Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
The WGSS curriculum is based in feminist scholarship - both within traditional disciplines across the academic divisions and in response to questions that cannot be answered within the framework of a single discipline. To foster this interdisciplinary inquiry, the Women's Studies Program was established in 1978 and has been built upon the feminist teaching, scholarship, and activism from faculty and students with a wide variety of disciplinary and cross-disciplinary perspectives. In the past few decades, the program has grown and evolved, changing its name to the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program in 2008 to recognize important changes within feminist scholarship.
Acknowledging this important history, WGSS courses retain Women's Studies' focus on examining previously unavailable information about the lives and contributions of women and analyzing the effects of cultural attitudes, power and inequality, and social structures on the experiences of women. In addition, feminist scholarship has recognized and explored commonalities between women's oppression and the oppression of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and other sexual minorities worldwide, as well as the varied experiences of masculinity throughout the globe. In this vein, WGSS courses explore the cultural construction of sex, gender, and sexuality in the context of their relationship between theoretical and experiential knowledge, and privileging historically marginalized voices, WGSS encourages scholarship and teaching that is committed to the feminist principle of creating a more just world for all.
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WGSS banner image by Kathie Clyde
The WGSS banner image of the painted trunk comes from Kathie Clyde, Kauke Hall administrative coordinator, who repurposes old furniture with painted quilt patterns. The quilt pattern is the Ohio Star and the title of the piece is "Where Ohio Meets Chautauqua Lake."