Research Training Group

The central idea of the RTG is to establish embodied gender research across scientific disciplines. To understand gender research as embodied means to (once again) take the idea that people are living entities, composed in the form of bodies, into closer consideration.

By focusing on the material and phenomenal dimensions of gender, the RTG aims to establish a new approach to gender and gender relations as well as a new empirical field of research. The unique scientific component of this research program lies, most notably, in its dissolution of the rigid oppositions that have developed over the past decades in the field of gender research and in its reception in particular. In doing so, it opens up new and productive connecting perspectives. This is accomplished by bringing corporeality and the body into the discourse of deconstructivist approaches while, at the same time, breaking free from the limitations of essentialist understandings.

Following existing approaches of gender research, we understand gender as a process that cannot be made or seen as static. It is an inescapable and historically specific requirement. Going beyond the corresponding deconstructivist approaches, however, the RTG does not only analyze the construction of reality through language and latent social and discursive structures. Phenomenological approaches are also taken in the analysis of the multidimensional composition of lived experience. Interesting from this perspective are the structural boundness of gendered modes of existence and the obstinacy of subjective experience. If we understand the living body as a continuous, incomplete process that carries emancipatory potential in its obstinacy—which is a central premise of the RTG—transformations of gender and gender relations come more markedly into view.

The RTG does not see the bodily and lived experience of gender as a question reserved only for certain specialized sciences. On the contrary, the subject matter requires a dialogue between disciplines, as this is the only way experiential space, in all its complexity, can be grasped. The RTG is a place in which different disciplines and internationally renowned scientists of Bielefeld University work in cooperation. For many years, these scientists have conducted gender research in existing institutions such as the "Interdisziplinäres Zentrum für Geschlechterforschung" or IZG. Using subject-specific materials and empirical data, the fields of American studies, German literary studies, health sciences, political science, sociology, and sports science focus on different aspects of the bodily and lived possibilities of experiencing gender. The scientists involved are highly qualified for this because they each have specific expertise in the different dimensions of body, corporeality, and peoples' own self-lived experience (age, ethnicity, health, religion, sexuality, sport etc.); thus, they complement each other in their fields of inquiry as well as in their theoretical perspectives.

The RTG research program is grouped into two areas: the bodily-lived constitution of societal modes of existence (Research Pillar I) and the transformation of the arrangement of genders (Research Pillar II)—the latter always made possible by the former.

In view of the current societal context of right-wing populist trends and their associated challenges to accomplishments of emancipation and equal rights, together with a revival of traditional family and gender norms, the RTG is of high social and political relevance. The focus on the gender experience is especially important considering that gender serves as a "bridge of affect" in populist discourses (Gabriele Dietze). Furthermore, the transfer of scientific knowledge into the knowledge of everyday actors and organizations is a systematic part of the RTG: a product of its investigation of social experiences and the close link of theory and empiricism.