Everyday Feminist Research Praxis: Doing Gender in the Netherlands

Everyday Feminist Research Praxis: Doing Gender in The Netherlands presents a selection of previously unpublished work presented during the 2011, 2012 and 2013 Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies (NOG) conferences. The contributors are researchers who are working at, or who have been associated with, the universities part of the NOG. The NOG is a top European programme and has a longstanding international reputation for its pioneering work in the field of literary, cultural, philosophical, anthropological and epistemological Gender Studies. Reflecting the wide spectrum of interdisciplinary gender studies, this volume is organised into four sections along four conceptual knots. The four thematic entry-points are space/time, affectivity, public/private, and technological mediation. Each section, introduced by a commissioned established expert in the field, consists of four chapters written by emerging scholars. The book concludes with an epilogue, consisting of a reflective interview with NOG board members. The central emphasis of this volume is twofold: first, the everyday is approached as a concretely grounded site of micro-political, intersecting power struggles. Second, the contributors make explicit connections between theory and their everyday feminist research practices. They provide a reflexive account of their research, and put into words what drives them. The relation between theory and practice has been a key concern of feminist research in recent decades. The two domains are here not considered as oppositional, but rather contributors chart their interconnections and entanglements. The authors cover a wide topical area that includes, amongst others, digital representations of women movements; European homonationalism; fashion modelling and labour; sexual identities; child-birthing discourses; digital documentaries; fan fiction; and the post-human. As a whole, the interventions show how feminist research praxis remains crucial in critically disentangling naturalized routines of daily life, which in turn enables the scrutiny of, for example, the arbitrariness of entrenched power relations and the revealing of contradictory and layered, personal and collective, everyday trajectories. Everyday feminist research praxis, thus, energises possibilities for new forms of recognition, representation and redistribution of power.
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