GSS is committed to the study of issues specific to women and the LGBT community, with added emphasis on understanding disciplinary models of knowledge.
About the Concentration
Gender and Sexuality Studies (GSS) is an interdisciplinary program that examines gender and sexuality as fundamental categories of social, political, historical, and cultural analysis.
Taught by faculty working in diverse academic fields, GSS courses introduce students to a range of perspectives and methodologies for thinking critically about how categories of gender and sexuality are constructed in historically and culturally specific ways. Students acquire concepts and critical skills for examining institutions and other complex social mechanisms that serve to regulate sexual practices and to reproduce certain prescribed forms of gendered subjectivity.
Exploring the ways gender and sexuality operate within structures of power and inequality, GSS courses situate questions about masculinity, femininity, sexuality, and transgender in relation to other analytical frameworks such as race, ethnicity, class, age, disability, and sexual orientation. The program offers courses that examine the lives and experiences of women and LGBTQ+ people in a variety of historical, cultural, and political contexts, courses that engage questions of sexual difference, sexual roles, sexual socialization, and sexual bias, as well as courses that explore various intersections between feminism, gender theory, queer theory, transgender studies, post-colonialism, indigeneity, black studies, and social justice activism.
Becoming familiar with the history, theoretical foundations, methods, and core debates of the discipline, students concentrating in GSS should graduate with a solid grasp of what defines Gender and Sexuality Studies as a vibrant, evolving field of interdisciplinary research and analysis.
Exploring the ways gender and sexuality operate within structures of power and inequality, GSS courses situate questions about masculinity, femininity, sexuality, and transgender in relation to other analytical frameworks such as race, ethnicity, class, age, disability, and sexual orientation. The program offers courses that examine the lives and experiences of women and LGBTQ+ people in a variety of historical, cultural, and political contexts, courses that engage questions of sexual difference, sexual roles, sexual socialization, and sexual bias, as well as courses that explore various intersections between feminism, gender theory, queer theory, transgender studies, post-colonialism, indigeneity, black studies, and social justice activism.
Becoming familiar with the history, theoretical foundations, methods, and core debates of the discipline, students concentrating in GSS should graduate with a solid grasp of what defines Gender and Sexuality Studies as a vibrant, evolving field of interdisciplinary research and analysis.