GUIDING PRINCIPLES
Gender and sexuality are fundamental to the ways humans understand themselves and a major or minor in Gender and Women’s Studies can enhance practically any other field of study. It is a discipline that continually asks us to rethink history, culture and identity and it continues to transform scholarship and fundamental assumptions in all areas of the humanities, social and natural sciences, and the professions.
The Gender and Women’s Studies program focuses on the historical and cultural production of gender difference, the significance of feminist research, and how gender interacts with other axes of difference, especially race, class, sexuality, and ability. We bring feminist and queer theory into conversation with research across the university, inviting students to explore new ideas within an open, supportive environment.
Students pursuing a major or minor in Gender and Women’s Studies:
- Identify how gender and sexuality operate in society—shaping cisgender, nonbinary, transgender, and queer identities—and how they influence economic, social, and political structures.
- Acquire tools for making intersectionality central to awareness of how identity works, learning how we can make sense of gender and sexuality through rigorous exploration of race, ethnicity, class, ability, nationality, religion, and other axes of inequality.
- Apply insights offered through GWS to activist work for social justice and personal life decisions.
We affirm values that oppose racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, classism, xenophobia, ableism, ageism, and hatred based on religious identity both publicly and explicitly and strive to provide an inclusive intellectual community that recognizes, values, and embraces diversity in its many forms. We make every effort to ensure that our commitment to social justice encompasses values of diversity, equity and inclusion and are manifest in our policies, programs, and practices.
COLLEGE GUIDING PRINCIPLES
COLLEGE MISSION
DIVERSITY, EQUITY & INCLUSION
SUSTAINABLITY