Women's & Gender Studies, AB

The Women’s and Gender Studies Program provides an interdisciplinary, critical, and cross-cultural exploration of the issues related to women’s rights, sex rights, and gender justice, in the global context. Focusing on the intersections of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality, Women’s and Gender Studies fosters the generation of knowledge about human subjects in all their gender and sexual diversity, and encourages the critical interrogation of traditional academic disciplines.

Using cross-cultural and transnational perspectives, the program pursues the exploration of:

  • women’s lives, labor, and arts
  • structural violence, social justice, and gender activism in the global context
  • the politics of sexuality
  • the intersectional and historical meanings of gender
  • the history of gender roles and performances
  • representations of various genders in different media
  • the impact of gendered analysis on the sciences
  • the gendered formation of knowledge

The Women’s and Gender Studies program encourages its majors and minors to engage in community service, either independently or through Community-Based Learning courses. 

Georgetown College offers both a major and a minor in Women’s and Gender Studies, and the School of Foreign Service offers a minor in Women’s and Gender Studies.  Interested students should contact the Director of the Women’s and Gender Studies program, Professor Nadia Brown, or the Associate Director of the program, Professor You-me Park, as early as possible in their sophomore year to plan a program of study.

Major in Women’s and Gender Studies

The major in Women’s and Gender Studies requires a total of eleven courses. In addition to the three foundational courses (Introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies or Introduction to Sexuality Studies; Feminist Theory I or II; and Women’s and Gender Studies Senior Capstone), students must take eight additional electives.

The Women’s and Gender Studies Program offers five areas of concentration: Globalization and Poverty, Social Justice and Violence, Sexuality Studies, Cultural and Media Representations of Gender, and Race and Racism (see below for details). While majors are not required to pursue a concentration, they are required to take at least one elective from either Globalization and Poverty or Social Justice and Violence, and one course each in Sexuality Studies, Cultural and Media Representations of Gender, and Race and Racism. 

The four additional electives are to be chosen by the student. Of the total electives required for the major, at least one must be outside the dominant Western European/North American context (appropriate courses are marked with an asterisk below). Additionally, we urge students to take courses that encompass issues of diversity within the U.S. context. 

Concentrations Within the Women’s and Gender Studies Major

While meeting the requirements of the major as stipulated above, students have the option to pursue a formal concentration in one of the following five areas:

  1. Globalization and Poverty
  2. Social Justice and Violence
  3. Sexuality Studies
  4. Cultural and Media Representations of Gender
  5. Race and Racism

A concentration would include the completion of five courses from one of the lists below, of which a minimum of two must be core elective courses offered by the Women’s and Gender studies program, and as many as three may be cross-listed electives originating in other departments. Upon the approval of the director or the associate director of the program, students may count appropriate courses that are not listed towards the concentration.

Integrated Writing in the Women’s and Gender Studies Major

The Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Georgetown University has always put a special emphasis on writing as an integral part of the critical exploration of society and culture. Both of our introductory courses (Introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies and Introduction to Sexuality Studies) teach the fundamentals of academic writing, and the vast majority of our electives are student-centered, process-oriented seminars in which students work individually and in groups to prepare written and oral reports and critiques. Further, the program’s commitment to developing our students’ writing skills is most evident in the Senior Capstone course, in which all of our majors are required to produce a senior long paper.

The Capstone Seminar creates a synthesis of their studies in the discipline, and aims to improve upon their research and writing skills. In order to demonstrate their competence as feminist writers, students apply feminist research methods and theories to a research problem/question of their own choosing.  They are asked to formulate their own definitions of feminist scholarship, and to understand a variety of critical, theoretical, and empirical approaches to studying major feminist concerns and topics. By the end of the course, students aspire towards writing a long paper that is of sufficiently high quality as to merit consideration for potential publication.