威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校

The gender and women’s studies major and certificate provide a unique background for students seeking to analyze gender and other vectors of inequality, both historically and in contemporary society, as reflected through texts, social practices, and social institutions in the U.S. and abroad. Our graduates have gone on to provide this kind of analysis in fields like health policy, immigration law, social work, reproductive justice, educational administration, employment policy, medicine, architectural design, and media production.

The curriculum reflects the interdisciplinary nature of gender and women's studies, offering to all students an opportunity to study gender and women in such areas as literature, history, anthropology, sociology, education, law, biology, psychology, philosophy, political science, economics, and the arts. Department courses have been designed to fulfill breadth requirements in the appropriate divisions.

Learning Outcomes

• Gender ? Understand the concept of gender as an identity and an institution along its multiple dimensions (cultural, social, political, economic) and how gender in forms power relations.
• Inter sectional ? Recognize how gender intersects with other axes of inequality, such as race, class, disability status, sexuality, gender expression, nationality, geography and age. Identify the difference between intersectional and Universalist understandings of gender.
• Feminist theory­ ? Apply feminist theoretical approaches, both national and international.
• Class­ ? Recognize the role of economic inequalities in creating material and cultural differences in the US and other national contexts and their gendered implications.
• Race/Ethnicity ? Understand the role of race/ethnicity as a tool of creating, identifying, materializing, and solidifying human difference and its relationship to gender.
• Global Processes ? Appreciate historical, political, cultural and socio?economic influences on gender relations in global context. Understand global dimensions of gender inequality, including hierarchies among women within and across nations. Identify gendered dynamics of globalization in historical or contemporary contexts.
• Sexuality ­? Understand that sexuality is not a natural or self?evident attribute or category and that sexuality assumes a variety of culturally specific and contested meanings.
• Disability and Embodiment ? Understand the creation and evolution of different categories of embodiment and the experience of living through and as bodies.
• Health and Science­ ? Identify that health is both a physiological and a socio?cultural experience, and recognize ways in which gender and other axes of social inequality influence health. Develop critical tools to place the medical field, scientific research, and public health and policy organizations into social contexts, and recognize how these institutions both can reflect and perpetuate dominant ideologies. Learn about feminist approaches to, and histories of, science, medicine, and health activism.
• Contemporary and Historical Issues -­ Gain familiarity with a variety of issue areas in which gender is important, both historically and today, in national and transnational spheres. These include but are not limited to: health, the body, science, politics, citizenship, feminism, activism, labor, history, media, language, literature and the arts.