The program offers an interdisciplinary liberal arts education that critically engages students in considering the complexities of gender identity and women’s lives historically and in the contemporary moment. WGS coursework further helps students understand how gender intersects with other important social identities, like nationality, sexuality, race, class, ethnicity, and ability.

Student Learning Goals

• To explain how gender is produced within social institutions and how these institutions affect individual lives.
• To discuss histories of feminism as a social movement and feminist theories of social transformation.
• To explain theories of embodiment, such as how bodies are constituted within social and biological discourses, or the relationship between embodiment and subjectivity, consciousness, and agency.
• To critique how hegemonic feminism includes and/or excludes different theoretical perspectives, such as theories of racial formation and theories of sexuality.
• To analyze the mutual constitution of gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, nationality, and religion.
• To explain gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, nationality, and religion from the perspective of postcolonial and transnational frameworks of analysis.
• To identify how feminist theories are constructed and enacted both inside and outside of the classroom.
• To identify the intellectual paradigms and political perspectives of different modes of knowledge production or interdisciplinary methodologies.
• To analyze scholarship and a variety of media in order to create original arguments in writing.
• To apply different modes of feminist praxis, such as fieldwork, performance, or research.