Correspondence Directory

Majors and Courses of InstructionWomen’s and Gender StudiesWomen’s and GenderStudiesMajorProgram Director and Assistant Professor - Richelle SchrockContinuing Part-time Instructor - Connie RichardsWomen’s and Gender Studies is an area of study as well as an optic for understanding society,culture, and political events. The program offers interdisciplinary, cross-cultural, and transnationalcourses and provides a meeting ground to explore questions about political institutions, globalevents, and collective and individual action. Courses in the program examine how an individual’ssocial experiences are shaped by history and institutions of gender/sex, socioeconomic class, race,sexuality, and nationality.Students are encouraged to develop their analytical, comparative, transnational, and media literacyskills by taking courses in the program offered by contributing faculty in history, economics,literature, sociology, anthropology, journalism, and zoology, as well as many other departments. Theacademic frameworks provided in courses seek to enhance the integration of these skills beyond theclassroom and campus to one’s everyday public and personal lives.Courses in the Women’s and Gender Studies program provide perspectives throughout the entirecurriculum as they are also taught by many faculty across disciplines. In this way the programenriches more traditional disciplinary approaches not simply by including the study of women andgender constructions but by transforming the categories through which knowledge is produced,applied, and disseminated within that given discipline.Women’s and Gender Studies courses are categorized in three ways. (I) Program courses areprimarily interdisciplinary, taught wholly within the WGS program and carry the WGS prefixand course number. Some of these courses are also cross-listed with other departments. Thesecourses focus on the study of women and gender constructions through the frameworks offeminist theories, methodologies, and activism. These courses explore not only the constructions offemininity and masculinity but also how additional social locations and identities (race/ethnicity,socioeconomic class, sexuality, and nationality) shape and make one another. (II) Disciplinefocusedcourses are classes taught by faculty whose primary appointment is in another departmentor program. These classes generally address the study of women and gender within the context of aparticular discipline (such as English or history). Many of these courses also explore how feministframeworks have reformulated their disciplines and analyses. (III) Related courses are listed under acourse number from the originating department or program. These are courses in which substantiveattention (approximately a quarter of the course content) is given to feminist frameworks thatexplore the intersections of gender, race/ethnicity, sexuality, class, and nationality, but such issuesmay not be the primary focus of the class.Major: A minimum of ten units consisting of: WGS 110, one theory or methods course; theremaining eight units of the major will be a mix of program, discipline-focused or related courses;of these eight units a minimum of six units must be program or discipline-focused; a minimum ofthree courses must be from program courses; no more than two courses can be from related courses;and a course taken in the theory/methods list cannot double count towards these eight units.At least seven out of the 10 courses must be 250 or higher. Students are also encouraged to takerelevant electives across the curriculum to enhance their major.274