East Africa, particularly along the Swahili Coast, where the majority of Swahili speakers are Sunni Muslims. In Zanzibar Town, Tanzania, the valorization of verbal discretion, the widespread belief that sodomy is a religious taboo, and the real risk of negative sanctions for transgressing sexual norms usually prevent open discussion of sexualit…
Educating Muslim Women
Educating Muslim Women is a unique study of Muslim women told throughthe story of Nana Asma’u, a nineteenth-century Fulani woman from NorthernNigeria who became a renowned scholar and greatly impacted Muslim womenin Nigeria and beyond. Drawing on history, literary analysis, and ethnography,the volume’s slimness belies a wealth of material that will interest historians,applied linguists, and even sociologists of contemporary Muslim communities.The…
Swahili Talk About Supernatural Sodomy
Since the 1960s, Swahili-speakers on the coast of Tanzania have talked about attacks by Popobawa, a supernatural creature said to sodomize his victims. This article examines both narratives and metadiscourse about Popobawa. I examine two salient features of this contemporary legend: intertextuality and a narrative frame that obligates Popobawa victims to spread the legend. People use Popobawa discourse for both conservative and transgressive purp…
Strategies for taming a Swahili husband
This Article uses Swahili audio recordings of marital instruction and interviews with Zanzibari Muslim women to investigate their conception of ‘love’ within Islamic marriages. When seen through a language socialisation framework, their talk illustrates how Swahili women socialise one another into not only particular ways of using language within marriage but also a particular discourse about the ideal means to mitigate their precarious status wi…
Men in African Film and Fiction
Fills a gap in the international literature by offering new insights into the heterogeneous ways in which African men are performing, negotiating and experiencing masculinity. Through their analysis of the depictions in film and literature of masculinities in colonial, independent and post-independent Africa, the contributors open some key African texts to a more obviously politicized set of meanings. Collectively, the essays provide space for re…
Men in African Film and Fiction
Religious Plurality in Africa
Society of the Righteous
When I Was a Swahili Woman
Combining evocative and analytic autoethnography, I explore the ambiguous and ambivalent relationship between conversion, "going native," and socialization through a case study of my own experience. I examine fieldnotes written during my two-year marriage to a Zanzibari man and audio recordings from my linguistic ethnographic fieldwork among Zanzibari women during the same period, not only revealing my own previously concealed secrets but also ar…
Muslims on the Margins
Offers vivid stories of nonconformist Muslim communities The turn of the twenty-first century ushered in a wave of progressive Muslims, whose modern interpretations and practices transformed the public’s perception of who could follow the teachings of Islam. Muslims on the Margins tells the story of their even more radical descendants: nonconformists who have reinterpreted their religion and created space for queer, trans, and nonbinary identitie…
African Studies Keyword
Autoethnography-a methodology that foregrounds personal experience both during research and in writing about it-is a useful keyword for scholars working in Africa and the diaspora. Mara and Thompson argue that by exploring new forms of writing and engaging in critical self-reflexivity regarding (shifting) positionalities, autoethnography-particularly collaborative approaches-is vital to ongoing efforts to decolonize African Studies. Mara and Thom…
Becoming Muslims with a “Queer Voice
This article examines LGBT Muslim erasure by hegemonic Islamic and homonormative ideologies and how those involved in nonconformist Muslim groups queer those ideologies in order to forge narratives of belonging. I analyze the work of ‘queering’ Muslim voices among LGBT Muslims and allies involved in a multisited community of nonconformist Muslim face‐to‐face and online groups, and what such queering explains about the relationship among erasure, …
Making Space for Embodied Voices, Diverse Bodies, and Multiple Genders in Nonconformist Friday Prayers
In contemporary North American Muslim congregations involved in the "progressive Muslim movement," prayer practices rework tradition in recognizably Muslim ways while nevertheless differing markedly from those of most mosques. Ethnographic description and participant narratives shed light on the process through which intercorporeality impacts interpretation of Islamic gender norms, outlining the connections among epicene prayer space, bodily prox…
How to Be a Good Muslim Wife
The existing literature on women of the Swahili Coast has focused largely on their involvement in activities labeled as non-Islamic by both male peers and scholars. However, Islam plays an important role in these women's lives and they often bring Islamic knowledge to bear on their participation in seemingly secular activities. In this study I address women's role as sex instructors with a specific focus on instructing a bride in contemporary Swa…
Zanzibari women’s discursive and sexual agency
This article analyzes a conversation with two Zanzibari women about sex between humans and spirits. This research demonstrates how they navigate gender-based restrictions on discourse to discuss sex and desire, violating a hegemonic language ideology that would silence them. Whereas previous work has focused on how Swahili women subvert gendered speech prohibitions by nonverbally taking up discourse produced by others, this article examines how t…
Strategies for taming a Swahili husband
This Article uses Swahili audio recordings of marital instruction and interviews with Zanzibari Muslim women to investigate their conception of ‘love’ within Islamic marriages. When seen through a language socialisation framework, their talk illustrates how Swahili women socialise one another into not only particular ways of using language within marriage but also a particular discourse about the ideal means to mitigate their precarious status wi…
Keeping it real
The article examines images and discourses produced by and circulating around X Plastaz, an internationally-successful Tanzanian hip-hop crew with one Maasai member which draws heavily on Maasai imagery in its publicity materials and performances, and uses Maasai chanting in its music. The analysis demonstrates that the interplay between local and international success is at the centre of the images the crew projects. By examining the different w…
Discreet Talk about Supernatural Sodomy, Transgressive Gender Performance, and Male Same-Sex Desire in Zanzibar Town
Very little is known about the communicative practices of men who transgress gender and sexual norms in East Africa, particularly along the Swahili Coast, where the majority of Swahili speakers are Sunni Muslims. In Zanzibar Town, Tanzania, the valorization of verbal discretion, the widespread belief that sodomy is a religious taboo, and the real risk of negative sanctions for transgressing sexual norms usually prevent open discussion of sexualit…
Fictive Fathers in the Field
Through my own narrative about my relationship with my fictive father in Zanzibar and the impact of this relationship on my research, in this autoethnographic essay I explore three themes: fictiveness, fatherhood, and the field. These themes tie together different aspects of the term “patriography,” linking them to ethnography and its subgenre autoethnography. Drawing on the term “patriography” as the science or study of fathers, I use the concep…
Beginnings and Endings
In this autoethnographic essay, I explore my identification with a young Zanzibari woman I call Asha, whose premarital activities and wedding I took part in while doing ethnographic research on Zanzibari Muslim women's weddings and marriages in 2011. When both of our marriages ended abruptly, my relationship with Asha was severed, and I use this loss to examine why I was so invested in it to begin with. [loss, marriage, Swahili, weddings, Zanziba…
Secrets of a Swahili Marriage
I am a cultural studies scholar with a primary interest in African discourse, and my research thus intersects with and draws on linguistic anthropology. I teach a course in literary ethnography and am interested in redeeming ethnography for African cultural studies, where it is still largely perceived as tainted by colonialism and orientalism. This piece of fiction draws on my fieldwork in Zanzibar and Zimbabwe, particularly my linguistic anthrop…
I am Maasai
In the Tanzanian Bongo Flava youth music scene, Abel Motika is a popular artist who uses both verbal and visual markers of Kisongo Maasai ethnicity to style himself as "the Maasai rapper" with the stage name "Mr. Ebbo." Through analysis of his 2002 song "Mi Mmasai" 'I am Maasai', this study investigates his ethnic stylizing in playful use of Maa pronunciation and an understudied Swahili language game known as kinyume 'backwards style'. The study …
Queering language socialization
Swahili Talk About Supernatural Sodomy
Since the 1960s, Swahili-speakers on the coast of Tanzania have talked about attacks by Popobawa, a supernatural creature said to sodomize his victims. This article examines both narratives and metadiscourse about Popobawa. I examine two salient features of this contemporary legend: intertextuality and a narrative frame that obligates Popobawa victims to spread the legend. People use Popobawa discourse for both conservative and transgressive purp…
From the Time of Ignorance to the Afterlife
This study examines Swahili-language Islamic marital booklets ( vijitabu ) written between 1932 and 2020, focusing on their gendered chronotopes and nostalgic elements. These booklets, written by and for Muslim men, offer advice on marriage, sexuality, and related topics, reflecting societal changes and the influence of reformist Islam in East Africa. The analysis identifies four prominent chronotopic formulations: the contemporary East African c…
Religious Plurality in Africa
Culture Shock
Swahili learners' reference grammar
Focus on African Films by Françoise Pfaff
Preserving East African Knowledge Through Swahili Moves
No abstract
The Mother Tongue and Bilingual Hysteria
Approaching Tsitsi Dangarembga's 1988 novel Nervous Conditions as an extended metaphor of translation, the article analyses the complementary relationship between the two female cousins, Nyasha and Tambu, by examining the complex ways in which they situate themselves in relation to language and culture. The comparison between Nyasha and Tambu is anchored in translation theory and psychoanalysis, while highlighting the Shona linguistic undercurren…
"Daina Ramey Berry, "Swing the Sickle for the Harvest Is Ripe
Keeping it real
The article examines images and discourses produced by and circulating around X Plastaz, an internationally-successful Tanzanian hip-hop crew with one Maasai member which draws heavily on Maasai imagery in its publicity materials and performances, and uses Maasai chanting in its music. The analysis demonstrates that the interplay between local and international success is at the centre of the images the crew projects. By examining the different w…
Zanzibari women’s discursive and sexual agency
This article analyzes a conversation with two Zanzibari women about sex between humans and spirits. This research demonstrates how they navigate gender-based restrictions on discourse to discuss sex and desire, violating a hegemonic language ideology that would silence them. Whereas previous work has focused on how Swahili women subvert gendered speech prohibitions by nonverbally taking up discourse produced by others, this article examines how t…
I am Maasai
In the Tanzanian Bongo Flava youth music scene, Abel Motika is a popular artist who uses both verbal and visual markers of Kisongo Maasai ethnicity to style himself as "the Maasai rapper" with the stage name "Mr. Ebbo." Through analysis of his 2002 song "Mi Mmasai" 'I am Maasai', this study investigates his ethnic stylizing in playful use of Maa pronunciation and an understudied Swahili language game known as kinyume 'backwards style'. The study …
Men in African Film and Fiction
Fills a gap in the international literature by offering new insights into the heterogeneous ways in which African men are performing, negotiating and experiencing masculinity. Through their analysis of the depictions in film and literature of masculinities in colonial, independent and post-independent Africa, the contributors open some key African texts to a more obviously politicized set of meanings. Collectively, the essays provide space for re…
Men in African Film and Fiction
How to Be a Good Muslim Wife
The existing literature on women of the Swahili Coast has focused largely on their involvement in activities labeled as non-Islamic by both male peers and scholars. However, Islam plays an important role in these women's lives and they often bring Islamic knowledge to bear on their participation in seemingly secular activities. In this study I address women's role as sex instructors with a specific focus on instructing a bride in contemporary Swa…
Swahili Talk About Supernatural Sodomy
Since the 1960s, Swahili-speakers on the coast of Tanzania have talked about attacks by Popobawa, a supernatural creature said to sodomize his victims. This article examines both narratives and metadiscourse about Popobawa. I examine two salient features of this contemporary legend: intertextuality and a narrative frame that obligates Popobawa victims to spread the legend. People use Popobawa discourse for both conservative and transgressive purp…
Strategies for taming a Swahili husband
This Article uses Swahili audio recordings of marital instruction and interviews with Zanzibari Muslim women to investigate their conception of ‘love’ within Islamic marriages. When seen through a language socialisation framework, their talk illustrates how Swahili women socialise one another into not only particular ways of using language within marriage but also a particular discourse about the ideal means to mitigate their precarious status wi…
Educating Muslim Women
Educating Muslim Women is a unique study of Muslim women told throughthe story of Nana Asma’u, a nineteenth-century Fulani woman from NorthernNigeria who became a renowned scholar and greatly impacted Muslim womenin Nigeria and beyond. Drawing on history, literary analysis, and ethnography,the volume’s slimness belies a wealth of material that will interest historians,applied linguists, and even sociologists of contemporary Muslim communities.The…
Discreet Talk about Supernatural Sodomy, Transgressive Gender Performance, and Male Same-Sex Desire in Zanzibar Town
Very little is known about the communicative practices of men who transgress gender and sexual norms in East Africa, particularly along the Swahili Coast, where the majority of Swahili speakers are Sunni Muslims. In Zanzibar Town, Tanzania, the valorization of verbal discretion, the widespread belief that sodomy is a religious taboo, and the real risk of negative sanctions for transgressing sexual norms usually prevent open discussion of sexualit…
America Dancing
Reviewed by: America Dancing: From the Cakewalk to the Moonwalk by Megan Pugh Katrina Thompson Megan Pugh. America Dancing: From the Cakewalk to the Moonwalk. New Haven: Yale UP, 2015. 416 pp. $32.50. In America Dancing: From the Cakewalk to the Moonwalk, Megan Pugh poses a simple yet highly debated question: “What makes a dance American?” (3). Pugh does [End Page 82] not attempt to answer the question, but through over 400 pages, illustrates ins…
Beginnings and Endings
In this autoethnographic essay, I explore my identification with a young Zanzibari woman I call Asha, whose premarital activities and wedding I took part in while doing ethnographic research on Zanzibari Muslim women's weddings and marriages in 2011. When both of our marriages ended abruptly, my relationship with Asha was severed, and I use this loss to examine why I was so invested in it to begin with. [loss, marriage, Swahili, weddings, Zanziba…
Secrets of a Swahili Marriage
I am a cultural studies scholar with a primary interest in African discourse, and my research thus intersects with and draws on linguistic anthropology. I teach a course in literary ethnography and am interested in redeeming ethnography for African cultural studies, where it is still largely perceived as tainted by colonialism and orientalism. This piece of fiction draws on my fieldwork in Zanzibar and Zimbabwe, particularly my linguistic anthrop…
When I Was a Swahili Woman
Combining evocative and analytic autoethnography, I explore the ambiguous and ambivalent relationship between conversion, "going native," and socialization through a case study of my own experience. I examine fieldnotes written during my two-year marriage to a Zanzibari man and audio recordings from my linguistic ethnographic fieldwork among Zanzibari women during the same period, not only revealing my own previously concealed secrets but also ar…
Fictive Fathers in the Field
Through my own narrative about my relationship with my fictive father in Zanzibar and the impact of this relationship on my research, in this autoethnographic essay I explore three themes: fictiveness, fatherhood, and the field. These themes tie together different aspects of the term “patriography,” linking them to ethnography and its subgenre autoethnography. Drawing on the term “patriography” as the science or study of fathers, I use the concep…
Becoming Muslims with a “Queer Voice
This article examines LGBT Muslim erasure by hegemonic Islamic and homonormative ideologies and how those involved in nonconformist Muslim groups queer those ideologies in order to forge narratives of belonging. I analyze the work of ‘queering’ Muslim voices among LGBT Muslims and allies involved in a multisited community of nonconformist Muslim face‐to‐face and online groups, and what such queering explains about the relationship among erasure, …
Queering language socialization
Making Space for Embodied Voices, Diverse Bodies, and Multiple Genders in Nonconformist Friday Prayers
In contemporary North American Muslim congregations involved in the "progressive Muslim movement," prayer practices rework tradition in recognizably Muslim ways while nevertheless differing markedly from those of most mosques. Ethnographic description and participant narratives shed light on the process through which intercorporeality impacts interpretation of Islamic gender norms, outlining the connections among epicene prayer space, bodily prox…
Culture Shock
‘Significant errors of fact’? A response to Simon Bright on nationalism, colonialism and anti-essentialism in Zimbabwe’s Cinematic Arts
This response article addresses the misinterpretations, misrepresentations and disparagements of my research by filmmaker Simon Bright. Drawing from my book, Zimbabwe’s Cinematic Arts , which is rooted in my doctoral research conducted in 2001, this response aims to rectify factual errors and clarify the nuanced arguments that were misread by Bright. While acknowledging the importance of continuously reshaping and reforming identities, as highlig…
Sociology (23 obras) · Gender Studies (20 obras) · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories (15 obras) · Gender Studies (14 obras) · Linguistics (14 obras) · Political science (14 obras) · History (12 obras) · Philosophy (12 obras) · Swahili (12 obras) · Anthropology (11 obras)