The Centre for Gender and Diversity in 2012


Director:
Prof. Lies Wesseling

Centre profile

The Centre for Gender and Diversity (CGD) studies gender as a historically variable set of scripts for performing crucial social differences. Gender governs social processes of inclusion and exclusion in interaction with affiliated categories of difference such as age, religion, sexuality, disability, ethnicity, class and nationality. Gender never operates in isolation, but it only acquires meaning at the crossroads with other markers of social difference. We analyse these intersections, paying particular attention to the intersections between gender, religion and age while focusing on the arts.

The arts make a vital contribution to the recycling and transformation of behavioural scripts and pathos formulas. Artworks invent and represent social behaviours and emotional modalities while shaping their audiences’ behaviours and orchestrating their emotions. This applies to all forms of art and literature, whether high-brow, low-brow or middle-brow, although they impact their audiences in different ways. Therefore, we study cultural artefacts from both high culture and popular culture (i.e. fiction, poetry, film, photography, life writing, oral storytelling, the performing arts and children’s media).

While we are a humanities group, our interest in the arts as a shaping social force implies that we cross the gap between the humanities, the social sciences and the life sciences, not just in the formulation of our research questions but also in the selection of our methodological tools and research partners. It is our current mission to develop innovative interdisciplinary research projects within the fields of gender and the arts and to engage in knowledge valorisation, contributing to a society in which difference does not automatically entail discrimination. In addition to engaging in innovative research, we also teach courses on gender and diversity at Maastricht’s University College (UCM) and in the BA and MA Arts and Culture programmes at FASoS.

The CGD is currently embedded within the Arts, Media and Culture (AMC) research programme and the department of Literature and Art. This stands to reason, given its focus on the arts. The CGD has a distinct voice within AMC through its sustained interest in issues of representation, subjectivity and power. However, this does not mean that any future member of the CGD will automatically be affiliated with these two groups. The CGD also welcomes expertise from the social sciences, meaning that it may also potentially branch out into other FASoS research programmes and departments in the near future. The CGD values its cooperation with the Globalisation, Transnationalism and Development (GTD) research programme and science, technology and society studies (STS) and wants to contribute to the Maastricht spearheads “Quality of Life”  (ageing studies, Swinnen) and “Europe and the Globalising World” (Occidentalism/Neo-Orientalism, Brunotte; global adoption/transnational families, Wesseling). The CGD cultivates good working relationships with other gender studies centres in the Netherlands within the institutional context of the NOG (Nationale Onderzoeksschool Genderstudies) yet distinguishes itself from them through its persistent focus on the arts.

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