I think everyone should major or minor in WGST because gender and sexuality studies are an essential part of life. Whether you want to go into government, business, service, or something else, women’s and gender studies classes provide you with tools to understand systems of oppression and how to dismantle them.
Senior Testimonials
One of the things that the WGST Program values is its students’ experience in this program, ensuring that they gain the best this program has to offer. To gain some insight on what it is like being a Women’s and Gender Studies Major at Georgetown, hear from our fellow 2022 alum’s experiences!
Taking Introduction to Sexuality Studies with Prof. Sizemore-Barber my first semester at Georgetown completely transformed my life. …as a queer man of color wanting to live more in his truth while in college, I decided to take a class on sexuality. As the semester progressed, I realized that the Women’s and Gender Studies Department and its professors had similar goals as I did. They wanted to help queer students of color find meaning within the connections, be advocates, and enact change.
My favorite WGST memory is walking around in Dr. April Sizemore-Barber’s classroom in Intro to Sexuality Studies, emulating masculine and feminine body movements to exemplify Judith Butler’s theory of gender performance. The exercise is what really made the theory click for me.
You-Me Park is my favorite WGST professor! Everyone needs to take at least one WGST class because it gives you a lens through which you can look at everything in the world. After taking a WGST class, you will never see the structures of your life and the world in the same way again, and we need everyone to have this feminist lens on things in order to change our world and our lives and conditions.
I took my first Women’s and Gender Studies class with Professor Park and never left! She inspired me to become a Women’s and Gender Studies major and has helped me immensely in my academic journey. I think people should major or minor in WGST because you can analyze anything through a gendered lens. It forces you to learn to think critically and expand intellectually by conversing and debating with people with differing opinions!
If you to truly understand our world and how it can be a better place for all of us, you need to take a WGST class. Studying women’s issues and gender issues will equip you with tools to most truthfully and tangibly dissect the problems in all fabrics of society. You will feel the urgency of social justice, the impetus of all that is right and wrong in this world, and the hunger to make a change in our society.
Professor You-Me Park is an unlike any professor with whom I have had the pleasure to work at Georgetown. There are few people who invest in students like she does. Her leadership of the Program has made it so students are prioritized in every scholarly and community-based endeavor of WGST at Georgetown, and I cannot recommend the Program enough!
My first WGST course, Gender & Sexuality in MENA with Professor Michelle Ohnona, changed the course of my academic career. She introduced me to Orientalism and its influence in Western discourse. I was then able to process my own personal experiences of discrimination as a Bengali Muslim American woman using this framework while understanding how Muslim women and our bodies have historically been used as political objects to advance Western colonialism and imperialism. Originally, I was just a Psychology major, but after this class, I knew I also had to major in WGST. By doing so, I was able to hear from diverse, marginalized perspectives that are often deliberately missing from other courses. My dream of becoming a child/adolescent therapist for marginalized communities is rooted in dismantling different systems of oppression through an intersectional lens, which is exactly what the WGST department is working towards as well.