The Gender Studies program at Saint Michael’s College focuses on questions of gender and difference, the body and sexuality. As students investigate power relations, social inequalities, and modes of resistance, they consider how social constructs shape the production of knowledge in given fields at particular moments and locales.

Our courses also examine the ways in which naturalized gender norms influence everyday practices and manifest in the words we use, the clothing we wear, the popular culture we create or consume, the family structures we inhabit, and the laws and public policies we obey or defy. Our program pays particular attention to how gender and sexuality intersect with race, class, ethnicity, national belonging, and transnational movement(s).

In Depth

The Gender Studies Program fosters awareness of the relationship between gender and culture — that is, between the ways in which culture shapes perceptions of femininity and masculinity, and how these perceptions interact with other aspects of culture. Gender Studies examines these processes in their historical and contemporary manifestations.

An interdisciplinary program, Gender Studies draws from a wide range of faculty and courses, including fine arts, liberal arts, humanities, social and natural sciences and pre-professional programs. Since much of culture is grounded in constructions of gender, issues examined in courses may encompass sexual identities and orientations, intersex and transgender issues, social practices, gender-influenced cultural productions and historical change. Courses across the curriculum may consider such matters as how biology intersects with culture, how gender creates and maintains structures of power, how aspects of the humanities are gender-inflected, and how gendered identities affect personhood. The purpose of such academic exploration is to expand curricular possibilities that enable students to comprehend more fully the complex factors that shape their experiences of themselves, others and the world. Service learning and active engagement in contemporary gender issues are essential aspects of the Gender Studies Program.