CGS Minor

Critical Gender Studies is an interdisciplinary program offering students the opportunity to study gender, race, class, sexuality, and nationalism as intersecting categories of analysis and experience. The program’s curriculum is designed to move students beyond popularized accounts of gender to consider its complex constructions over time and in a variety of cultural, scholarly, and global arenas. Students can expect to encounter a rich spectrum of theoretical and methodological approaches in studying these complex constructions—approaches which all share, despite their differences, a critical orientation in their analyses of gender relations.

This orientation is reflected in the program’s name, Critical Gender Studies: to study gender critically is to refute easy answers and simple conclusions with respect to men and women in society and reach, instead, for clearer, more detailed accounts of the social, political, economic, historical, and cultural contexts and intricacies of power through which the social relations of gender have been made and maintained.

The Critical Gender Studies minor provides students with an interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary training and, for this reason, is an ideal addition to any major in the Social Sciences, Humanities or Sciences.