Feminist cultural studies are affiliated with the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies founded by Richard Hoggart at the University of Birmingham.  In 1974, a group of women students at this center formed the Women’s Studies Group, which later published the first book on feminist cultural studies - Women Take Issue: Aspects of Women’s Subordination (1978). This group wanted to explore women’s experiences of cultural formations and to achieve this used approach that integrated approaches of women’s studies and cultural studies. Questions that they wanted to answer were: what forces reproduce patriarchal oppression of women; and what form of political action could be able to combat that oppression? 

Feminist cultural studies researched concepts of reproduction, race, colonialism, postcolonialism, materialism, postfeminism, and class; and also diverse topics such as advertising, shopping malls, art, literature, fashion, film, television, soap operas, magazines, romance, youth subcultures, pornography, and housewifery. Some of the most notable representatives of feminist cultural studies are Ang Ien, Hazel Carby, Teresa Ebert, Rosemary Hennessey, Dorothy Hobson, Angela McRobbie, Elspeth Probyn, Janice Radway, and Janice Winship.

Dutch-Australian scientist of cultural studies Ien Ang (1954-) studies media and cultural consumption, identity politics, nationalism, and ethnicity, as well as globalization. In the book Desperately Seeking the Audience (1991), she presents a "structured interpretive model" of the analysis of the relationship between the media and their audience. The messages sent by the media can be interpreted in different ways, but there is always one way of understanding the message that the media themselves impose as the most important and preferred. On the other hand, it is wrong to look at the whole audience uniformly, because different segments of the audience have their own needs and preferences. These segments differ in age, gender, class, geographic region, religion, or belonging to a particular subculture.

Authors: Ien Ang. Carby, Hazel; Ebert, Teresa; Hennessey, Rosemary; Hobson, Dorothy; McRobbie, Angela; Probyn, Elspeth; Radway, Janice; Winship, Janice.

Books:

Ang. Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination (1985);

     -     Desperately Seeking the Audience (1991);

     -     Living Room Wars: Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World (1996);

     -     Alter/Asians: Asian-Australian Identities in Art, Media and Popular Culture (2000);

     -     On Not Speaking Chinese: Living between Asia and the West (2001);

     -     The SBS Story (2008);

     -     Cultural Diplomacy: Beyond the National Interest? (2016);  

     -     Chinatown Unbound: Trans-Asian Urbanism in the Age of China (2019);

Modleski, Tania. Feminism without Women: Culture and Criticism in a “Postfeminist” Age (1991);

Shiach, Morag. Feminism and Cultural Studies (1999);

Thornham, Sue. Feminist Theory and Cultural Studies: Stories of Unsettled Relations (2000);

Women’s Studies Group, Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Women Take Issue: Aspects of Women’s Subordination (1978).