Overview and Learning Goals

Overview

The interdisciplinary Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program (GSWS) combines numerous scholarly traditions that engage critical inquiry around the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, and class. Drawing primarily on the humanities and the social sciences, courses in GSWS deconstruct gendered and sex normative structures of power as well as the multiplicity of identites and experience across cultures and historical periods. In its curriculum and its faculty research, GSWS explores the multiple directions that feminist and queer scholarship and activism take locally, nationally, and transnationally.

Learning Goals

• Practice Positionality. Students actively reflect on how knowledge is situated, learning to recognize how researchers’ worldviews shape research. In approaching knowledge and cultural expression, students interrogate their lived experiences as potential resources for understanding. Students learn to use gender and sexuality as heuristics to understand varied cultural, social, and political topics.
• Think Intersectionally. Students explore how gender and sexuality relate to other categories of difference and manifestations of power, including but not limited to race, ethnicity, class, nationality, and disability. Students recognize how these categories inform dynamics of domination and subordination present in various cultural, interpersonal, and institutional contexts.
• Map Plurality. Students understand anti-essentialist and non-normative praxes related to gender and sexuality. Drawing on the diverse expressions and embodiments of gender and sexuality across different historical periods, in distinct geographic regions, and among majoritarian and minoritarian communities, students examine the many ways identity, kinship, and desire are expressed. 
• Engage in Deconstruction. Students learn to question and challenge dominant models of knowledge production through engagement with underexplored and alternative texts, voices, and methods. Students seek ways of challenging dominant ideologies and hegemonic practices by exploring ideas and areas of study that are ignored or sidelines in mainstream academic contexts.

GSWS majors at Bowdoin become engaged, informed, and resourceful readers and writers, capable of critical thinking and cultural analysis.

Curriculum of the Bowdoin Major in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies

The GSWS Program takes a theoretically broad and methodologically varied approach to the study of gender and sexuality and their intersections with race, class, ethnicity, nationality, and religion across historical eras and transnational contexts. Courses at every level of the GSWS curriculum focus on reading, writing, speaking, collaborative learning, and the development of critical thinking skills. From first-year writing seminars and introductory courses (1000-level) to theory courses, intermediate seminars, and electives (2000-level), to advanced seminars, independent studies, and honors projects (3000- 4000-level courses), GSWS students gain competence and confidence in their ability to understand, interrogate, and contribute to this interdisciplinary field of study. In addition to core and elective courses taught by the permanent GSWS faculty, faculty from across the campus contribute classes from a wide range of departments and programs.

Options for Majoring or Minoring in the Program

Students may elect to major in gender, sexuality, and women's studies or to coordinate a major in gender, sexuality, and women's studies with digital and computational studies, education, or environmental studies. Students pursuing a coordinate major may not normally elect a second major.  Non-majors may elect to minor in gender, sexuality, and women's studies.

Program Website