Women’s and Gender Studies Program

Welcome to the Women’s and Gender Studies Program!

The Women’s and Gender Studies Program provides an interdisciplinary, critical, feminist, and cross-cultural understanding of women, gender, and power in a global context. Focusing on the interactions and intersections of race, class, (dis)ability, gender, and sexuality, Women’s and Gender Studies fosters the generations of knowledge about gender and sexuality in all its diversity and encourages the critical interrogation of traditional academic disciplines.

Program Overview

Using cross-cultural and multi-racial perspectives, the program includes exploration of:

  • women’s lives, labor, and arts
  • the politics of sexuality
  • the history of gender roles and performances
  • the structural, institutional, legal, and historical meanings of gender
  • representations of women in different media
  • the impact of gendered analysis on the sciences
  • the gendered formation of knowledge

Our learning goals include the ability to:

  • Engage critically, at an advanced level, with concepts and debates in contemporary feminist theory.
  • Engage with critical theories of gender and sexuality as they intersect with race, ethnicity, class, religion, nationality, geopolitical and regional specificities.
  • Orient ourselves within a range of intellectual, social, and political histories relevant to the field.
  • Analytically explore and engage with critical and historical concepts and apply them within discussion and debate, academic research and writing, and praxis.
  • Interrogate the assumptions on which their own approaches to gender or sexuality-related cultural analysis are based.
  • Develop an understanding of the various disciplines that inform women’s and gender studies, to assess and question the divisions between these disciplines and develop an understanding of interdisciplinarity and post-disciplinarity.
    • Disciplines include: health/medicine; law; politics; international relations; economics; media and communication studies; philosophy; theology; cultural studies; queer & LGBTQ+ studies; ethnic, regional, and post-colonial studies.
  • Design and execute independent research in the field at an advanced level, sufficient to be considered for publication.

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