Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSX) is a cross-disciplinary area of inquiry that investigates the social, psychological, biological, and cultural construction of gender, as well as the ways women and men locate themselves within gender systems. Because femininities and masculinities vary as a result of cultural, historical, political, and institutional forces, gender inquiry helps students understand the multiple ways gender and gender relations are socially constructed, and how these understandings of gender in turn shape virtually every aspect of our everyday lives: political institutions, law, the economy, the family, education, work, literature, the arts, media, philosophy, religion, and sexuality.

Courses in the WGSX cross-disciplinary curriculum identify gender as a fundamental category of analysis in theory and practice. The program is committed to the centrality of the study of women, while at the same time interrogating gender and sexuality as organizing categories. We use “women” as an inclusive term that refers to all woman-identifying individuals. WGSX Courses will allow students to focus their study on materials that illustrate women’s condition, history, and achievements; to investigate how women have been portrayed and how those representations are changing; and to examine feminist critiques of academic areas of knowledge, including the contributions of queer theory and new feminist research. In order to provide a new site for knowledge production that engages differences constructively, the WGSX study area not only locates sex, gender, and sexuality within traditional disciplinary categories but also fosters interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary exploration of the conditions that have shaped people’s experiences both as objects and as subjects of knowledge regarding gender and sexuality. The program is committed to the centrality of the study of women while at the same time interrogating masculinity, as well as gender and sexuality as organizing categories.

At the conclusion of the WGSX major, students will be able to:

• Distinguish variations in gendered systems across culture(s) and over time;
• Assess how sex, gender, and sexuality are related to other social hierarchies and identity markers, such as race, ethnicity, nationality, class, and ability; 
• Critique how sex, gender, and sexuality shape aspects of our daily lives; and
• Integrate and implement values of inclusion, diversity, and equity in regard to sex, gender, and sexuality.