Everyday Feminist Research Praxis

Book excerpt: Everyday Feminist Research Praxis: Doing Gender in The Netherlands offers a selection of previously unpublished work presented during the 2011, 2012 and 2013 Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies (NOG) conferences. Reflecting the wide spectrum of interdisciplinary gender studies, this volume is organised into four sections along four conceptual knots. These thematic entry-points are space/time, affectivity, public/private, and technological mediation. The central emphasis of this volume is twofold: first, the everyday is approached as a concretely grounded site of micro-political power struggles. Second, the contributors make explicit connections between theory and their everyday feminist research practices. As a whole, the interventions – ranging from fashion modelling, child-birthing discourses and digital documentaries – 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 contradictory, personal and collective, everyday trajectories. Everyday Feminist Research Praxis, thus, energises possibilities for new forms of recognition, representation and redistribution of power.