14th Annual Colloquium
Faculty Highlight
Libby Nutt Williams
Fall 2013 Courses!
Click here for a course schedule for the WGSX FA2013 Cross-Listed Courses.
Click here for a .pdf of the course descriptions.
The Program
Women, Gender, and Sexuality (WGSX) is a cross-disciplinary area of study that investigates social constructions of gender as well as the ways in which gender impacts lived experience. Gender inquiry helps students understand how ideas about masculinity and femininity shape virtually every aspect of common life; how gender is central to disciplines as disparate as the arts and the sciences; and how gender is essential for understanding our own bodies.
The goals of the WGSX Program are to engage students and faculty in:
- analyzing gender and gendered systems across cultures and over time;
- identifying the complex relationship between sex and gender;
- exploring formations of sexuality and sexual identity;
- recognizing how gender and sexuality are related to other social hierarchies and identity markers, such as race, ethnicity, class, and ability; and
- addressing societal inequalities based on gender and sexuality.
The WGSX Program is committed to the centrality of the study of women and to the analysis of gender and sexuality as organizing cultural categories. WGSX courses, offered in disciplines across campus, identify gender as a foundational category of analysis, both in theory as well as practice. WGSX courses also allow students to study women's history, material realities, and achievements; to investigate how gender and sexuality are represented in visual and written texts; and to examine feminist and queer critiques of both society as well as academic areas of knowledge. The WGSX Program encourages students and faculty to make connections between academic knowledge and experience outside the classroom through activism, sponsored lectures and workshops, and community events.
program mission statement, approved May 2010
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.
