Teaching Gender With Libraries And Archives

This volume invites teachers and students in women's studies to engage with the library not as an instrument for preserving and disseminating knowledge (including feminist knowledge), but as a subject and object of knowledge in its own right.

With the legalization of same-sex marriage and the explosion of LGBTQ news coverage in recent years, gender studies is a subject of intense interest in popular media and a part of the curriculum at many colleges. Libraries realize the importance of supporting the field yet many have difficulty finding resources and programming ideas. This book provides case studies and a range of innovative solutions for better meeting patron needs. Twenty-seven chapters are arranged into sections covering Research and Library Instruction, History and Herstory, Programming, Collections and Beyond, and Resources.

Everyday Feminist Research Praxis: Doing Gender in The Netherlands offers a selection of previously unpublished work presented during the 2011, 2012 and 2013 Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies (NOG) conferences.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.

This 37th volume of the Yearbook of Women's History focuses on the meaning and potential of archiving for enhancing gender equality and the position of women worldwide. More than just storehouses of knowledge, archives offer new ways for understanding the past, debating the present and creating the future. Focusing on both traditional and non-traditional archival practices, in various parts of the world, the Yearbook of Women’s History explores the meaning of archiving for women and women’s history. Besides investigating the feminist potential of the archive, it also examines questions of erasure and forgetting. While archives may have emancipatory or democratizing potential, practices of discarding equally shape the histories that can be written, and the stories that can be told. The articles in this volume are alternated with descriptions of collections and institutes, and the topics addressed cover a full range of archival theory and practice. This volume has been produced by the editorial board of the Yearbook of Women's History in collaboration with Atria, institute on gender equality and women's history in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Can the recovery of women's contributions to literary culture be compared to a salvage operation? In that case, for what purpose? The essays in this book explore the role of women writers and readers in Nordic literary culture within a European and worldwide network of literary exchange. Specifically, they consider the transnational transmission of women's literary texts during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Textual exchange is as a migratory practice entailing processes of textual export, import, translation, reception and dissemination across national boundaries. These essays are case studies that not only explore the various transformations that happen when texts migrate from one cultural and linguistic framework to another, but also highlight the gendered nature of such transformations and the significance of transcultural exchange for perceptions of gender. Spanning from digital humanities and world literature, libraries and reading societies to the transnational reception of authors such as Selma Lagerlöf, Simone de Beauvoir and Monika Fagerholm, the essays contribute to an exciting and expanding field of humanities research. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of NORA—Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research.

Der Begriff der Agency – nur unbefriedigend als 'Handlungsmacht', 'Handlungspotenzial' oder 'Handlungsinitiative' ins Deutsche übersetzbar – ist in verschiedensten wissenschaftlichen Disziplinen unverzichtbar, um Prozesse gegenseitiger Einflussnahme, die Reichweite oder den Ausschluss von Handlungsspielräumen oder Verantwortung für konkrete Vorgänge zu bestimmen. In der Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaft hat er lange Zeit keine systematische Rolle gespielt. Erst in Reaktion auf Perspektiven der seit den 1990er-Jahren boomenden Akteur-Netzwerk-Theorie (ANT) und daran anschließenden Entwürfen der Medienwissenschaft wurden vergleichbare Konzepte von medial verteilter Handlungsmacht entwickelt. Gegenüber solchen eher theoriegeleiteten Studien nehmen die Autor*innen des vorliegenden Bandes verschiedene exemplarische Medienkonfigurationen in den Blick und versuchen das Erklärungspotenzial von 'Agency' als medienwissenschaftlicher Schlüsselkategorie aus der Perspektive ihres jeweiligen Forschungsfeldes genauer zu bestimmen. Unter den Bedingungen der 'Postdigitalität' – der Annahme, dass kaum noch 'nicht-digitale' Medienbereiche auszumachen sind und der Begriff der 'Digitalisierung' deshalb gewissermaßen bedeutungslos geworden ist – lassen sich gegenüber früheren Zugängen insbesondere zwei medienwissenschaftliche Facetten von Agency neu diskutieren: Zum einen, inwiefern neben menschlichen Akteuren auch neu entstandenen nicht-menschlichen Entitäten ein solches Handlungspotenzial zuzurechnen ist. Zum anderen wären im postdigitalen Raum auch die relativen Handlungs(un)fähigkeiten von individuellen, kollektiven und institutionellen Akteur*innen neu zu bestimmen, wo Handlungsketten oder Kommunikationsmuster zunehmend durch den verfügbaren oder beschränkten Zugang zu Ressourcen sowie den Affordanzen von digitalen Medienkonfigurationen gekennzeichnet sind. Agency postdigital bringt diese beiden Aspekte zusammen und zeichnet eine Karte der veränderten Verteilung und Manifestation von Handlungsmacht in der postdigitalen Welt entlang exemplarischer medienwissenschaftlicher Forschungsfelder.

Christine Ruane examines the issues of gender and class in the teaching profession of late imperial Russia, at a time when the vocation was becoming increasingly feminized in a zealously patriarchal society. Teaching was the first profession open to women in the 1870s, and by the end of the century almost half of all Russian teachers were female. Yet the notion that mothers had a natural affinity for teaching was paradoxically matched by formal and informal bans against married women in the classroom. Ruane reveals not only the patriarchal rationale but also how women teachers viewed their public roles and worked to reverse the marriage ban. Ruane's research and insightful analysis broadens our knowledge of an emerging professional class, especially newly educated and emancipated women, during Russia's transition to a more modern society.