Our courses are interdisciplinary and transnational in content and approach. Our curriculum spans the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Courses deal with popular culture, medicine, historical and contemporary feminisms, cross-cultural perspectives, arts, race, class, and the differences between sex and gender.
Interdisciplinary study was born in order to solve problems unaddressed or insolvable through the methods of a single discipline. Deploying insights from an array of fields as part of the process of reaching new insights, interdisciplinary study examines questions thematically. It is problem-oriented and focused upon generating new ideas, methods, or solutions.
I was very fond of The Politics of Marriage, taught by Professor Friedman. It combined my interests in interpersonal relationships and politics and added an anthropological perspective. The interdisciplinary nature of gender studies courses has always been one of their most appealing features.
Joshua Allen, expected December 2017 graduation; B.A., Creative Writing (through Individualized Major Program); B.A., Political Science; Minor, Gender Studies
Examination of popular cultural “makings” of masculinity, femininity, and sexuality through typical representation of gender within fiction, theater, cinema, radio, music, television, journalism, and other secular mass media. Analysis of the developing international telecommunications “superhighway” and struggles to secure increased representation of women and of feminist perspectives within existing culture industries.
Investigation of forms in which gender, gender markings, gender meanings, and gender relations are arranged in different cultures of the world. Assessment of debates concerning the global salience of feminist claims about women's “oppression,” political mobilization around gender, body rituals marking masculinity and femininity, indigenous women, and resistance to gender formations beyond Euro-American borders.
Examines the construction of sexuality and sexuality studies while analyzing the intersection of race and ethnicity in the production of knowledge and particular social categories that shape racial communities and sexual cultures. May employ a range of different approaches, depending on the instructor.
Investigation of debates among feminists as to whether aspirations towards global feminism are possible and desirable. The course compares concerns about the global situation of women, as articulated by international bodies such as the United Nations, with concerns articulated by feminists in different parts of the world.
Examines the crucially important role that space and place play in the construction and maintenance of gender norms and sexual practices. Subjects may include the gendered history of the domestic domain, feminist critiques of architecture and urban planning, the modernist art of flâneurie, or the gendered and racial politics of imprisonment in the United States.
Investigates “gendered” ways that technological transformations reshape social life, physical space, built environments, or medical research. Familiarizes students with how feminist inquiry remaps such fields as computer technology, urban and development studies, geography, medicine, or health sciences.
The College of Arts