Undergraduate Minor
Any advisor can declare the Minor in Gender and Women's Studies for you.
Program Overview
Core Courses
Complete both courses:
This interdisciplinary course provides an introduction to concepts of gender as understood in U.S. society, economy, politics, and culture. The course examines gender through complex relations of power such as race, class, sexuality and considers historical and transnational contexts. Engaging multiple fields, texts, and approaches, students gather a conceptual tool box with which to explore gender and make connections to the world around them.
Explores feminist theories from various disciplines, analytical frameworks, and subject areas. Examines the construction, differentiation, and representation of the genders in different cultural settings, and the ways that race, class, sexuality, and geopolitics inform gender.
Core Electives
Complete one of the following courses:
This course examines how ideas about women, gender, and sexuality have been created through the arts, literature, laws, and science. The course explores these ideas as both concepts and lived experiences from multiple perspectives and considers how they inform power, knowledge, and identity.
Explores theories and critiques of sexuality, gender, race and nation, as they have been organized under the concept of `queer theory.' Topics include: historical emergence of queer theory in relation to histories of feminism, lesbian & gay studies, and social activism; queer of color critique; transgender activism and studies; theories of sexuality; the critique of identity; sexual cultures; and similarities and differences within lesbian, gay, trans, and queer theories.
Focusing on contemporary migration across international borders, we explore how migration contributes to the production, contestation, and remaking of gender and sexual norms as these intersect with hierarchies of race, class, and geopolitics. We particularly examine how the selection, incorporation, and governance of migrants provide occasions for challenging, renegotiating, or affirming dominant gender and sexual norms; how migrants contest multiple exclusions and refashion identities, communities, and politics through gender and sexuality; and how transnational social fields, grounded in histories of empire and global capitalism, shape and are reshaped by these processes.
This course examines the gendered constitution of race in the U.S., from 18th century naturalism and 19th century scientific racism, to 20th and 21st century eugenics, multiculturalism, neoliberalism, and "color blindness".
This interdisciplinary course examines key works by those women of color whose political and cultural investments in a collaborative, cross-cultural critique of U.S. imperialism and heteronormativity has been called "U.S. Third World Feminisms."
This course will examine the varied and evolving concerns of Chicanas as they forge new visions of feminism through the Chicano Movement of the 1960s; organizing among Chicana lesbian communities; Chicanas' entrance into academic, literary and artistic arenas; diverse community and national activist efforts in the 1980s; and current transnational initiatives.
Other GWS Electives
Complete 12 units from any GWS or cross-listed courses.
More Information
- Minimum of 21 units with 12 upper division units are required
- No more than 6 units of internship, independent study, or preceptorships (293, 299, 299H, 391, 393, 399, 399H, 493, 499, 499H) may fulfill the GWS major
- GWS 240 should be taken before GWS 305 or Core Electives
- GWS 305 is a suggested prerequisite to Core Electives
- GWS 496A Senior Capstone Seminar: Reflections on Gender and Transformations is open to students in the GWS minor in either their junior or senior year
- Gender and Women's Studies Minor Checklist