Research

Our Gender Studies research focuses around four major areas: Cultural critique, Colonial legacies & postcolonial formations, Crossing/Challenging Boundaries and Critical Epistemologies.

Cultural critique

This strand focuses on issues of representation in the arts as well as in the curatorial world. It emphasises the role of cultural institutions and political economies in the making and unmaking of diversity, inclusion and equality. It focuses on the role of cultural critique as a way of rethinking ethics and global dynamics in arts, literature and global media studies. Critique is central to feminism as it focuses on the power of inherited hegemonic structures and foster critical interventions to instantiate transformation and change.

Colonial legacies & postcolonial formations

This strand focuses on the legacy of empires both old and new and studies the ways in which these legacies and aftermaths still impact on cultural and postcolonial formations both in Europe and beyond in many entangled ways. It particularly focuses on how subaltern subjects or minority groups manage to counter dominant and mainstream narrations and forms of representation by fostering decolonial and postcolonial strategies of resistance and critical interventions.

Crossing/challenging boundaries

This strand explores and challenges epistemological, methodological, and conceptual boundaries in research.  It works with gender as an intersectional analytical category, which shapes and is shaped by social processes such as racialization, cis-normativity, heteronormativity, ableism, classism, nativism, migration and anthropocentrism. By working with gender as an intersectional analytical lens, it challenges boundaries between categories such as sex and gender, (national, cultural, bodily, etc.) borders and border-crossings, humans and non-humans, or nature and culture.

Critical Epistemologies

This strand looks at how feminist interventions challenge hegemonic understandings and critically investigate these traditions and the alternative knowledges they produce. In doing so, we continue the legacy of Gender Studies at Utrecht University as being at the forefront of feminist and critical theory formation and the ways in which theory is applied and challenged in practice. The research group has broad expertise in the politics of knowledge production: the history of intersectional feminisms, queer(ing) and decolonial(izing) epistemologies, feminist posthumanisms and the diverse schools in gender, queer and trans* perspectives.