Gender and Women's Studies Program Courses and Requirements

The Gender and Women's Studies (GWS) Program focuses on the culturally and historically specific production of sexual difference, on the wide-ranging impact of feminist research both inside the academy and in the larger society, and on the intersections of gender with other social forces such as race, sexuality, class and colonialism.  The program fosters rigorous critical inquiry into these multiple forms of difference, challenging conventional cultural assumptions about women, sexuality and gender roles, and promotes the development of new ideas and research in feminist scholarship within an open, supportive environment.

Gender and Women's Studies majors will be able to:

  •  Ascertain how gender functions in the world;
  •  Understand how the experiential refutes and complicates theoretical claims;
  •  Engage gender theory, and understand how such analytical frameworks have been generated;
  •  Generate new knowledge through research, and perform critical analysis of that knowledge;
  •  Recognize how knowledge about gender is produced, including the lived experience of gender (bodily knowledge);
  •  Situate primary research within a critical framework.