Welcome to the Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies Department
2011-2012 marks our first year as the newly renamed Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies Department. Students at the graduate level will now receive their degrees and certificates in Feminist Studies. These changes reflect current debates in the field that involve feminisms in different historical and geographic contexts; push research and teaching in new directions; and speak to complex, powerful relationships among social categories.
- Gender is critical to our collective work. The ways bodies and social relations are constituted within a field of power, both inside and outside of man/woman binaries, are central to our scholarship and teaching.
- Women Studies is the history and future of our department. Analyses of sexism and of women’s places in the world are critical to our work. We retain the non-possessive “women” instead of the more common “Women’s Studies” to indicate that our work as a department is not owned by or solely relevant to women.
- Sexuality is integral to our scholarly and political inquiry into subjects as varied as reproductive politics, violence and war, racism, development, art and music, cultural studies, digital humanities, and queer studies.
- Feminism is an analytic that opposes all forms of inequity and operates across traditional academic disciplines. Theories, politics, and histories grounded in decades of feminist scholarship allow our students to critique injustice and generate responses to oppression.
The core of this intellectual work articulates race and ethnicity in U.S. and transnational contexts, as we analyze how these social formations intersect with gender, women, and sexuality in specific times and places.
This is an exciting time for us to discover debates of the past, evaluate debates of the present, and shape debates of the future! As the year progresses, we will highlight different aspects of these debates and invite you to join the conversation.
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updated 4/19/2012 Sexuality & Queer Studies Certificate What Can I do with a Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies Degree?
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What Our Students Think
During 2010-2011, we surveyed our students and held a contest asking them to reflect on our new name. The large majority of students were excited about the new name. The winner of our contest wrote:
Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies changes how students, professors, and the public understand what we learn in this amazing program. GWSS is a change for the better and demonstrates that we don't only discuss and learn about women. This program is much more than women; it is the study of all oppressed groups, it's becoming educated about racism, sexism, and classism, it's becoming aware of our differences, and it's becoming activists. This name change may be a mouthful, but it's an empowering name that allows everyone a better understanding of what we're truly about.
--Kelsey Rudeen, class of 2011
Departmental Highlights
- The Women Studies Program was founded in 1970. Demand for the major grew over time and departmental status was achieved in 1996. GWSS in its current configuration builds on decades of feminist research, teaching, and organizing. Our graduate program is the first of its kind in the Pacific Northwest and one of less than twenty doctoral programs in the U.S.
- All undergraduate majors are required to complete a senior capstone course and participate in an internship—distinctive marks of our commitment to excellence in writing and critical thinking, and to linking those skills to community-based social justice practice.
- Intersectional and transnational analyses foreground our studies of race and ethnicity in U.S. and global contexts, as we analyze how these social formations intersect with gender, women, and sexuality in specific times and places. Our research and teaching complement and contribute to Ethnic Studies, Transnational Studies, and Women of Color scholarship.
- Our alumnae, including the fifteen PhD students we have graduated to date, hold important positions in academic, professional, and non-profit institutions. [“What can I do with a GWSS degree?”]
- We offer undergraduate majors and minors in GWSS and graduate certificate programs in Feminist Studies and Sexuality and Queer Studies.
- We have nine full-time faculty members, who are affiliated with Anthropology, Nursing (psychosocial and community health), Psychology, the Jackson School of International Studies, and the Graduate School, as well as 99 adjunct and affiliate faculty who hold appointments in other departments and share the feminist mission of GWSS.