Critical Cultural and Feminist Studies

F3K examines gender, intimacy and the body as sites of cultural change. We ask how demands for flexibility and self-optimization become embedded in the self, while technologies, prosthetics and transitions expand and transform our bodies. We also explore how the humanities and medical sciences shape embodied life, and how bodies push back in ways that unsettle the very categories and technologies that seek to define them.

Building on decolonial epistemologies, F3K works to make space for Indigenous knowledge systems and to examine the methodological and epistemological implications they carry in  Nordic and arctic contexts. We ask how research practices can be rethought so they do not reproduce colonial extractive logics, but instead create new and more sustainable ways of knowing. We draw on Indigenous feminist and ecofeminist perspectives that link the exploitation of land and bodies to patriarchal and colonial knowledge formations, and that emphasise care, reciprocity and relationality as principles for producing knowledge.

Drawing on empirical work with Nordic trans and queer history, F3K examines how historical sources, literature, oral history and popular culture can form the basis for a distinctly Nordic vocabulary in gender and sexuality studies. We approach history as an archive of feelings, where emotions, desire, shame and longing are not only themes but also methods for understanding past life worlds. Our aim is to develop theory that grows out of the empirical material and the cultural and historical specificities of Nordic contexts.

F3K examines how the home functions as a site of intimacy, belonging, emotional survival, politics and resistance. Drawing on feminist theory, we understand the home both as an affective and political zone and as a concrete space where gender, class and sexuality are negotiated through everyday practices. We focus especially on domestic, popular and feminine sources such as women’s magazines, advice columns, television, film and everyday literature, which reflect and shape ideas about the good life, health, care, family, desire, norms and shame. Friendship appears here as a distinctive social and cultural formation that challenges heteronormative intimacies and opens up alternative ways of organising care, intimacy and kinship. Through the concept of the emotional archive, we explore how friendships feel and have felt, and how such experiences are embedded in broader histories of emotion, including how friendships have worked as practices of resistance, affective economies and alternatives to the ideals of the nuclear family.