This edited volume brings together for the first time international research approaches from the field of figurational and processual sociology at the intersection of gender studies. It assembles current research on the change of gender relations in formal and informal structures. By using Norbert Elias’s process-sociological oeuvre selected gender figurations in the western and non-western world are discussed. This book is anchored, on the one hand, in a socio-historical understanding of the trajectory of gendered societies over a wide area and range of centuries in the Process of Civilization. On the other hand, the immediate impulse for this volume is the critical discussion of Eliasian thinking concerning dynamic gender relations in different empirical case studies and process-theory. It will be crucial reading for sociologists interested in the Elias school, as well as sociologists of gender more broadly.

Stefanie Ernst is Head of the Research Field Work, Knowledge and Sociology, Institute of Sociology, University of Münster, Germany.

Valerie Dahl is a researcher at the Rhine-Waal University of Applied Sciences, Germany.

Marta Bucholc is Director of the Centre of Figurational Research, Faculty of Sociology, University of Warsaw, Poland.