This research programme takes the specific and located history and the growth of the discipline of gender studies as an interdisciplinary, transformative scholarly practice as its point of departure. The research programme of gender studies in the humanities of Utrecht University addresses and re-invents the traditions developed so far by feminist scholars. The programme thus explores how the tensions between generating new categories of gender analysis and building on traditions of women’s and feminist movements and scholarship can be taken beyond the opposition of overcoming the past and celebrating the new.

The programme thus reconsiders the history of the feminist movement and feminist scholarship, and canonizes feminist thought again. Based on the strength of its faculty in specific research areas this exploration focuses on three fields: Art & Beyond, Postcoloniality and Social Justice, and Contemporary Feminist Theory. Together they focus on the ways in which instances of gendering occur, that is, on how cultural practices and artefacts get to perform and transform gender in a context that is thoroughly power-laden. The programme looks at the ontology and epistemology, ethics and aesthetics of gender in its entanglement with other axes of socio-cultural differentiation such as class, ‘race’/ethnicity, sexuality, and age. With its interdisciplinary research, gender studies scholars in the Humanities at Utrecht University add to contemporary (feminist) debates about transitional justice, post-colonialism, post-humanism, and post-secularism.