Women, Gender & Sexuality

Return to: College of Arts & Sciences: Departments/Programs 

Overview Women, Gender & Sexuality is an interdisciplinary program in which students study gender relations and sexualities.  By examining social issues, literary texts, media, technologies, and historical materials, students develop a critical, socially engaged sense of how gender and sexuality shape and are shaped by the world around them.  Topics range from women’s political participation to the history of sexualities, women writers, theories of race/class/gender/nation, gendered inequalities, masculinities, body politics, queer sexualities, women and money, feminist environmentalism, and gender and technology, to name but a few.

Students gain credit toward a major or minor by registering for WGS prefix courses as well as primary and adjunct courses across departments, programs, and schools.  Primary and adjunct courses have been offered in association with African American Studies; American Studies; Anthropology; Art History; Classics; Comparative Literature; Drama; East Asian Languages and Cultures; Education; English; French; German; History; Latin American Studies; Media Studies; Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures; Music; Nursing; Philosophy; Politics; Psychology; Religious Studies; Slavic Languages and Literatures; Sociology; Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese; and other units.  Updated course listings are available on the program website.

Faculty WGS’s core faculty represent a range of disciplines across the humanities and social sciences. They have conducted research on women, gender, and sexualities in many areas of the world, including India, Iran, Japan, South Africa, Sri Lanka, and the United States, and they bring that expertise with them into the classroom.  Aside from regular classroom and advising activities, faculty members meet with majors and minors at lectures in the program’s colloquium series and at other sponsored events.

Students Due to the interdisciplinary nature of the program, many of our students are double majors. We also encourage non-majors and minors to explore the variety of courses we offer.