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Link To Women,Gender & Sexuality Studies


The Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies minor is part of the Cultural Analysis and Theory Department at Stony Brook. The department focuses on analyzing complex social and cultural phenomena.Women’s and Gender Studies is an interdisciplinary area of scholarship and research that focuses on the significance of gender as a variable in experience, history, and culture. Women’s and Gender Studies raises questions that often have been ignored or marginalized, and it makes the experience and history of women central to the study of any human concern. Scholarship in Women’s and Gender Studies demonstrates the need to recognize new models of knowledge, as well as the need to be critical of theories and approaches that do not take into account the difference of gender as it intersects with race, class, sexuality, and other variables of social experience.

The program introduces students to the history of feminism, as well as its contemporary theories and methods. Feminist theory in a global context provides the background for a critique of the social construction of gender and its relation to other systems of privilege. The collective expertise of the Program’s faculty members emphasizes the study of gender and sexuality in coordination with queer studies, cultural studies, transgender studies, mobility/migration studies, literary perspectives, social movements, transnational feminisms, reproductive health, disability studies, public health, and feminist methodologies.

Below is a list of the undergraduate classes, with descriptions, I attended while enrolled at Stony Brook University:

• Women, Culture, and Difference
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An introductory humanities survey focusing on women’s traditional association with the home and men’s association with public life and how writers, artists, philosophers, and religious thinkers have reflected upon those relationships over the past 150 years. Through lectures and critical analyses of novels, poetry, art, philosophy, and religious texts, the course explores how changing intellectual, artistic, and religious precepts have affected gender identity and different genres in the humanities.

• Sociology of Gender
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The historical and contemporary roles of women and men in American society; changing relations between the sexes; women’s liberation and related movements. Themes are situated within the context of historical developments in the U.S.

• Histories of Feminism
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An historical study of the theoretical and practical developments that form contemporary feminism. Beginning with the 18th century critiques of women’s rights, the course traces the expansion of feminist concerns to include a global perspective, as well as attention to race and class. Representative texts include Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women, poems by Phyllis Wheatley and Sojourner Truth, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas, and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex.

• Gender Issues in the Law
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A critical exploration of American law that specifically addresses the issues of (in)equality of women and men in the United States. The course surveys and analyzes cases from the pre-Civil War era to the end of the 20th century dealing with various manifestations of sex discrimination, decided in the federal court system, typically by the Supreme Court, and the state court system. The course also considers how the political nature of the adjudicative process has ramifications for the decisions rendered by a court.

• Sociology of Human Reproduction
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A study of the links between biological reproduction and the socioeconomic and cultural processes that affect and are affected by it. The history of the transition from high levels of fertility and mortality to low levels of both; different kinship, gender, and family systems around the world and their links to human reproduction; the value of children in different social contexts; and the social implications of new reproductive technologies.

• Women and Politics
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Analysis of the role of women in current American politics — their electoral participation, office seeking, and political beliefs — and policy issues that have special relevance to women. The course traces the history of American women’s political involvement and the historical trajectory of gender-related policy from the mid-19th century to today.

• Gender and Work
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Gender differences in workforce participation and occupational attainment as they have changed throughout U.S. history. Covers such topics as historical changes in workforce participation; economic, legal, and social factors affecting employment; career options; and pay equity. Readings and lectures focus on the historical and contemporary experience of American men and women, including differences by ethnicity and class.

• Sociology of Sexuality
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An exproration of the social and cultural implications of sexuality and sexulization in American and world cultures