Women's and Gender Studies is an interdisciplinary program designed to encourage students to focus critically on gender and sexuality. Many of our courses investigate how assumptions about gender and/or sexuality operate in society, shaping feminine, masculine, transgender, gay, lesbian, bisexual and queer identities, and how they influence social and political structures. Recent work in Women's and Gender Studies has demonstrated the need to reexamine past work in such fields as history, economics, psychology, and literature to create a curriculum that represents the history and achievement of women as well as men, glbtq people as well as heterosexuals, while reflecting on the ways that assumptions about gender and sexuality shape academic disciplines. Integral to the Women's and Gender Studies is the idea of intersectionality- that (amongst other axes of identification) race, ethnicity, class, ability, nationality, and religion are important factors in the any critical understanding of gender and sexuality. Equally central is the challenge of interdisciplinarity WGST represents: what it means, for example, to read Toni Morrison's Beloved in light of racialized notions of femininity, to use gender theory to examine the ways norms of heterosexual masculinity inform Western political philosophy, to analyze the impact class and race in the U.S. has on women's access to health care, or to consider the particular impact global warming or HIV/AIDS has on women in developing countries because of the gendered division of labor.

What do you do with a WGST major? (more)