Imagining and performing the agentic self: An ethnographic exploration of Muslim teenage girls' mobile youth culture in Flanders

Abstract

This chapter explores the mobile youth culture of Muslim teen girls in Flanders (Belgium) by drawing from a 15-month offline/online ethnographic research project. More specifically, our ethnographic investigation illustrates how these girls’ mobile youth culture is ingrained in everyday negotiations of power dynamics. Being part of a diasporic Muslim community in Flanders, Muslim teenage girls navigate a social reality in which they seek to reconcile both “Islamic” and “Western” ideals of womanhood with their own desired anticipations for the future. Overall, we found how mobile communication is located at the heart of these girls’ continuous efforts to construct an “agentic self” in-between the Islamic and the Flemish hegemonies. Our study reveals how Flemish Muslim teen girls incorporate the anyplace/anytime connectivity afforded by mobile media in (dis)empowerment narratives of the self. They do so by reflecting on – parental – surveillance and on their own networked participations. The results call for the further development of a sociocultural perspective within mobile youth culture theory that recognizes youth as an intersectional category that is at least partly informed by sociocultural discourses on age.