Gender

With this goal in mind, regular cluster meetings and guest lectures are held with international and local researchers and joint events organised by gender researchers on site (see current dates below).

Several research groups, projects and the doctoral programme "Interdisciplinary Gender Studies" are also in close contact with the Gender Cluster (HUK).

The Gender Cluster also provides an online platform to increase the visibility of interdisciplinary gender research and to facilitate the exchange and networking of researchers, lecturers and project staff who are active in the field of women's*, gender, feminist and queer research at the University of Graz.

Gender is a central criterion for structuring societies and organising cultural systems. In contrast to the view that gender provides a clear natural basis for the organisation of culture, e.g., for the separation of production and reproduction, gender research in various disciplines has made it clear that gender itself is a product of society and culture. Gender is subject to historical change, shows great variance in intercultural comparison and is linked in complex ways to other categories of social structuring and differentiation. In particular, gender serves as a marker of socio-cultural power relations.

Gender research is now being conducted in almost all cultural, social, natural and technical science disciplines. Research into gender is, therefore, an area of intersection between many disciplines and research programmes. The gender cluster in the research network "Heterogeneity and Cohesion" sees itself as a bundling and productive linking of such different disciplinary perspectives. Based on cultural theoretical approaches and theories of intersectionality, it is assumed that gender cannot always be understood as a primary marker of difference, but rather always interacts with other social categories such as race, class, age, body or sexual desire. In addition, in the context of current queer studies, fluid, ambiguous and ambivalent identity configurations require analytical attention.