Maaike Hommes (she/her) is Assistant Professor in Cultural Analysis and Film and Visual Culture at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society.

More information about Maaike Hommes

Fields of interest

• Cultural Analysis
• Crip theory
• Disability studies
• Queer theory
• Affect theory
• Materialist feminism

Research

My PhD research was funded by the GCSC in Giessen and coined the concept Nervous Routes to understand how unexplained illness gains shape through, for instance, internet memes, video art, and the video essay, autotheory, literary memoir, or mainstream (documentary) cinema, and how these forms clash or intersect with medical discourse and texts. The project addressed how the lines of thought along which unexplained illness is made sense of usually involve notions of blame and accountability. The proposed route is to move towards an acknowledgement of unexplained illness and conceive of relational forms of care.

An (eclectic) list of current research interests includes: relational embodiment, embodied spectatorship, relationality and care, knowledge production, accessible pedagogy, crip/queer cinema, the video essay, documentary film, medical imaging and digital technologies, philosophy of science, “leaky bodies” and post-capitalist parenting, reproductive justice and breastfeeding as a form of relationality, or, what Rachel Cusk calls the “motherbaby” as embodied form.

Curriculum vitae

Maaike has a background in the arts, working on events and talks around the body and the senses, such as smell and taste.

Maaike was part of a guest-editor team for the Giessen-based Journal On_Culture, and has published scholarly work in journals such as Literature and Medicine and Diffractions.

Popular (non-academic) writing in Dutch has appeared in De Nederlandse Boekengids, De Groene Amsterdammer, and Tirade.

Publications