Introduction to Women's and Gender Studies

Catalog description

This course introduces students to the interdisciplinary field of women’s and gender studies. It is designed to help them develop a critical framework for thinking about questions relating to sex, gender, and sexuality and the ways that they are constructed and institutionalized – in our relationships, in our families (broadly defined), in our schools and workplaces, and in our culture. This course connects theory with “real life.” Further, because women’s and gender studies is an inherently disciplinary field, we will be reading scholarship from a number of disciplines and will have particular representation from philosophy, history, and psychology. Students will examine how these disciplines have approached gender, privilege and oppression, power, and identity. Through all of this work, they will seek to expand their knowledge of women’s and gender studies in terms of issues of race, ethnicity, culture, and class through readings, films, and other resources. Throughout all of this work, students will use an intersectional feminist framework to think through feminism(s), feminist praxis, and in particular how each of us exists in relationship to power via gender and race. A central goal of this course is to foster an informed and reasoned openness to, and understanding of, difference.