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About Us

Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) Department Mission

Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies is an interdisciplinary department for students who wish to explore gender and its relation to other axes of power: race, class, ethnicity, and sexuality. We use these concepts to analyze human experience in its bodily, political, economic and cultural dimensions. Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies covers a complex variety of theoretical and empirical scholarship both within traditional disciplines and in interdisciplinary frames in the humanities, in the social sciences and in the natural sciences as well as combinations of the three. The Department is committed to critical perspectives and bodies of knowledge that contribute to possibilities for transformation and change.

Become a Major or Minor in WGSS

Students interested in majoring or minoring in WGSS have following options:

  • Full WGSS Major
  • Combined WGSS Major with another Department
  • Full Double Major with WGSS and another Department
  • WGSS Minor

Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW)

Complementing the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Department, the Barnard Center for Research on Women maintains an extensive and expanding resource collection of feminist research. Many of these resources, including BCRW's own online journal, The Scholar & Feminist Online, are available on BCRW's multi-media website. BCRW also sponsors a variety of events that are invaluable to students interested in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Many WGSS students also work as Research Assistants at BCRW.

Consortium for Critical Interdisciplinary Studies

WGSS participates in a consortium with Africana Studies and American Studies that supports the development of intellectual and curricular projects across the three fields and offers concentrations within our majors (organized as minors for students across the college). We are particularly interested in relations between and among, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity and nation. The Consortium creates models for research and teaching that contribute to new ways of understanding processes of social differentiation and that help to create new possibilities for justice.  WGSS offers several interdisciplinary concentrations in conjunction with CCIS.