Chloe Patton

A visual ethnographer by training, my research spans the disciplines of sociology, anthropology and cultural studies, and explores intersections between gender, race, identity and representation.

A key area of interest for me is the management of twenty-first century cultural diversity in the West, particularly the ways multiculture has come to be problematised through the so-called ‘Muslim question.’ An important strand of this work focuses on the ways the female Muslim subject is visualised in policy and popular discourse. I have explored this through ethnographic engagement with Australian Muslim women and youth in the context of forced marriage in Australia; discourses of Islamic veiling practices in France and Australia; and my doctoral research on identity formation among young Shia Muslims in Melbourne.

A recurrent theme in this work has been the question of agency, particularly how women and young people negotiate dominant and often harmful representations of their identities in the public sphere. My research with workers engaged in community work in the Muslim community, for instance, explored how what I term their ‘insurgent knowledge’ about pressure to marry in transnational contexts can inform better ways to address the issue of forced marriage in Australia. I have recently used this notion of women’s epistemic insurgency in a quite different context, exploring how women in online menopause forums are elaborating a new form of feminist theory about menopause.

Visuality is also a strong theme in my work, both in terms of the politics of visual representation and the visual ordering of modern social life. My PhD, which resulted in an exhibition at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Photography, explored narratives of multicultural belonging through a visual ethnographic study of photographic self-portraits produced by young Australian Muslims.