Undergraduate Program
Undergraduate Program
Undergraduate Director:Dr. Yana Rodgers
Sr. Department Administrator: Monique Gregory
The Women's & Gender Studies undergraduate program, founded in the early seventies, is one of the oldest in the nation. Currently, the program has over 200 majors and minors and serves over 1900 students annually in a wide array of core and cross-listed courses. The major, approved in 1984, introduces students to significant issues and debates in feminist scholarship, theory, and activism.
“Women’s & Gender Studies seek to enrich traditional disciplinary approaches not simply by including women but by transforming the categories, through which knowledge is produced and disseminated.”
All courses are interdisciplinary and each considers the complex dynamics among race, ethnicity, locality, class, gender, and sexuality. The readings and discussions in each class represent a wide variety of women's perspectives concerning issues such as: the conceptualization of difference, the production and recreation of femininity and masculinity, language and gender, the division of labor, women and poverty, sexual violence, reproductive rights, gay and lesbian theory, gender and popular theory, and contemporary feminist politics. Ultimately, we strive to ground both research and theory in the everyday realities of feminist activism around the globe. Women’s & Gender Studies program faculty, students and staff are active members and leaders of academic and community women’s organizations.
The WGS alumnae pursue their professional career in various fields. One-fifth of our graduates continue their education in graduate programs in different fields (political science, English, law) around the country. Many alumnae also engage in work in the area of health and pharmacy (about one fourth). Others choose law (one-fifth of the alumnae), education (one fourth) media or computer studies. Many WGS graduates continue their activist work in non-governmental organizations that engage with women and work, international politics and women’s leadership.
01:988:250 Feminist Perspectives
- Course Code: 01:988:250
- Semester(s) Offered: Spring
- Credits: 3
01:988:240 Gender and Science
- Course Code: 01:988:240
- Semester(s) Offered: Spring
- Credits: 3
01:988:235 Dynamics of Class, Race, and Sex
- Course Code: 01:988:235
- Semester(s) Offered: Fall, Winter, Spring, Summer
- Credits: 3
- SAS Core Certified: CCD, CCO
01:988:202 Gender, Culture, and Representation
- Course Code: 01:988:202
- Semester(s) Offered: Fall, Winter, Spring, Summer
- Credits: 3
- SAS Core Certified: AHo, AHp
01:988:201 Feminist Practices
- Course Code: 01:988:201
- Semester(s) Offered: Fall, Winter, Spring, Summer
- Credits: 3
- SAS Core Certified: SCL
01:988:284 Feminist Knowledge Production
- Course Code: 01:988:284
- Semester(s) Offered: Fall
- Credits: 3
01:988:200 Gender, Digital Media, and Social Curation
- Course Code: 01:988:200
- Semester(s) Offered: Fall, Spring
- Credits: 3
01:988:160 Women Working in the Global Economy: Feminist Perspectives
- Course Code: 01:988:160
Course Description: This course examines issues related to women’s paid and unpaid work during a time of rapid integration of world markets. Students will analyze the role of government policy, unions, and women’s movements in raising women’s wages, promoting equal opportunity, fighting discrimination in the workplace, and securing greater control over working hours. We will integrate current policy and academic discourse on corporate responsibility and codes of conduct to uphold labor rights for female workers. We will also examine issues of intergenerational equity as women continue to perform most of the unpaid work caring for children and the elderly. By the end of the course you will be a more informed and critical reader of academic work, news accounts, and policy materials that present evidence and policy arguments about women and work.
01:988:130 Knowledge and Power : Issues in Women’s Leadership
- Course Code: 01:988:130
- Semester(s) Offered: Fall, Spring
- Credits: 3
- SAS Core Certified: CCD, CCO
01:988:101 Intro to Gender, Race and Sexuality
- Course Code: 01:988:101
- Semester(s) Offered: Fall, Winter, Spring, Summer
- Credits: 3
- SAS Core Certified: CCD, CCO
Course Description:
In this course we will be thinking about the ways that race, gender and sexuality structure our social worlds and intimate lives. We will ask what it means to describe these categories as ‘socially constructed’ and consider the mechanisms through which they are produced and reproduced. At the same time we will pay careful attention to the material ways in which power is organized and distributed through these categories. Assuming that these are not ‘natural’ categories we will look at the work that goes into making them appear so, and consider the ways in which their meanings and efficacy change over time. In the latter weeks of the course we will begin to think more about the value and pitfalls of using identity categories as analytical frameworks and organizing platforms.
The course is invested in an interdisciplinary approach and as such we will broach these questions by engaging a cross section of academic, literary, popular culture and activist texts. The course is designed to be not only an academic endeavor, but also an attempt to bridge our academic, personal and political investments, as such I encourage you to bring your life experiences and political investments into the course and classroom as a valuable set of knowledges that we will attempt to build upon and challenge.
Learning Goals
This course will adhere to the SAS 21st Century Challenge goals by supporting students to
- Analyze the degree to which forms of human difference shape a person’s experiences of and perspectives the world
- Analyze a contemporary global issue from a multidisciplinary perspective
- Analyze issues of social justice across local and global contexts
WGS learning goals
- Understand and critique the formation of categories of gender and sexuality as they function in social, economic, cultural and/or political contexts and as they intersect with other categories of difference such as race and ethnicity.
- Communicate effectively using gender analytics as a tool for academic research, for creative production, for collaborative work, and/or for practices of social change.
- Know the complexity and variety of differently gendered lives and livelihoods around the globe.
- Recognize stereotypes and the naturalization of hierarchies of difference through analyzing power dynamics from the micro to the macro level.
- Identify the politics of issue framing and knowledge production.