Rachel Spronk

Rachel Spronk is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She works at the intersection of three scholarly fields: anthropology, gender & sexuality studies, and African studies. In her publications, she analyses the complexities of gender, sexuality and culture by focussing on public debates on the one hand, and personal relationships and self-perceptions on the other. She studies the development of the (idea of the) middle classes in Kenya and Ghana and how those social transformations relate to changes in gender and sexuality. In her work, she combines the ethnographic study of practices and self-perceptions with the task of rethinking our theoretical repertoires. She is the author of Ambiguous Pleasures. Sexuality and Self-Perceptions in Nairobi (2012) and co-editor of Readings in Sexualities from Africa. (Readings in African Studies).