Introduction to Gender and Women’s Studies

Catalog description

This course introduces students to thinking critically and analytically about the complex ways that gender is socially constructed and enforced. It focuses on how race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, religion, ethnicity, and geopolitical location affect the ways gender is lived. The course addresses how social, political, economic, and cultural conditions create and maintain gendered identities and social relations, the ways people navigate gendered expectations and experiences, and how feminist inquiry questions existing forms of power and privilege. This class is based on feminist scholarship and will introduce students to feminist theory and analysis.