The aim of the project Strategic Practices: Hidden Histories of Gender in Finland 1880-2005 is to reinsert an historical understanding back into research on gender and power. We strive to identify heretofore unseen aspects of gender history. We are particularly interested in how persons in the past viewed the dynamics of agency and power. We strive to develop and test a sensitive theoretical model which will allow us to study how gender relations have historically been negotiated in everyday homes, marketplaces and workplaces. The new model under development, whose working title within the project is the process model of gender (sukupuoliprosessimalli), will allow us to reincorporate individual motivation and strategy back into our structural understanding of gender, and to trace out the dynamics of gender power at the local, everyday level where they occur. We maintain that the ‘gender’ which exists at the level of cultural concepts is constantly produced by ‘acts’, including communication, which are constantly and willfully produced by social persons. Our project seeks to reconceptualize the concept of gender away from the notion of a hierarchical structure and toward a more fluid orchestration of cultural tactics in which individuals need social competence in order to navigate a rich complexity of gender codes.
The ultimate aim of the project in developing this model is to give rise to critical discussion and serious new empirical research. A process model of gender would facilitate the study of the fluidity and complexity of power, and help us understand the mechanics of power at the micro-level, including how some forms of power remain ‘hidden’. We will develop and test this new theoretical model within an interdisciplinary team of researchers working at different levels: both those who have used the older sukupuolijärjestelmä model as part of their research and have seen for themselves its limitations, and those postgraduate students who are coming to the field with fresh ideas and empirical data with which to critically test new models. The case studies addressed by each project member will be the testing grounds for this new model, to judge its limitations and advantages, the types of historical research for which it is most fruitful and for which it is less so.
