Gender, Sexuality, and Society

Our aim is to provide you with a coherent and comparative study of gender and sexuality within the social sciences and the humanities. Drawing from psychology, feminism, literary theory, sociology, politics, visual culture, and other fields of inquiry, you will develop an informed understanding of the fundamental concepts, theories, issues, and debates that surround gender and sexuality from a range of interdisciplinary perspectives. This will lay the foundation for a comparative investigation of interdisciplinary epistemologies and will prepare you for more focused topical, theoretical, and region-specific explorations within three fields of specialization. 

The educational goals for this major are as follows:

• You will demonstrate knowledge of the developmental, social, theoretical and historical frameworks that define the study of gender and sexuality from both a social sciences perspective and a humanities perspective.
• You will identify, compare, critique, and analyze the historical, social and cultural specificity of different conceptions of gender and sexuality.
• You will apply their knowledge of gender and society to a globally informed understanding and evaluation of the pressures, politics and debates of representations of gender and sexuality, particularly those bearing upon legal rights and social justice.
• You will be able to read and critique literature on sex and gender in the social sciences and the humanities.

No matter your specialization, you will examine larger social, cultural, and political explorations that involve subjects like the representation and construction of gender, the teaching of sexuality in schools, feminist rights within the workplace, gender and sexuality within colonial and post-colonial studies, and LGBT activism. Your studies will prepare you to interpret and critically analyze the scientific, biological, artistic, and poetic articulations of gender and sexuality at the center of contemporary social, cultural, and political debates.

With every single one of our majors, you’ll find a carefully curated medley of core courses and electives, which will provide you with the tools you need to establish an unshakeable foundation in the principles and concepts fundamental to your growth within your disciplines of choice. Many majors also enable you to specialize further within the broader area of study.

BROWSE ALL MAJORS AND REQUIREMENTS

The Gender, Sexuality and Society core courses, which you must take as part of the major requirements, will provide you with the tools you’ll need to ground your present and future studies. Your introduction to the fundamentals of Gender, Sexuality and Society will help pave the way for your successful completion of other GSS courses.