Program Highlight
Faculty Highlight
Male Confessions: Intimate Revelations and the Religious Imagination (2010)
by Professor of Religious Studies Bjorn Krondorfer
Male Confessions examines how men open their intimate lives and thoughts to the public through the form of confessional writing. Such writing reveals the interior struggle men are willing to share with a larger audience under particular circumstances.
The Program
Women, Gender, and Sexuality is a cross-disciplinary area of inquiry that investigates the social, psychological, biological, and cultural constructions of gender, as well as the ways women and men locate themselves within gender systems. Because femininities and masculinities vary as a result of cultural, historical, political, and institutional forces, gender inquiry helps students understand the multiple ways gender and gender relations are socially constructed, and how these understandings of gender in turn shape virtually every aspect of our everyday lives: political institutions, law, the economy, the family, education, work, literature, the arts, media, philosophy, religion, and sexuality.
Courses in the Women, Gender, and Sexuality cross-disciplinary curriculum identify gender as a fundamental category of analysis in theory and practice. The goals for the minor are to analyze the variations in gender systems that have occurred across cultures and over time; to identify the relationship between biological difference and social inequality; to explore constructions of sexuality and sexual identity; and to recognize how gender inequality is related to other social hierarchies such as race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality.
The minor is committed to the centrality of the study of women, while at the same time interrogating gender and sexuality as organizing categories. Courses will allow students to focus their study on materials that illustrate women's condition, history, and achievements; to investigate how women have been portrayed and how we are redefining these representations; and to examine feminist critiques of academic areas of knowledge, including the contributions of queer theory and new feminist research. In order to provide a new site for knowledge production that engages differences constructively, the Women, Gender, and Sexuality minor not only locates women within traditional disciplinary categories, but also fosters interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary exploration of the conditions that have shaped women's experiences both as objects and as subjects of knowledge.
I write for those women who do not speak, for those who do not have a voice because they were so terrified, because we are taught to respect fear more than ourselves. We've been taught that silence would save us, but it won't.
Audre Lorde, 1934-92. Quoted in Claudia Tate, Black Women Writers at Work, 1985.
