Welcome to the Gender Relations Centre

The Gender Relations Centre (GRC) was established in 1992 and forms part of the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies (RSPAS), College of Asia and the Pacific at The Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra.

Our mission is simple: to be at the forefront of international research and graduate education on transformations of gender and sexuality in Asia and the Pacific. Our intellectual and pedagogical rationale is threefold:

First, we focus on connecting theory and practice on questions relating to: gender and sexuality in cross-cultural translation and relation; the transformation of gender regimes with European colonialism and Christianity; agency, sexuality and gender in discourses about reproductive health, population and HIV/AIDS; gendered violence, notions of personhood, family conflict and suicide; transformations of masculinities; gender, globalization, development and environmental challenges; gender, citizenship and migration; national and transnational movements of feminism and gender activism; and gender and visual representations in popular culture and art.

Second, we deploy a comparative interdisciplinary lens in addressing these questions. Drawing primarily on theory and methods from anthropology, history, cultural studies and Asian and Pacific studies, we compare trajectories of transformation within and between the regions of Asia and the Pacific. This has been effected in a wide range of research publications and grounds the pedagogy of our graduate program, in terms of specific supervisions, collective retreats, reading and writing seminars and our weekly cross-campus Gender, Sexuality and Culture seminar series.

Third, we act as a node in connecting research on gender and sexuality across the ANU and beyond. The network and graduate program of Gender, Sexuality and Culture engages about forty staff and many graduate students across campus, some of whom are primarily enrolled in disciplines such as anthropology, history or in interdisciplinary cultural studies. We run a weekly cross-campus colloquium for this audience at which speakers from the ANU, across Australia and overseas present. We are increasingly engaged with the Gender Thematic Advisory Group within AusAID and other government departments with concerns about gender in Asia and the Pacific, with diplomatic missions, and with leading centres for research in gender and sexuality across the region, especially in China and the Pacific.