密歇根大学安娜堡分校

The Women’s Studies major seeks to provide students with a comprehensive understanding of scholarship on women, gender, and sexuality while training them in the use of interdisciplinary methods. The major entails both theoretical and practical approaches to feminist thinking in a number of disciplines. Students learn supporting skills and gain academic breadth through the major’s cognate requirement, and coursework explores the multicultural and global nature of feminist scholarship. All aspects of the Women’s Studies major train students to think analytically by developing their critical reading and writing abilities.

Goals of the Major:

To provide majors with an understanding of the interdisciplinary scholarship on women, gender, and sexuality, and to train them in interdisciplinary methods.
To offer theoretical and practical approaches to feminist thinking across the disciplines.
To encourage comparative thinking about coursework that explores the multicultural and global nature of feminist scholarship.
To train majors to think analytically by teaching them to read and write critically.
To provide supporting skills and context for the study of women through the cognate requirement.
To encourage intellectual and academic breadth through the cognate requirement.

Areas of the Women's Studies major:

LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer) and Sexuality Studies offers an interdisciplinary approach to sexuality that includes topics such as religious beliefs, legal codes, medical constructions, and social movements, and recognizes them as historically variable and culturally specific. With the contributions of empirical research, feminist scholarship, and queer theory, courses in this area acquaint students with history of sexuality and understanding the formation of sexual identities and sexuality.

Gender, Race, and Ethnicity in the U.S. examines the intersection of gender, race, and ethnicity in order to consider differences among women and men, as well as the impact of multiple categories of identity on experience and on the formation and contestation of gender itself. Interracial and interethnic relations, the mutual influence of social movements, and racialized genders are also explored. Although the U.S. is the primary focus, consideration of various diasporas encourages analysis of the links between communities across national borders.

Gender, Culture and Representation explores ways in which ideas and meanings about women and gender are produced culturally and historically. It positions students as readers, viewers, and interpreters of cultures and cultural artifacts, especially in the domains of literature, philosophy, the visual and performing arts, mass media (including film), and their histories. Courses might explore a particular historical topic from a feminist perspective. Others might introduce students to feminist analyses of past and/or contemporary cultural forms and encourage them to consider processes of viewing, writing, and producing knowledge.

Gender in the Global Context offers a comparative cross-cultural perspective on the construction and meaning of gender, race, class, and sexuality. It examines current forces of globalization and empire, the histories of imperialism and colonialism, and postcolonial resistance and theory. Courses decenter the U.S. while placing it in a geopolitical context, including global and transnational feminisms.