Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies - Volume 23, Issue 2, 2020

In this article, I argue to open out from critical strands within the Open Access (OA) movement, to propose a genealogy that embraces the activism of feminist, queer, anti-colonial, anti-racist, and labour movements active since the 1980s. By discussing contemporary forms of feminist and intersectional approaches to OA publishing against a background of grassroots activism since the 1980s, I aim to open out from the engagement of ‘concerned academics’ towards those activists who share a politics of struggle against capitalist, colonialist, and patriarchal domination – across epistemological, disciplinary, and geographical boundaries. With this, I seek to tentatively articulate an approach to academic OA publishing in which academic and activist work is not perceived as something divided but as something that embodies different aspects of the same praxis online and offline.

The author investigates the possible consequences of open access for learned societies with their own journal, such as the Dutch–Flemish association for gender history. For learned societies, the advantage of open access is that contributions in their journals become easily accessible for researchers. But, it remains uncertain whether small associations are able to meet the technical requirements for open access. More important is the financial aspect. When the content of the journals of learned societies has to be online and freely accessible, members may no longer wish to support these associations financially. When the associations start losing members, they are affected financially and may no longer have the means to publish their journals. In this situation, they may lose more members and may, in the end, even be threatened in their existence. This has other consequences as well, because learned societies and their journals contribute to the diversity and vitality of the humanities and allow a wide audience to become acquainted with results from academic research.

In the Netherlands, the redistribution of unpaid housework from women to men is very limited, despite the fact that women’s labour force participation and level of education have increased significantly over the past decade. We use the feminist economic household bargaining approach to analyse male partners’ contribution to housework, with primary data from heterosexual couples. We collected the data from two mutually exclusive groups who either supply or demand paid household services through two online agencies. The results show that, for the lower-class households (those supplying services), men do more unpaid housework when their female partner earns a relatively high income. For the higher-class households (those demanding services), we find no such effect for women’s income. Instead, we find that, when men earn relatively high incomes, they reduce their contribution to housework. Moreover, we find that, with a higher family income, more paid household services are hired. We conclude that, for the lower class, income insecurity seems to stimulate men to do more housework, allowing women to do more paid work, whereas, for the higher class, more personal and more family income appears to be an escape for men from doing more housework.

This article aims to investigate how the notions of love and romantic relationships are constructed in secular and Catholic texts. Flemish society can be characterised by an intricate entanglement of secularism and Catholicism. I aim to examine this entanglement through an empirical analysis of both secular and Catholic discourses on love and romantic relationships. These discourses offer a challenging case study in which the fluid boundaries between Catholic and secular formations can be explored. Throughout the article, it becomes clear that these narratives can show both overlaps and differences when it pertains to themes such as love as a verb, autonomy, and the monogamous couple relationship. I argue that both discourses can be categorised as gender blind, and that they both sustain implicit gendered expectations regarding the romantic love complex.