Introduction: Feminist Cultural Studies

There is no consensus as to how Cultural Studies is to be defined or delimited. It does not consist of one unified theory but must rather be regarded as an open field that is characteristically manifold. Since the field of Cultural Studies is so open and fluid it has taken varying forms in different parts of the world – Cultural Studies has been globalised. One sign is that a number of Cultural Studies conferences have taken place all over the world, including in Sweden, where the question of what Swedish Cultural Studies is and can be has been discussed. Feminist perspectives are today well established and integrated in this field, and there is a considerable overlap and mutual interaction between Cultural Studies and Gender Studies. However, the question of what Feminist Cultural Studies is today has remained under-theorised, and there is also a growing need to collect and on a wide front present such work. This is not least the case in the Swedish and Nordic context, where such a broad collection of work in Feminist Cultural Studies has not been published for a long time. To remedy this deficiency we who are the editors of this theme section of Culture Unbound issued a call for papers for the European Cultural Studies conference arranged by ACSIS (the Advanced Cultural Studies Institute of Sweden) in 2011, with the following wording: