Gender and Women's Studies is an interdisciplinary program focusing on feminist explorations of the intersecting ways in which gender, sexuality, race-ethnicity, class, and nationality inform lives and illuminate social, cultural, and political life. Course work is grounded in scholarship about gender and women in different historical eras and geographic regions. Courses emphasize the manner in which gender, as a symbolic system that relies on constructions of masculine and feminine difference, helps to constitute social, cultural, political, and economic processes and institutions. Courses also explore how gender and gender inequalities are constituted by and through social, cultural and political processes. Course materials challenge the idea of homogeneity in ideology, politics, or status among women and address the ways in which at various times, and often concurrently, gender is challenged and reproduced by individuals.

The Gender and Women's Studies Program offers several core interdisciplinary "program courses." The major also offers many "discipline-focused" courses focusing on women, gender, and/or sexuality taught by faculty members in Anthropology, Art, African American Studies, Comparative American Studies, East Asian Studies, English, History, Philosophy, Politics, Psychology, Religion, Sociology, and Theater and Dance.

GAWS Website

* Material from this page is taken directly from Oberlin Department websites