ABSTRACT
Does a specific, Nordic profile within gender research and women’s studies exist? Posing this question begs another: does anything exist that could be called specifically “Nordic”? When a historical scholar such as Benedict Anderson ends up defining a nation as “an imagined political community”, doubt must necessarily be cast upon calling anything inherently Nordic (Anderson 1991). Anderson could not reach a “scientific definition” of the nation concept, and concluded that nationality and nationalism are “cultural artefacts of a particular kind”. Worldwide, scholars within women’s studies have similarly reached the conclusion that it is impossible to define Woman with a capital W.Nor have we been able to unearth any scientific definitions of gender; rather, we have been compelled to deconstruct the “big narratives” unfolded about woman, about gender and about what constitutes femininity and masculinity.
